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How Marine Life Is Responding to Warming Oceans

I spoke over the phone with one of the researchers, Dr. Camille Parmesan, to get her impressions of the study and its implications.
A school of mackerel, via Wikimedia Commons

The warming world is causing flora and fauna to shift towards cooler lattitudes, a phenomenon that will likely continue as the world's climates continue to change. Much of the discussion about climate change is focused on terrestrial environs, but oceans aren't immune to warming effects. A study published in Nature last week aimed to unravel how climate changes was creating disruptions in marine lift migration and breeding patterns. The result? Marine life is shifting in response to climate change as well.

The study, titled "Global Imprint of Climate Change on Marine Life," was the product of an international climate change study, spanning several decades of research. Some of the data were even older—a century on the high end. While it will take some time to filter into national government channels, its findings will likely help shift environmental policy in several countries.

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"Given these findings, we expect marine organisms to have responded to recent climate change, with magnitudes similar to or greater than those found for terrestrial species," reads the report. "Recent climate studies show that patterns of warming of the upper layers of the world's oceans are significantly related to greenhouse gas forcing. Global responses of marine species revealed here demonstrate a strong fingerprint of this anthropogenic climate change on marine life."

I spoke over the phone with one of the researchers, Dr. Camille Parmesan, to get her impressions of the study and its implications. We talked about how the study was launched, its economic implications, and the fact that it will take hundreds of years for the ocean to regain balance. Assuming, of course, that governments and industry can manage to reverse course.

Motherboard: How did this immense international effort come together?

Camille Parmesan: It started with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. This was a new working group, whose objective was to synthesize all the data in marine systems, and see whether or not those changes could be linked to climate change.

I've done these types of syntheses myself on mainly terrestrial species. I started publishing my first global meta-analysis in 2003, and I knew very well that marine systems had been under-represented in these big global analyses and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. Largely because a large amount of the data was in smaller journals and green literature—journals that I didn't even necessarily have access to.

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An example of how warming ocean temperatures will change near-shore bioversity in Australia. Source images from CSIRO Australia

When I got the invitation to be part of the working group, I was really excited because I knew this needed to be done. I was absolutely astonished at how much published data there actually was on ocean systems in journals I don't normally read. And, people are increasingly publishing on this subject. Any time you start a new synthesis you get a massive increase in data because people are realizing that their 30- or 40-year-old data sets worth publishing, even if they don't have an interpretation.

How many papers were in the analyses?

There were 250 papers or more. We had some quality control criteria and what not, but it all added up to over 1700 observations.

Did you suspect that the same things that were happening on land were happening in the oceans?

I had this feeling very similar things were going on in the oceans as on land, but I didn't have a lot of data to show that. With this new paper, we can actually show that we're seeing the same sort of changes in the ocean that we're seeing on land; which I find very reassuring as a biologist.

Even though I was part of this group, I'm an insect and plant person not a marine biologist. The marine biologists were saying that "oceans are more complicated," and every time they mentioned some problem in the ocean I'd say, "Look, there is an analogy on the land, it's really not that different." And the results backed that up.

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What is an example of terrestrial and marine environments being analogous?

The fact that we're seeing massive poleward range shifts in both systems and earlier timing of spring events. In the latter case, in oceans you'll see phytoplankton bloom, and on terrestrial systems it's the breeding time of birds. Yes, we're looking at different events, but the big picture is that spring timing is shifting earlier, and poleward shift is true in both systems.

"This is going to have a huge impact on the fishing industry as far as where species can be fished."

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?

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No, you're absolutely correct that because fish are shifting their ranges, then the fisheries are going to have to deal with that. Take cod, for instance. We know that there was this huge collapse of the cod industry, which had nothing to do with climate change, but with what people were fishing.

You can imagine that cod could recover if you amend the fishing practices, and start having lower quotas and what not, but cod are shifting their range poleward. So, you might get a recovery near Iceland where cod are still doing fairly well in the cooler waters. But cod are disappearing from the North Sea and the more southerly parts of the North Atlantic that have been linked to temperature warming.

So, yes, this is going to have a huge impact on the fishing industry as far as where species can be fished. Any hope that it could recover in the more southerly parts of the North Atlantic and North Sea is probably dashed because the range has shifted.

In fact, when I was in Alaska a couple of years ago the fishermen that I talked to had noticed that a lot of fish species were moving north along the Alaskan coast. So, they changed where they fished. But, if you watch a show like Most Dangerous Catch, you'll know that as you go further north, the weather get more wild and the water gets much more treacherous. If this continues, they might find it more difficult to fish.

This gets me thinking of sustainability. Can we keep fishing the oceans the way we do in light of these shifting marine life patterns?

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I think the quick answer is no, and there have actually been some modeling analyses of this. I'll go back to cod because that system is really well understood.

One of the experts in Norway—a university scientist who also works with the fishing industry—has done some analyses of cod. Their natural ecology is to have these very large circles of abundance and then scarcity, so it's very variable on its own anyway. A lot of the commercial fish species are like this.

"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."

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.

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That's interesting because the wisdom of thinking hundreds of years down the road doesn't occur to a lot of people, especially those people setting policy. 

I think you just hit on one of the biggest difficulties in dealing with climate change. People are used to thinking that if you have a problem, you do something and you get an immediate response. Climate change just isn't like that. With climate change, if you have a problem, you do something and you know that future generations will be better off. It's much less immediately gratifying.

What is the biggest takeaway from this study, in your opinion?

The most important takeaway is actually something that I thought of in my previous meta-analyses, but it's even more important now because we are seeing that the oceans are changing even faster than the land. I want to remind people that these results are from a very, very tiny amount of climate change—0.7 centigrade (celsius) worldwide over, say, the last 100 years—compared to what people are talking about in the future, even with the best case scenarios.

I think people have a hard time thinking about what 4 degrees centigrade means. So, I think it's important for people to see that, okay, we have individual species in the ocean and on land shifting their ranges by as much as 200 or 400 kilometers per decade with this tiny amount of warming. You don't have to be a mathematician to think, "Gee, what are we gonna have with 4 degrees of warming?"

Has there been any official response from politicians, industry leaders, governments, or other international bodies?

You know, I've seen some response from the Sierra Club and some other organizations like that. But, governments don't respond that quickly. [Laughs] This will go into the next IPCC report because some of us are authors on that report, and we've been sort of placeholding it as we go along. Our study did get published in time to be included, so when the IPCC report is published is, in a sense, when governments will get wind of it.