November 12, 2012 — Hurricane Sandy’s terrible toll in lost lives and decimated communities is still being measured. But as we start to sort out the pieces, it’s also worth noting that the storm sent shockwaves through the mid-Atlantic region’s fishing industry.
Harbors and infrastructure were pummeled and in some cases destroyed along the New York and New Jersey coastlines, and the Garden State Seafood Association has already asked Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) to formally request a federal fisheries disaster declaration.
In the aftermath of the storm, the link between our changing climate and increasingly extreme weather is coming into greater focus and being called out by an increasingly large caucus. (For more on the link between climate and extreme weather events in North America, see this new column by the Center for American Progress.) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was among the first to link Sandy’s fury to the “reality” of climate change. Bloomberg Businessweek ran a cover story under the banner headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” which called out the increasing spate of corporate voices accounting for climate change in their business models. And the magazine’s namesake, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, cited climate change as the tipping point that led to his much-ballyhooed endorsement of President Barack Obama for reelection.
Just as Sandy’s fury cannot be separated from the effects of global climate change, fishermen have already noticed the effects of global climate change on their work. As our last wild capture industry, fishing businesses are arguably more reliant on natural forces than any other profession. It’s a centuries-old vocation, inherently dependent on knowledge passed down from one generation to the next, so when species distribution patterns evolve, even subtle change becomes readily apparent.
As ocean waters have warmed, fishermen have been finding some species that their grandfathers and even their fathers never dreamed of seeing. A 2009 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center found that about half of the species it studied were shifting their range further north or into deeper water in search of colder water, including Atlantic cod, haddock, and hake species—the keystones of New England’s iconic groundfishery. The commercial lobster fishery has all but disappeared in the waters of southern New England. And on the Pacific northwest, oyster farming is threatened by ocean acidification, a phenomenon caused by higher carbon concentrations in seawater.
In the Businessweek story, Eric Pooley, senior VP of the Environmental Defense Fund, adapted an old analogy first articulated by National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Jerry Meehl. “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther,” Pooley said. “Now we have weather on steroids.”
A similar theory can be applied to climate change’s impact on fisheries. Not that ocean warming and acidification has led to fisheries on steroids—the general decline in world fish populations certainly counters that interpretation, and we should be careful not to blame climate for the decline in populations. Overfishing, coastal pollution, and habitat degradation are far and away the greater factors there. Rather, climate change is increasing the degree of difficulty fishermen and regulators face in rebuilding depleted fish stocks now that the overfishing has, at least in the United States, largely been ended. We can’t say climate change has prevented any one species from rebuilding, but climate change sure made it harder and take a lot longer.
Read the full story on Think Progress