Climate change might be altering waters along US west coast

The spectre of an ocean floor littered with dead shellfish, rock fish, sea stars and other marine life off the Oregon coast spurred Mark Snyder, a climate change expert, to investigate whether California's coast faced a similar calamity.

It could, the University of California Santa Cruz earth scientist said, citing climate change, which some scientists believe is responsible for stronger and more persistent winds along the coast. There's no debate that windier conditions drive more upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean waters.

At normal levels, this upwelling sustains the abundance of marine life, but too much of these rich waters leads to a boom-and-bust cycle that ultimately creates ocean "dead zones" with little or no oxygen. Marine life that can't swim or scuttle away from these lethal zones suffocate.

www.guardian.co.uk...

I have personally seen beaches literally full of dead crabs and fish along the oregon coast at various and numerous times ("Dead zones" off Oregon coast are unprecedented, may have global warming link - blog.oregonlive.com...) and (www.sciencedaily.com...).

The rest of you around the country and the world may not be aware of this but here along the coast of oregon, pretty much everyone is worried...

It is becoming ever more apparent that each and every "Scientist" has a claim related to "Global Warming", which involves their Particular Field of Study. Can anyone say "Grant Money"? If he was an actual Scientist he would start with the Incident of Notice, and work an Analysis and Study of the said event, then attempt to repeat and test his findings through Non-Affiliated groups. After having done such, then he could at least formulate a Very Strong Theory upon which he could finally Publish a Credible Finding.

On the other hand, the Liberal "Guardian" could also be distorting this individual's studies. I have seen News Sources do this plenty of times as well.

i will have to postulate another theory on the dead zones off the west coast of the US.
and its not global warming.

these are toxic dead zones caused by over fishing by the large asian fishing fleets that have been 200+ miles off the west coast.


oceanworld.tamu.edu...

2. Over fishing is an important contributor to the recent increase in toxic algal blooms and ocean dead zones. Jackson, in his 2001 Science article of on Historical Over fishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems finds that:

There are three important corollaries to the primacy of overfishing... The first is that pollution, eutrophication, physical destruction of habitats, outbreaks of disease, invasions of introduced species, and human-induced climate change all come much later than overfishing in the standard sequence of historical events... The second important corollary is that overfishing may often be a necessary precondition for eutrophication, outbreaks of disease, or species introductions to occur... The third important corollary is that changes in climate are unlikely to be the primary reason for microbial outbreaks and disease... Ecological extinction of entire trophic levels makes ecosystems more vulnerable to other natural and human disturbances such as nutrient loading and eutrophication, hypoxia, disease, storms, and climate change... This is perhaps most apparent in the rise of eutrophication, hypoxia, and the outbreak of toxic blooms and disease following the destruction of oyster reefs by mechanical harvesting of oysters.

Most recent changes to coastal marine ecosystems subsequent to overfishing involve population explosions of microbes responsible for increasing eutrophication (74-76, 81), diseases of marine species (104), toxic blooms (82, 83), and even diseases such as cholera that affect human health (104, 105). Chesapeake Bay (81) and the Baltic Sea (74) are now bacterially dominated ecosystems with a trophic structure totally different from that of a century ago. Microbial domination also has expanded to the open ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River (106) and to the Adriatic Sea (107).

Nowhere is the lack of historical perspective more damaging to scientific understanding than for microbial outbreaks. Plans for remediation of eutrophication of estuaries are still based on the belief that eutrophication is caused only by increased nutrients without regard to overfishing of suspension feeders. Even more remarkable is the attribution of the rise in marine diseases to climate change and pollution (104) without regard to the pervasive removal of higher trophic levels and the asynchronous outbreaks of disease in different ecosystems that belie a simple climatic explanation.
From Jackson et al (2001).

www.oceanicfisheries.net...
www.earth-policy.org...
articles.latimes.com...
www.pcffa.org...