Thou shalt bow the knee to Holy Mother Global Warming at all times

The article excerpted below was headed "Climate change hurting N.E. cod population, study says".  But that's just a token bow -- an assertion for which there is no evidence.  Cod populations do fluctuate.  There's been a big bounceback in the North Sea (near England) cod population recently and the article below mentioned that they almost vanished from Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the early 1990s.  So there is every reason to think that the current situation is part of a natural cycle.

It does appear that the temperature in the Gulf of Maine has risen 4 degrees in the last 10 years and that probably is disliked by the cod.  But is that temperature rise part of global warming?  We also read that "the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world's other large bodies of saltwater"

So it's NOT global, is it?  It is a local phenomenon of unknown cause but probably due to fluctuations in ocean currents.  But those recent changes in ocean currents are due to global warming we are told -- on the basis of no evidence.  But in fact the changes CANNOT be due to global warming -- because there has been no global warming for 18 years.  The satellites are the only way of obtaining a truly global temperature reading and for the last 18 years they just show random fluctuations around a constant mean.

So a desperate attempt to link a local problem to global warming is an abject failure on all counts.  Warmists really are disgusting in their constant obeisances to their false god


The rapid warming of the waters off New England has contributed to the historic collapse of the region's cod population and has hampered its ability to rebound, according to a study that for the first time links climate change to the iconic species' plummeting numbers.

Between 2004 and 2013, the mean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine - extending from Cape Cod to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia - rose a remarkable 4 degrees, which the researchers attributed to shifts in the ocean currents caused by global warming.

The study, which was released Thursday by the journal Science, offers the latest evidence of climate change - this time, affecting a species once so plentiful that fishermen used to joke that they could walk across the Atlantic on the backs of cod.

Fisheries management officials have sharply limited cod fishing in hopes of protecting the species, but they estimate the number of cod remain at as little as 3 percent of what would sustain a healthy population. The limits, in turn, have hurt fishermen.
"Managers [of the fishery] kept reducing quotas, but the cod population kept declining," said Andrew Pershing, the study's lead author and chief scientific officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. "It turns out that warming waters were making the Gulf of Maine less hospitable for cod, and the management response was too slow to keep up with the changes."

Maine, the state with the highest percentage of forested land, is uniquely vulnerable to climate change, scientists say.

How does the government count the fish?

The institute had reported last year that the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world's other large bodies of saltwater. The authors of Thursday's study link the rapid warming to a northward shift in the Gulf Stream and changes to other major currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

They say the warmer water coursing into the Gulf of Maine has reduced the number of new cod and led to fewer fish surviving into adulthood. Cod prefer cold water, which is why they have thrived for centuries off New England.

The precise causes for the reduced spawning are unclear, the researchers said, but they're likely to include a decline in the availability of food for young cod, increased stress, and more hospitable conditions for predators.

Cod larvae are eaten by many species, including dogfish and herring; larger cod are preyed upon by seals, whose numbers have increased markedly in the region.

The researchers also suggest that federal officials have miscalculated the number of cod in the Gulf of Maine. The faulty models, they said, led the officials to allow overfishing, enough that the region's cod catch has fallen 90 percent over the past three decades.

The authors of the study said federal officials should use temperature and climate forecasts "to provide a more realistic picture of the potential size of fish stocks."

Federal officials said they weren't surprised by the findings.
"People have said that fish stocks are impacted by global warming for a long, long time," said John Bullard, regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which works with regional officials to set quotas.

The authors of the study said it's possible that the past two winters, which were unusually cold, may have provided a boost to cod. But they said the numbers remain significantly lower than the historical average and the stocks are likely to continue to struggle as the gulf warms.

They noted that cod are often easier to catch as their numbers drop, because they tend to aggregate near their spawning areas when their population declines.

Pershing said that's what happened along the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where cod vanished in the early 1990s after environmental advocates raised concerns for years about their declining numbers.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).