A school of mackerel, via Wikimedia Commons
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An example of how warming ocean temperatures will change near-shore bioversity in Australia. Source images from CSIRO Australia
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I'm not sure the marine biologists expected that, because they thought species would just go to colder depths. I said, "Well, if you're in the mountain range, you can go up and get cooler—it's the same thing."Some of these marine system datasets were a century old, right?The mean was about 40 years but, yes, some of the databases go back 100 years. Terrestrial databases go back to the 1700s.Which should make it more difficult for some to deny the study, no?Right. Now, a lot of people are only just publishing those databases because they didn't think they were interesting. It's only with climate change being such a hot topic that people are realizing that even if I'm not doing anything with this data, I should at least publish it.Earlier you were talking about migration to polar regions. I'm wondering what sort of effect this has on economies and food supplies. Take Japan, for instance, a country that feeds a great deal of its population with seafood. Is any of this on your mind, or am I over-extrapolating into the political and economic realm?"This is going to have a huge impact on the fishing industry as far as where species can be fished."
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When you've got high yearly variability and you add climate change on top of that, you increase the risk of the species going extinct. Which means you have to allow a much greater percentage of the population to remain in the ocean in order to keep that fishing sustainable. This will have a huge impact on how we determine quotas, where we fish, and how we can manage sustainable fisheries.If we were able to curb the effects of climate change, would there be a return to migration and breeding patterns, or are they forever disrupted?That's the 20 million dollar question because we haven't stabilized climate yet. And even if we stabilize emissions, the climate will continue to change for hundreds of years, just because CO2 is such a long-lived chemical. That's what conservation biologists ask themselves all the time. The best answer I can give you is that no one knows."These results are from a very, very tiny amount of climate change. I think people have a hard time thinking about what 4 degrees centigrade means."
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