Saving Seafood

Offshore wind grid woes may be worse than previously thought

December 7, 2021 — Experts are warning that the challenge of connecting large amounts of offshore wind to an aging onshore grid may be much larger than initially realized.

That’s because offshore wind will need to grow very big, very fast to decarbonize the grid, they say.

The White House has given a big boost to the burgeoning sector with its pledge to facilitate putting 30 gigawatts of offshore wind in the water by 2030 as part of a broader plan to decarbonize the economy by midcentury.

To reach the 2050 target, however, offshore wind would need to swell to 300 GW on the East Coast alone, said Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering expert at Tufts University, during an offshore wind panel hosted by Resources for the Future last week.

Hines is not alone in his assessment. While the Biden administration was lauded by industry and activists for the ambitious 30-GW target — which would be a 7,000 percent increase in offshore wind power from today — many academics crunching numbers conclude that the level of emissions cuts called for by Biden would require a lot more power.

A Princeton University study last year estimated that the United States may need to triple its transmission to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, for example.

Read the full story at E&E News

PENNSYLVANIA: Meet Philadelphia’s First “Community-Supported Fishery”

October 22, 2020 — “We need to teach Americans how to eat other kinds of fish,” says Talia Young, echoing a sentiment she heard from a guest at a local seafood conference. Young, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and former Philadelphia public high school teacher, realized in 2018 that she might be able to connect her passion for both people and fish.

“I thought…what if we created a program that connected local harvesters to culturally diverse seafood eaters,” she says.

So Fishadelphia was born. It’s a community-based seafood program in Philadelphia, run by high-school students from Mastery Charter Thomas Campus in South Philadelphia and Simon Gratz Mastery Charter in North Philadelphia, after school. They offer locally harvested, affordable seafood to a diverse customer base through various “clubs,” that function similarly to community supported agriculture (CSA) programs — making the program Philly’s first “CSF,” or community supported fishery. The program is focused on accessibility — so customers who have kids who are students at Mastery Thomas or Simon Gratz, are eligible for food stamps or Medicaid, or are referred by another customer, can subscribe to the CSF at a discounted “community rate.”

Read the full story at Next City

As warming waters push fish north, fishing communities have little choice but to follow

March 1, 2019 — In 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey. Although this was an unusual circumstance, it wasn’t singular. As it turns out, many large-scale fishing operations along the East Coast followed similar patterns of movement within that time frame. These shifts will persist or even intensify if climate change continues to warm up our oceans, according to new research published in the latest issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science.

In the past century, global warming has gradually raised the temperature of water along the Atlantic seaboard. Like moneyed New Yorkers taking to the Hamptons to escape city heat, fish close to the coastline are swimming away from their usual marine homes and toward cooler and more comfortable waters. As a result, fishing operations are getting disrupted. While the stories of fishers who have to travel longer and longer distances to secure their catch are well documented, the movements of fishing communities over time have not been mapped until now.

Talia Young, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, conducted the first-of-its-kind ICES study in part because she wanted to bridge what she felt was a disconnect between the empirical data of marine species migration and its impact on humans.

Read the full story at The New Food Economy

Scientists acknowledge key errors in study of how fast the oceans are warming

November 14, 2018 — Scientists behind a major study that claimed the Earth’s oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.

Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists’ work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth’s oceans “have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought.”

“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”

The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements. As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper’s conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time.

The central conclusion of the study — that oceans are retaining ever more energy as more heat is being trapped within Earth’s climate system each year — is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions. And it hasn’t changed much despite the errors. But Keeling said the authors’ miscalculations mean there is a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought.

“I accept responsibility for what happened because it’s my role to make sure that those kind of details got conveyed,” Keeling said.

The study’s lead author was Laure Resplandy of Princeton University. Other researchers were with institutions in China, Paris, Germany and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Earth’s oceans may be way hotter than scientists realized — here’s how worried you should be

November 2, 2018 — The oceans are the world’s thankless, built-in air purifiers.

Over the past couple hundred years, as humans have burned coal, cleared forests, put gas-powered cars and trucks on the road, and run air conditioners and refrigerators, the oceans have been quietly gathering up most of the carbon emissions those activities spew into the air. They’ve also absorbed most of the excess heat that those gases have trapped on the planet.

Previous estimates suggested that the world’s oceans have collectively taken in more than 90% of the excess heat energy that our carbon emissions have kept on Earth.

But a new report published in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggests it’s worse than that. The research shows that scientists have been measuring the amount of heat in the oceans incorrectly, so the waters have actually absorbed far more heat than previously thought.

“If we think the ocean is warming more than we thought, it means the Earth is warming more than we thought, and that means the Earth is more sensitive to our emissions,” lead study author Laure Resplandy, an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton, told Business Insider.

Scientists have long warned that we have to curb our reliance on fossil fuels to avoid a future of regular, catastrophic climate disasters. But Resplandy said the new findings in her report show that avoiding a future “Hothouse Earth” scenario will be even harder than anticipated. Specifically, that means it will be more challenging to avoid flooding from sea level rise in coastal cities, violent hurricanes, and the death of nearly all of Earth’s coral reefs.

Read the full story at MSN

 

Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming

November 1, 2018 — The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday.

Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by Earth’s atmosphere — the yearly amount representing more than eight times the world’s annual energy consumption.

In the scientific realm, the new findings help resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans before 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, differing types of temperature records — and an overall lack of them — contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up.

The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Pennsylvania: Fishadelphia Is Philly’s New Sustainable Seafood CSA

February 6, 2018 — Well the CSA model works in a lot of different ways. There are cow-share programs where a group of people all get together and buy shares of a side of beef. And now, in South Philly, there’s Fishadelphia, which is a Community Supported Fisheries program designed to bring fresh seafood from New Jersey fisheries straight to consumers in the city.

Fishadelphia was developed by Talia Young, a post-doc researcher at Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Here’s how it will work:

Fishadelphia customers can sign up to receive eight biweekly seafood deliveries through May 17 at the Mastery Charter Thomas Campus in South Philadelphia. The day-to-day business operations of Fishadelphia are run by middle- and high-school students at Mastery Thomas. Each delivery will contain one kind of fish or shellfish – such as porgy, flounder, mackerel, dogfish, skate, clams, squid or crabs – from fisheries or shellfish farms in Cape May, Barnegat Light and Galloway, New Jersey…Fishadelphia’s goals are to promote affordable access to high-quality food in urban communities, while also supporting local fisheries at a time when the United States imports nearly 80 percent of its seafood.

And that’s pretty awesome. It brings the community together, helps local fishermen and, most importantly, puts fresh fish in the hands of people who might not otherwise have access. Plus, as part of the program, Young is organizing a field trip down to the docks in New Jersey so that customers can see where their fish is coming from (hint: the water), and a season’s end party where the fishermen and harvesters can have a chance to meet the people who’ve been eating their catch.

Read the full story at Philadelphia Magazine

 

Changing Migration Patterns Upend East Coast Fishing Industry

May 11, 2016 — Summer flounder that once amassed in North Carolina have gradually shifted about 140 miles to New Jersey—one facet of the northward migration of fish species that is upending traditional fishing patterns.

The move north has sparked debate among regulators over how to respond to changing natural resources that could affect commercial fisheries across the eastern seaboard.

For the first time, a group of researchers backed by the federal government is trying to ascertain what the northward movement means for fishermen’s income and way of life.

“Some fisherman will end up losing out and some will win big,” said Malin Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers University, who is part of a team of scientists from Rutgers, Princeton University and Yale University studying the phenomenon.

Funded through a piece of a $1.4 million National Science Foundation grant, the team of scientists is examining how shifting patterns of where fish congregate is affecting commercial anglers and how they are changing their practices. They are also studying what kind of regulations may be needed to adapt to these changing realities.

For Lund’s Fisheries, for example, the northward creep has forced the company’s boats to catch the flounder in New Jersey and then spend time traveling to North Carolina, where regulations allow them to bring them on shore in more abundant quantities. When the boats travel south, the fishery can’t catch sea bass, scup and other species they may have reeled in at the same time in waters off New Jersey.

“It does cause us to drive fish around the ocean longer than we have historically. That gets factored into the cost of doing business,” said Jeff Kaelin, an executive at the company, which has facilities in Cape May, N.J., and North Carolina.

Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal