Warming Climate May Be Eliminating Long Island Sound Lobsters

[hatrack]

BRIDGEPORT -- Rising water temperatures could be to blame for the steep decline in lobsters and other cold-water species once found in abundance in Long Island Sound. According to researchers gathered yesterday in Bridgeport for the 16th annual Long Island Sound Summit, the Sound is experiencing a dramatic change in the types of wildlife that reside there.

Trawling surveys over the past 20 years show the number of cold-water species such as winter flounder, American lobster, cunner and spiny dogfish are declining while warm-water species such as bluefish, menhaden, hickory shad, black sea bass and summer flounder are turning up far more regularly. For example, Connecticut landings of the American lobster, which peaked at 3.7 million pounds in 1998, was down to about 710,000 pounds last year, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

One significant reason for that decline is probably rising water temperatures, said Lawrence Swanson of Stony Brook University's Marine Sciences Research Center. Swanson said that from 1991 to 2002, water temperature at the bottom of the Sound increased by about 1 degree and put the Sound's lobster at the knife's edge of its survivable habitat.

Robert Whitlatch, a marine science professor at the University of Connecticut, said climate change not only affects traditional denizens of the Sound, it also opens the door to a host of invasive species.

EDIT

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-lisstudy6apr09,0,5536289.story?coll=stam-news-local-headlines

[NNadir]

1. I grew up on Long Island.

I watched the place fall from paradise to a strip mall/landfill/toxic dump leaching horrible chemicals. I remember that when I was a boy my Dad could pull bushels of steamers out of the waters of Northport Harbor. By the 1970's they were all toxic, laden with bacteria and toxic chemicals.

It's sad. There are still some nice places, but most of the Island's been destroyed. Climate change will get what's left.

I have blood on my hands in that place. I fought against Shoreham. What the hell was I thinking?

[Canuckistanian]

2. What's the Shoreham story? n/t

[NNadir]

3. We stopped the Shoreham nuclear power station from coming on line.

We raised all sorts of specious objections, including one about it would be impossible for everyone to get off of Long Island if the reactor failed. We whipped up a frenzy of fear. We never stopped to consider which event was more likely, deaths from air pollution or deaths from a melt down. We never even were aware of what a collapsed atmosphere and warmer seas might mean to Long Island.

We were morons.

I wonder how everyone will get off Long Island when the new big hurricanes start hitting. New Orleans ain't got nuttin' on them.

Here's what a category 4 hurricane, an increasingly likely event, will do to the South Shore of Suffolk County:



Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of people live in that blue strip (under water), and that's just part of the Island.

Here's another densely populated area in Southern Nassau County:



Others areas on Long Island are found here:

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/storm_surge_maps.html

Now on Long Island they burn garbage, natural gas, oil, and lots of gasoline. The beaches are disappearing. Little storms put portions of Freeport under water. Years ago, during the Shoreham debate, coal ash used to rain on some North Shore cars and eat the paint. That was fun.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Not a moron, just ignorant

There's a subtle difference. :) I also used to be ignorant, but it amazing what an education can do...

[Canuckistanian]

5. I never fully understood the hysteria over nuclear plants

Sure, there was Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but those were only two plants among thousands of safely-operated and productive plants.

And Chernobyl was a case of utter stupidity. Those operators were a disaster waiting to happen.

But the real damage is being done each and every day that a coal plant is operational. Sulfur dioxides, NOx gases, CO2... that's going to be the irrevocable damage.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Some time ago...

I posted that the last time the planet went through this level of changes was at the permian-triassic extintion, 250,000,000 years ago, and that CO2 levels haven't been this high for ~30,000,000 years.

They talk about 1,000-year geologic disposal like it was long term. :eyes:

[bananas]

7. no - they were two plants among hundreds, not thousands

The hysteria was caused by the nuclear industry itself,
they would say that the plants were very safe,
the odds of a plant melting down were one in 10,000 years,
then they would say they wanted to build 1,000 plants in the U.S.,
and 10,000 plants world-wide.
People would do the math in their head - one meltdown every ten years in the U.S.,
and one meltdown every year somewhere in the world.

[NNadir]

8. This is a nonsensical statement on some level but if it were true...

...the fact is that if the industry said that (probably they didn't but were distorted by opponents), the nuclear industry sold itself short.

The industry operates 441 reactors world wide right now, roughly half of the 1000 it should have built in the US. One does not fail every two years. In the industry's 50 years of operations two reactors have failed, with only one causing important damage to the surroundings. Moreover that was an unusual type of reactor.

When we were opposing Shoreham, one heard all sorts of things, but the vast majority came from the idiots on our side, the opponents. We were, much like modern nuclear opponents, making stuff up and speaking of nuclear power as if it were in isolation, and as if it had to be perfect. We were just like nuclear opponents today. Our fucking cars were having their paint corroded by fly ash from power plants. We could have thought about that, but we were worrying about baby teeth with Sternglass.

You over-estimate them hugely when you say they "did the math." Bullshit. They couldn't even add and subtract. People who oppose nuclear power are spectacular in their inability to do math.

[bananas]

9. That nonsense came straight from the nuclear power industry

I'm pretty sure that 10,000 years number was used in the '70s,
here's an example of it being used in the '80s, broadcast on worldwide tv.
Nuclear advocates are spectacular in their inability to do math,
famous for "making stuff up" and covering up accidents of all sizes.


"Right after the Swedes announced that they had radioactivity
drifting over Sweden and coming from the area of the Ukraine, a
reporter interviewed the top U.S. nuclear engineering and PRA expert
who said that it could not be from a Russian nuclear power plant
because the models they had showed a MTBF for such plants of
10,000 years "
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/hise/safety-critical-archive/2001/0611.html

[NNadir]

10. Really? And the nuclear accident every other year that wipes out cities?

You're "pretty sure" that 10,000 was the number used in the 70's. How sure are you? Is there some point to the claim? Does a wrong number in the 1970's that you allege came from the "nuclear industry," those big bad guys, outweigh the apparently "wrong" numbers about the rate of increase in global climate change, which to all purposes appears to be much worse than predicted a few short years ago?

Anti-nuclear activists fixate on the fact that nuclear energy is not "too cheap to meter" as some syndic predicted in 1954, before a single commercial nuclear power plant had operated. They don't fixate - they ignore completely in fact - that no form of energy is "too cheap to meter." They haven't even made a remote ethical or financial stab at what global climate change is going to cost. (Mostly they don't give a shit.)

I haven't noticed nuclear activities killing anywhere near as many people as coal kills. Have you?

441 reactors operate on earth. Zero have failed catastrophically since the last one failed in 1986. You keep talking and talking and talking and talking and talking about that failure, Chernobyl Chernobyl, Chernobyl but you cannot make it as bad as a single day of coal operations, coal operations being, of course, the thing you don't discuss at all.

The anti-nuclear movement is a movement for people who can't add and subtract, in absolute terms and in moral terms. It is a movement that insists that nuclear energy must be perfect and every other alternative can kill as many people as it likes because nuclear energy is not perfect.

I was active in the 1970's anti-nuclear movement, as described. That movement arose from bad thinking on the part of the participants - all of whom wanted to blame the industry for their own enormous ignorance and intellectual laziness. I know exactly what pathetic thinking was going on then. In the 1970's, of course, there was very little history - and very few stark examples of risk such as we see now, and the nuclear industry could not rely on data. That's some excuse for my stupidity in 1975. Only a few reactors had operated for more than a decade - most had not. Now of course, tens of thousands of reactor-years of experience have accumulated, and a great deal has been learned. What do you suppose is the excuse for anti-nuclear stupidity today? Can people not count the number of reactors that operate and see how many fail and how many lives are lost? Can people not tell that massive portions of humanity are at risk from global climate change?

The people who founded the nuclear industry were prescient: They were working to address what would happen when the fossil fuels were gone. Everybody else wanted to pretend that the fossil fuels would never be gone, and this included the fossil fuel industry itself. We certainly pretended that on Long Island. I used to drive to anti-nuclear anti-Shoreham protests in a big giant Pontiac Tempest with a 389 cubic inch engine. What the fuck, exactly, was I thinking?

How is it that you're so fixated only on your "pretty sure" nonsense about the nuclear industry? You seem to have a big tolerance for even bigger lies about energy dating from that period. In fact, the nuclear industry if it said (and I doubt it) 1 failure per 10,000 reactor-years, was underestimating itself, not inflating itself. No one else was inaccurate about energy in the 1970's? Ralph Nader said in 1978 that the world would be totally solar by 2000. Why is it that that doesn't trouble you? People let fossil fuels slide while waiting for the grand renewable future. We're all in deep shit now. Nobody except a few very rare people like Arrhenius (at the end of the 19th century) predicted global climate change. This doesn't bug you? While I love Jimmy Carter, he told us that we should plan to make motor fuels from coal. Good idea?

The anti-nuclear industry - and it is an industry - can't even take responsibility for itself, can't even pretend to have an original analysis. Instead it is collective group of people who whine child-like "The nuclear industry said...nah, nah, nah, nah."

Speaking of child-like - are these the people with whom I should trust my children's lives? Fuck no.

There is not one anti-nuclear activist on this web site who can be said to have even a passing comprehension of the physical sciences, which is why every anti-nuclear claim comes form the big circle jerk of self-referential anti-nuclear websites which cite one another and try to pawn off the results as "thinking." I have never seen one bit of original thought from anti-nuclear activists on this subject, not one. (Co-incidentally "not one" is the same number of people who have died from the storage of the much obsessed about so called "dangerous nuclear waste.")

Grow up. If you want to claim that 1 reactor will fail every ten-thousand reactor years, there's plenty of data. Prove it. Don't rely on some puerile memory of the 1970s. Prove it. And when you're done with that, prove that such a rate will be worse than air pollution including global climate change.

[bananas]

11. Once again you prove that nuclear advocates can't do math

If the 10,000 year MTBF was correct, then with 441 reactors the catastrophic failure rate would be one in 10,000/441 = 22.7 years, not "every other year".

The reason people talk about Chernobyl and TMI is because when N is hundreds, then "2" is a significant number. For example, the space shuttle would seem perfectly safe - it has a perfect record if you ignore the Challenger and Colombia disasters.

[NNadir]

12. Heh, heh.

You got me there. My calculation is wrong.

Disband all the world's nuclear plants! Danger! Danger! Danger! It's the end of the world! Nuclear plants are too dangerous! Radiation! Radiation! A nuclear advocate has made a mistake!

But you still are ignoring the second part of the equation: Show that nuclear power kills more people than its alternatives. This you cannot do. Again it comes down to an insistence that nuclear power must be perfect while all other forms of energy can kill indiscriminately and be ignored because you have a very selective imagination, and simply refuse to do comparisons on the grounds, I guess, that saying "nuclear is bad" is too cool for words.

TMI killed ZERO people, which is infinitely less than air pollution from coal kills every single day, during normal operations. The ultimate effect of the disaster was economic. Harrisburg was never evacuated. In fact, during the accident, the President of the United States toured the reactor building, and he is an old man now, in quite good health, I think. The RBMK reactor - the only reactor ever to result in fatalities - is no longer built. (I assume that you never drive in automobiles since Nader demonstrated that the Corvair was dangerous, and you never fly planes since the 737 had fatal failures in the hydraulic tail mechanism.)

Given that the United States releases billions of tons of carbon dioxide worth of carbon dioxide each year, please inform us of what alternative you have to nuclear energy that is safer and most importantly (since I really don't want to hear blather about you 100 MW 0.00002 exajoule solar systems) immediately available.

Here is the report on the external cost of energy, the first comprehensive evaluation on the total impact of energy ever conducted: www.externe.info.

I made a calculational error, but you make an error in attention that is more grotesque. Here is a popular news report I googled up saying that millions of people die each year from air pollution.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1359954.htm

The generally accepted value for the number of deaths that will ultimately occur in the form of shortened lives for Chernobyl, per the UN report, is 4000. Anti-nuclear activists sometimes come up with bigger numbers through goolged news reports, although the obvious upper limit would be to claim that every death in the Ukraine is attributable to Chernobyl - a claim that a few have made over the years.

I note that even if Chernobyl wiped out Kiev, a city where last I looked, there were still people living capable lives, it would have a hard time keeping up with a single year of air pollution. But you focus on Chernobyl.

Maybe I made a calculational error in asking where the failure every other year is, but still I am thinking.

[mainegreen]

13. Don't worry. Once the gulf stream shuts down the water will get colder!

:sarcasm: