Go with the flow
"Poured Enamel, '' by LEAH DURNER, in her show at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., through Feb. 20.
The gallery touts that "her planned color schemes give way to impromptu spill motion.'' The idea, the gallery says, is to let "the uninhibited mind do great things.''
Winter's three gardens
"From December to March, there are for many of
us three gardens:
the garden outdoors,
the garden of pots and bowls in the house,
and the garden of the mind's eye."
-- Katherine S. White
The writer was an editor at The New Yorker, a celebrated writer on gardens -- especially about her garden in Brooklin, Maine -- the husband of the late celebrated essayist and children's book author E.B. White; the mother of Roger Angell, the still-working writer (especially on baseball and, increasingly in his old age, a superb memoirist) and a beloved Maine boatbuilder, the late Joel White.
Mr. Angell said of his mother: "As an editor, she was maternal and as a mother she was editorial.''
Wear your sunglasses
"Window 60 Autumn,'' by Maira Reinbergs in the "Color Passages'' show at ArtProv gallery, Providence, through Feb. 17.
Of climate change and N.E. floods
-- Photo by UMass Amherst
This photo shows how the Connecticut River spewed sediment into Long Island Sound on Sept. 2, 2011, showing the widespread erosion caused by Tropical Storm Irene.
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
AMHERST, Mass.
Lake sediments reveal that erosion from Tropical Storm Irene flooding in 2011 caused the most severe erosion of the historic record, according to a new study.
The recent study reveals that increasing soil moisture is raising flooding, erosion and landslide risks in New England, and found that erosion risks have multiplied four times as a result of climate change.
Led by University of Massachusetts Amherst geologist Brian Yellen, a team of scientists has been using sediment deposits in New England lakes to evaluate erosive destruction of historic floods. When floodwaters reach the quiet conditions of a lake, they drop their sediment and leave a layer at the lake bottom that can be used to reconstruct the erosive conditions of the causal flood, according to the researchers.
In a new paper in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, Yellen and his team show that the 2011 flood from Tropical Storm Irene in Massachusetts and Vermont caused historically unprecedented erosion in the form of landslides and rivers that jumped banks and destroyed most everything in their paths.
“When considering river floods here in hilly New England, the greatest risk we face is from fast, steep rivers undermining our structures — not from broad areas of inundation, like in the flat Midwest,” Yellen said.
Using chemical clues in the sediment layers, Yellen and his team showed that Irene flooding was uniquely capable of eroding ancient glacial till, riverbank material that has remained unmoved for the past 15-20 thousand years. Previous storms with greater precipitation totals and peak river flows weren’t as erosive, according to Yellen.
So what made Irene so erosive and destructive? It turns out that the 2011 tropical storm arrived on the tail of an anomalously wet period. In Vermont, total precipitation for the month immediately before Irene fell in the 95th percentile.
Increased soil moisture weakened banks and allowed for massive erosion, despite river flows that had been exceeded in the instrumental record.
Most alarming, the study found that rainfall statistics are shifting as a result of climate change. Based on trends in rainfall records, monthly preceding rainfall for Irene was four times more likely in 2011 than in 1911, according to the researchers.
“The jury is out on whether we will see more hurricanes as a result of climate change,” Yellen said. “But what is known with a good deal of confidence is that our region will continue to become wetter. This increasing baseline moisture primes the system for maximum destruction when big rain events occur.”
Stick to your opinion whatever the facts?
John Maynard Keynes's line in a debate: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'' is good to remember when politicians and others charge their opponents with inconsistency.
Canadian general consul to speak at PCFR on Feb. 16 on hydropower for N.E., etc.
Jan. 30, 2016
To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com). (We update the Web site frequently with news and commentary. Information on how to join the PCFR, including dues (which are very modest) and other organizational stuff may also be found there.)
Here’s our updated schedule for the rest of the year.
Speaking to us next, on Tuesday, Feb. 16, will be David Alward, the former premier of New Brunswick and now the consul general of Canada to New England.
He’ll talk about the implications of the recent change in Ottawa under Justin Trudeau, international security issues, such big trade matters as New England’s purchase of hydro-electric power from Canada and the idea of a common market encompassing Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
The international cities expert Greg Lindsay was to have joined us Feb. 16 but he must go to Scandinavia then. He’ll join us Wednesday, May 11. Some members have asked about when Eric Brenner, the Hapag-Lloyd executive, will reschedule to talk to us about world shipping, including the widening of the Panama Canal and the effects on East Coast ports. The answer: We don’t know yet.
We may also reach out to someone from the Port of Boston and Quonset.
As usual, the Feb. 16 dinner will be at the Hope Club, 6 Benevolent St., Providence. Drinks start at about 6, dinner by 7, then the talk and a Q&A and the evening ends by 9.
Please let us know whether you will join us Feb. 16 by replying to pcfremail@gmail.com or, in a crunch, calling (401) 523-3957. Thanks very much to those who have already let us know. The Hope Club needs good estimates no later than the day before a PCFR dinner.
Dues and dinner cost information may be found at: thepcfr.org. Other membership information may be found there, too.
On Tuesday, March 22, comes the very distinguished Andrew A. Michta, professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Europe Program).
He’ll talk about European politics and security, including NATO, and has a special focus on Central Europe and the Baltic States.
In 2013–2014, he was a senior fellow focusing on defense programming at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 2011–2013, he was a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) and the founding director of the GMFUS Warsaw office.
He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Columbia Prof. Morris Rossabi, who had been skedded for March and is one of the world’s greatest experts on Central Asia, is being rescheduled to September or October.
We have asked him to focus on Mongolia, whose ability to become a real democracy stuck between the great expansionist police states of China and Russia, has long fascinated us.
On Tuesday, April 12, celebrated author, TV documentary maker and former foreign correspondent Hedrick Smith is scheduled to join us; he’ll talk about Russia, and the current state of America, too.
On Wednesday May 11, comes the aforementioned internationally known expert on cities around the world, Greg Lindsay.
Look at:
http://www.amazon.com/Aerotropolis-Way-Well-Live-Next/dp/0374100195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279805811&sr=8-1
He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity, and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. He is also a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — a non-resident senior fellow of The Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute
Theodore Sedgwick, former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, who had been skedded for May, is rescheduling to September. (We take July and August off.)
On Tuesday, June 7, Michael Soussan, former UN whistleblower; acclaimed author; widely published journalist; NYU writing professor, and women's rights advocate, will speak. His satirical memoir about global corruption, Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course In International Diplomacy (Nation Books / Perseus) is being adapted for a feature film, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Hutcherson.
He will speak about the subject of his next book TRUTH TO POWER: how great minds changed the world. A brief history of thought leadership.Ca
Suggestions are appreciated.
We look forward to seeing you.
RIP, Providence's circus barker
I only enjoyed former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci's showmanship when he was out of office and could do little damage. His corrupt, egomaniacal, chaotic and sometimes vengeful mayoralty was a triumph of cult-of-personality circus acts over good government.
His death today is a certain rite of passage for a city with a complicated and sometimes infantile relationship with him over more than four decades.
Providence has a lot going for it in history, location, educational and other institutions and a rich mix of ethnic cultures. As many American cities started a comeback in the '80s, Providence could have done much better if it had had a competent and .honest mayor instead of what it got from Mr. Cianci. As Fiorello LaGuardia and Ed Koch proved in New York, it's possible to be "colorful'' and honest and competent.
The corruption of Mr. Cianci's regime drove businesses out of the city and discouraged others (most infamously Pfizer) from setting up shop in it. His astonishingly irresponsible sweetheart-deal labor contracts have also been devastating and have often put the city in the edge of bankruptcy.
So many Providence voters displayed insularity, ignorance and wishful thinking when it came to their "Rogue King'' that it recalls Mencken's line about democracy being the system under which "the people get what they want, good and hard''.
The standards and expectations of too many voters in Providence were so low that they enabled a man who did considerably more harm than good for the city, whatever Buddy's impressive ability to take the credit for so many good things he didn't do for the city.
As it was, some good stuff happened here, but much of it in spite of rather than because of Buddy Cianci, for whom public life was all about personal power and drawing the maximum attention to himself: "Look at me, look at me, look at me!''
But I'll miss his classic Northeast mayor wisecracks (though I hear similar stuff from pols in other cities I've lived and worked). And his unwillingness ever to give up had a certain grandeur, I suppose. I chatted with him a few weeks ago and he seemed eager to perform for years to come. He was very friendly, and for a few moments I liked him, as I had liked him occasionally before in the almost 40 years I'd known him, in a sort of clinical way.
-- Robert Whitcomb
Textile trauma
"It's in Our Blood'' (assorted fabric), by Caitlin Pritchard, in the "Open Studios Exhibition,'' at OneWay Gallery, Narragansett, R.I., through March 13.
Emily Schwartz Greco: Trump slurbs up the ethanol scam
As the “lamestream” media, late-night talk show hosts, and Sarah Palin impersonator-in-chief Tina Fey lapped up the former Alaska governor’s first remarks to Donald Trump’s “right-wingin’ bitter-clingin’” supporters, one of her most hilarious lines didn’t get the attention it deserved.
Some Republicans are “even whispering they’re ready to throw in for Hillary over Trump because they can’t afford to see the status quo go,” John McCain’s 2008 running mate said. “Otherwise, they won’t be able to be slurping off the gravy train that’s been feeding them all these years. They don’t want that to end.”
Seriously?
Iowa, home to the first official contests for the major parties’ nominations, is the nation’s . Saluting its corn-flavored gravy train is a rite of passage for presidential candidates courting Iowa voters like the ones at the Ames rally Palin was addressing.
And Trump, like every presidential candidate other than the libertarian-tinged Republicans Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, supports the government-pampered ethanol industry.
On the same day that Palin made her boisterous return to the political spotlight — and just one week before his state’s caucuses — Gov. Terry Branstad proclaimed his opposition to Cruz. “I think it would be very damaging to our state” for Iowa’s other leading GOP contender besides Trump to become president, Branstad told reporters at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit.
Trump also addressed the event, hosted by Iowa’s main ethanol trade group in Altoona.
“We are with you, folks, and we’ve been with you since day one,” The Donald said, after assuring the assembled leaders of Big Corn that he would leave the Renewable Fuel Standard intact.
The RFS is a government program that requires gasoline sold in the United States to beblended with ethanol. This mandate theoretically boosts U.S. energy independence, buffers gas prices from spikes, and helps our nation fight climate change.
But growing government-subsidized corn to power transportation makes no environmental sense. It increases the acreage dedicated to a single crop, destroying farmland for a harvest that feeds no one. It does nothing to improve the American diet at a time when millions of us are obese and badly nourished.
Then there’s the crop’s horrible water footprint: It takes 75 gallons of water and 50 acres of land to grow enough corn for a single gallon of ethanol. It takes another three gallons of water to convert that corn into fuel in a factory. And the agribusiness model for corn grown for fuel consumes vast quantities of fertilizers and pesticides, which poison local waterways.
Meeting the challenge of the climate crisis means that Americans must drive less and get more miles per gallon when we hit the road. Burning gasoline blended with 10 percent ethanol, as the mandate currently requires, shaves 3 percent off a vehicle’s fuel efficiency, according to the government’s own data. That wastes oil — as does growing the corn and hauling it to processing plants.
And at current prices for oil and corn, ethanol has become so expensive to produce that the numbers no longer add up, according to professor Scott Irwin and professor emeritus Darrel Good of the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics.
In other words, if the government stopped forcing industry to purchase the fuel, ethanol demand would evaporate. But since Iowa happens to be one of only seven swing statesthat will probably decide the 2016 presidential election, this gravy train will surely keep chugging along for years to come.
So slurp, baby, slurp.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.com, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies, where this piece originated.
Only looks like this once a year
"Through the Mountain Pass'' (oil on wood panel), by Jennifer Moses, in her show "Cartoons and Other Confections,'' at the Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 28.
Hilarious take on Boston accents and movies
For a hilarious take on Boston accents and movies set in Boston, look at this.
David Warsh: Kasich's time may have come
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Readers have wondered when I might back off the hunch I voiced a year ago, and reiterated as recently as December, that Jeb Bush still could eventually win the presidency. Here goes:
Bush clearly no longer has a chance of winning the nomination. It is Ohio Gov. John Kasich who appears ready to seize the role of a plausible competitor to the eventual Democratic nominee. There appears to be almost no political difference between the two men, except the heavy baggage connected with the former’s name. Kasich is running second to Donald Trump in New Hampshire in the polls.
Nobody said it would be easy, but the logic of Kasich’s candidacy is simple: If he polls strongly on Feb. 9 in New Hampshire; if he gains enough traction in February to score some successes in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1; if he wins Ohio’s winner-take-all primary on March 15; if he gains the nomination of the Republican Party at its convention in Cleveland in July – then he stands a good chance of being elected president in November.
Why? Because he is good at appealing to voters who consider themselves independent of either party’s establishment. And it takes 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. And it’s a stubborn fact of present-day U.S. politics that most states are virtually certain to wind up in one column or another.
Kasich would seem to be competitive with the Democratic nominee, whether it is Hillary Clinton or someone else, in all 10 states that seem likely to be up for grabs in the fall – Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and New Hampshire.
I have been as surprised as everybody else by events of the last year. Let’s review:
It was barely a year ago that Mitt Romney announced that he was mulling a third presidential bid. The establishment wing of the Republican Party swiftly overruled him, indicating a preference for Jeb Bush, who in December 2014 had mentioned on his Facebook page that he was considering a run. Supposedly preemptive sums of money flowed to Bush’ s Super PAC, Right to Rise, run by political consultant Mike Murphy. Romney quickly steered off.
What happened next was that, unfazed, 15 other persons declared their candidacy for the Republican nomination, one after another, along with Bush: Ted Cruz (March 23), Rand Paul (April 7), Marco Rubio (April 13), Ben Carson (May 4), Carly Fiorina (May 4), Mike Huckabee (May 5), Rick Santorum (May 27), George Pataki (May 28), Lindsey Graham (June 1), Rick Perry (June 4), Bush (June 15), Donald Trump (June 16), Bobbie Jindal (June 24), Chris Christie (June 30), Kasich (July 21), and Jim Gilmore (July 30).
Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy on April 13, Bernie Sanders on April 20, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on May 29, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee on June 3. Sanders has recently swept ahead of Clinton in polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
Why such pandemonium? The over-arching explanation seems to be Bush-Clinton fatigue after so many years of their presence in presidential politics.
Without a single vote being cast, real-estate baron and reality-television star Trump vaulted to front-runner status in most polls of Republican voters. It’s getting a little late to explain U.S. outcomes in terms of the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis; Europe is another matter: most likely the Trump phenomenon is an expression of ephemeral contempt for dynastic politics.
Trump is not the first self-financed celebrity candidate to seek the presidency. He’s just the one with the fewest principles. Software entrepreneur H. Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate in 1992, upstaging incumbent George H. W. Bush and enabling Bill Clinton to win the presidency with just 43 percent of the vote (Perot received 19 percent and Bush 37 percent, but electoral vote totals were 370, 168, and 0.)
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is threatening to enter the race as an independent if Sanders gets the better of Hillary. An interesting questions have to do with Trump’s options once his star begins to fade. Eventually he presumably will become a commentator. Better for everyone if it were sooner rather than later.
Bush could do everyone a favor by quickly stepping out of the campaign if his New Hampshire totals are disappointing and urging his massive organization to support Kasich. As far as I can tell, his politics are little different from those of the Ohio governor, except on foreign policy. Still, Bush would make a very good secretary of state in a Kasich administration. The silly negative ads with which the two campaigns are attacking one another in the final days of New Hampshire should stop.
I have no idea how likely any of this might be. I do know an incredibly interesting political season looms. There is a real possibility that the election of a moderate Republican would be good for the country, mainly for the obvious reason: Kasich’s success would dampen the amplitude of extreme opinion on the right.
You might wonder, whence stems my license to pronounce on these matters? I have, after all, never covered a campaign. All I can say is that these arguments are deeply grounded in concern for economic affairs over the long run, and you will never hear them from my old friend and fellow economics columnist, Paul Krugman, of The New York Times. He thinks that there are no moderates in the Republican Party primaries, and that even if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a long-time financial journalist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.
A pre-Slater Mill approach
"In her workplace set on stilts on Inle Lake she spins and spins'' (digital photo), by Philip Lieberman in his show "Myanmar: At the Cusp,'' at the Providence Art Club through Feb. 12.
Canada is next topic at Committee on Foreign Relations
To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com).
Here’s our updated schedule for the rest of the year.
Speaking to us next, on Tuesday, Feb. 16, will be David Alward, the former premier of New Brunswick and now the consul general of Canada to New England.
He’ll talk about the implications of the recent change in Ottawa under Justin Trudeau, international security issues, such big trade matters as New England’s purchase of hydro-electric power from Canada and the idea of a common market encompassing Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
The international cities expert Greg Lindsay was to have joined us Feb. 16 but he must go to Scandinavia then. He’ll join us Wednesday, May 11. Some members have asked about when Eric Brenner, the Hapag-Lloyd executive, will reschedule to talk to us about world shipping, including the widening of the Panama Canal and the effects on East Coast ports. The answer: We don’t know yet.
On Tuesday, March 22, comes the very distinguished Andrew A. Michta, professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Europe Program).
He’ll talk about European politics and security, including NATO, and has a special focus on Central Europe and the Baltic States.
In 2013–2014, he was a senior fellow focusing on defense programming at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 2011–2013, he was a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) and the founding director of the GMFUS Warsaw office.
He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Columbia Prof. Morris Rossabi, who had been skedded for March and is one of the world’s greatest experts on Central Asia, is being rescheduled to September or October.
We have asked him to focus on Mongolia, whose ability to become a real democracy stuck between the great expansionist police states of China and Russia, has long fascinated us.
On Tuesday, April 12, celebrated author, TV documentary maker and former foreign correspondent Hedrick Smith is scheduled to join us; he’ll talk about Russia, and the current state of America, too.
On Wednesday May 11, comes the aforementioned internationally known expert on cities around the world, Greg Lindsay.
Look at:
He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity, and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. He is also a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — a non-resident senior fellow of The Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute.
Theodore Sedgwick, former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, who had been skedded for May, is rescheduling to September. (We take July and August off.)
On Tuesday, June 7, Michael Soussan, former UN whistleblower; acclaimed author; widely published journalist; NYU writing professor, and women's rights advocate, will speak. His satirical memoir about global corruption, Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course In International Diplomacy (Nation Books / Perseus) is being adapted for a feature film, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Hutcherson
He will speak about the subject of his next book TRUTH TO POWER: how great minds changed the world. A brief history of thought leadership.
General and specific information on the PCFR is available at thepcfr.org.
'The Birds' and then 'Music in the Night'
I had a pleasantly eerie but nostalgic late-night drive last night going from Newport to Providence after midnight. When I left my hosts on Division Street (after a very entertaining Robert Burns party) ravens were loudly and insistently, indeed ominously, cackling over the narrow street, laid out in the 17th or 18th Century. I thought of the Hitchcock horror movie The Birds.
But then I turned on the car radio and enjoyed 45 minutes of the sort of old sweet jazz that you used to hear all over the place on your radio dial, back when most of the people making the music were still alive. They used to call such shows "Music in the Night'' and they were usually hosted by a male announcer whose baritone was made more mellow by a serious cigarette habit.
Frank Carini: Something fishy about climate change
Atlantic cod caught off New England.
Via ecoRI News
For generations winter flounder was one of the most important fish in southern New England waters. Today, the once-abundant flatfish is hard to find off the coasts of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Overfishing is often blamed, and the industry certainly bears much responsibility, as does consumer demand. The winter flounder commercial fishery was once a highly productive industry with annual harvests up to 40.3 million pounds, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
Since the early 1980s, however, landings have steadily declined. Total commercial landings for all stocks combined — Georges Bank, Gulf of Maine and Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic — dipped to 3.5 million pounds in 2010, according to the Virginia-based organization.
Overfishing, however, is just one factor in the decline of some once-prevalent species in local waters. The reasons are complicated and diverse, from habitat loss, pollution, and even energy production — the Brayton Point Power Station, in Somerset, Mass., pre-cooling towers, played a role in the precipitous decline of winter flounder in Mount Hope Bay — to climate-change impacts such warming water temperatures, shifting currents and less oxygenated waters.
In fact, one of the biggest current threats to domestic fisheries, including those along the southern New England coast, is the impact a changing climate, combined with land-based pollution, is having on water quality.
“When water is polluted, it exacerbates the threats posed by algal blooms and disease,” said John Torgan, director of ocean and coastal conservation for The Nature Conservancy’s Rhode Island chapter. “Our coastal edges and estuaries inoculate the ocean from threats. Our coastal ponds and rivers are breeding grounds for marine life. If we reduce the amount of pollution in our waters, they’ll be able to better cope with whatever challenges climate change brings. The best investment we can make is to address the sources of land-based pollution.”
The former Narragansett baykeeper for Save The Bay said that effort must continue to focus on reducing the amount of nitrogen dumped into local waters from wastewater treatment facilities, septic systems and cesspools. He also noted the importance of rebuilding natural buffering along the coast, and better protecting wetlands.
However, the technology required to remove nitrogen from wastewater treatment plants and septic systems is expensive. In fact, very few wastewater treatment facilities in southern New England possess it. A de-nitrification septic system for a home or building can cost upwards of $40,000, but Torgan noted that one system could serve a number of structures. He said reducing the amount of nitrogen in local waters is an investment the region must make.
“Water quality and the ecological health of our coastal waters and estuaries are the most important drivers for environmental and community well-being in coastal states,” Torgan said. “Clean, healthy coastal waters are the key to environmental protections, public health and tourism. Can you swim? Can you take fish?”
Tepid waters
Southern New England’s coastal waters are warming, and key species are disappearing (cod and winter flounder), southerly species are appearing more frequently (spot and ocean sunfish) and more unwanted guests are arriving (jellyfish that have an appetite for fish larvae and, in the summer, lionfish, a venomous and fast-reproducing fish with a voracious appetite).
This biomass metamorphosis will likely transform southern New England’s fishing industry, for both better and worse. But how much of this change is climate related and how much is simply the region’s natural ebb and flow of marine life? A lack of ecosystem-wide data makes that a difficult question to answer. But change is being witnessed and documented.
“Climate change has happened in southern New England’s coastal waters,” Torgan said. “We’ve seen a significant warming on average in water temperatures, especially winter water temperatures. Southern New England’s ocean waters have changed, and this warming triggers fish kills, hypoxia and die-offs."
In 2012, water temperatures off the New England coast hit a record high, and shifts were observed in the distribution of Atlantic cod, a cold-water species, according to a 2013 study. While the region’s biomass diversity is certainly being altered by warming temperatures, species populations also are being changed by prey-to-predator ratios and by overfishing in waters hundreds of miles away.
Jon Hare, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Narragansett Laboratory, told ecoRI News that fishing pressures and climate change are the two obvious factors when it comes to changing population distributions.
“Whether it’s climate change or fishing pressures, species distribution is changing and we need to adapt how we manage that change,” Hare said.
Climate change, however, is perhaps the least understood factor. Both scientists and fishermen are just beginning to understand the possible ramifications. For instance, despite ongoing, but so far fairly limited, research it remains unclear how different species will adapt to warming waters, shifting currents and other climate-change impacts.
Species native to southern New England marine waters, such as cod, lobster and winter flounder, which the region’s fishing industry built its fleet around, will either adapt, find more suitable habitat elsewhere or their numbers will decline.
“Numerous studies have now documented changes in species distributions related to climate change,” Hare has written in research papers. “In general, species are moving poleward and into deeper waters. However, it is important to recognize that this is a general pattern and that there are a substantial number of exceptions.”
Winter flounder, which have distinct habitat needs and migrate to estuaries to spawn, may be unable to shift their populations, as warmer-water species such as black sea bass and butterfish move into the void left by the migration of cold-water species northward and/or further offshore.
Challenges and opportunities
Sarah Schumann, president and founder of the Warwick, R.I.-based nonprofit Eating with the Ecosystem, said local fishermen are seeing an influx of black sea bass, and it’s northern expansion is putting native species, such as lobster, at risk.
Black sea bass historically have been found between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras, N.C., where they are sought both commercially and recreationally and are subject to size restrictions and rigid quotas. However, their numbers here are increasing and they are now being found in the colder waters of the Gulf of Maine, which isn’t quite as chilly as it once was. In fact, according to a 2015 study, warming waters are a major factor in the Gulf of Maine's cod collapse.
The greater abundance and distribution shifts of black sea bass will have environmental impacts and economic implications — both good and bad.
“The predatory impact of this explosion of black sea bass will be significant. They eat lobsters and shellfish,” Schumann said. “Their quota is pretty small, so there’s time and effort associated with catching them by accident and throwing them back. They also get caught up in fishing gear. That’s money lost for fishermen.”
On the flip side, Schumann noted that the increased range of these spiky-finned fish opens up a possible fishery to New England fishermen. “This shift northward of black sea bass will hopefully bring new opportunities, but it also will bring new challenges,” she said.
The change in black sea bass population density and increased range doesn’t automatically mean a changing climate is the reason, according to Schumann, other fishermen and scientists.
Populations shift and change all the time. It’s difficult to spot trends without more significant data sets. For example, there is plenty of data on surface-water temperatures but very little on bottom-water temperatures.
Also, the appearance of southern, warmer-water species off the New England coast isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Atlantic garfish, torpedo rays and cobia, to name just a few, have been randomly appearing here for decades.
However, that doesn’t mean warming waters and shifting currents, being caused in large part by manmade greenhouse-gas emissions, aren’t reshaping southern New England’s fisheries.
“Climate change is happening and we need to deal with it,” Hare said. “Fishermen are seeing the changes every day. They’re used to seeing fluctuations in species from fishing impacts, habitat destruction and a large number of negative impacts, but climate change is having an impact.”
Summer flounder and blue crabs — both of which spawn offshore and are less dependent on specific habitat needs — will likely expand their range because of climate change. In fact, fishermen and scientists here are already seeing blue crabs, a more southerly species, in greater numbers. Summer flounder offshore spawning stock is moving up the East Coast, as coastal waters here become less New England like and more Mid-Atlantic like.
That’s not to say southern New England hasn’t witnessed the return of some classics. Torgan noted that cod, for the first time in years, are biting off Block Island. He also said the region’s Atlantic herring population is doing well.
The combination of a changing climate and nitrogen pollution is destroying lobster habitat, meaning the population of this popular species is declining in southern New England. (istock)
Lobsters leaving
Southern New England’s lobster population has declined sharply since the late 1990s. The reasons are varied — for example, dredged material from marinas dumped off Prudence Island destroyed lobster habitat, and some believe pesticide use has contributed to the decline — but warming waters are likely shifting these bottom-dwelling crustaceans offshore and to the north.
In fact, last summer, a report by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission attributed southern New England’s lobster decline to climate change.
“Since the American lobster is highly influenced by temperature, climate change is expected to significantly impact the life history and distribution of the species,” according to the 493-page report. “In the lobster’s southern range, the number of days above 20º C (68 degrees Fahrenheit) is increasing, threatening successful reproduction. Contrastingly, in the Gulf of Maine, the number of days in the ideal range of 12-18º C is increasing, providing a potential benefit to the species. Climate changes are important to monitor and provide a strong justification for the timing of this benchmark stock assessment.”
Warmer water temperatures also can influence lobster vulnerability to disease and reduce their growth rate — a bad combination for the species and for those who make their livelihood catching the popular seafood.
“Lobsters are moving offshore into deeper waters, and it seems to be connected to warming waters,” said Eating with the Ecosystem's Schumann. “But we don’t have data on bottom-water temperatures, so it’s difficult to say that’s the main reason. It’s a complex issue.”
The Nature Conservancy’s Torgan said climate change and pollution, most notably excess nitrogen, are conspiring to destroy lobster habitat.
“We’re losing lobster habitat,” he said. “They’re not dying; they’re numbers are declining because their habitat is.”
Climate change is impacting, and will continue to impact, southern New England’s marine waters. But how fast and in what way is still anyone’s guess. These unknown climate-change impacts pose a challenge for both scientists and fishermen.
With the decline of cod, winter flounder and yellowtail flounder, much of Rhode Island’s groundfish fleet has turned its attention to squid. The Ocean State is now one of the biggest harvesters of squid on the East Coast. Climate change most assuredly played a part in the local loss of those three popular fishery species, but without more data it’s difficult to pinpoint how big a role it’s playing or will play.
But climate change is altering ecosystems, both aquatic and terrestrial. Ocean surface temperatures are expected to increase another 4-8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council.
“Even a shift of one to three degrees on average can have a dramatic impact on the life cycle and distribution of southern New England’s classic cold-water species,” Torgan said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it will kill them, but it makes them more susceptible to disease and predation.”
Warmer waters could also lead to changes in the timing of seasonal plankton blooms, disruption in migration patterns, and the disappearance of species at the southern end of their range, such as lobsters.
The world’s oceans also have been steadily acidifying for the past 250 years, fueled largely by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Acidifying oceans could dramatically impact the world’s squid species, including the population off the southern New England coast that is being harvested in greater numbers by an adapting local fishing industry.
In fact, about half of 36 fish stocks in the northwest Atlantic Ocean, which includes the waters off New England, have been shifting northward during the past four decades, with some stocks nearly disappearing from U.S. waters as they move farther offshore, according to a 2009 NOAA study. Many of them are commercially valuable species.
The study focused on the impact of changing coastal and ocean temperatures on fisheries from Cape Hatteras to the Canadian border. The research looked at annual spring survey data from 1968 to 2007 for stocks ranging from Atlantic cod and haddock to yellowtail and winter flounder, spiny dogfish and Atlantic herring. Researchers found many familiar species are shifting to the north, where ocean waters are cooler, or staying in the same general area but moving into deeper waters.
The study’s co-authors, including Hare, selected the 36 species to study because they were consistently caught in high numbers during annual spring bottom-trawl surveys. They also represented a wide range of species known to be commercially and/or ecologically important.
Ocean temperatures have increased since the 1960s and ’70s, and the authors found significant changes in species distribution consistent with warming in 24 of the 36 stocks studied. Ten of the 36 stocks examined had significant range expansion, while 12 had significant range contraction, according to the study.
The study also found that heavily fished stocks appeared to be more sensitive to climate change. Also, each fish species has a particular temperature range in which it thrives. If water temperatures depart from that range, they may experience reduced growth and reproduction, ultimately reducing their numbers in a particular area and changing the species’ distribution.
It also means fisherman will have to travel farther to catch some species, at least until it’s no longer economical.
These climate change-driven shifts in fisheries pose a threat, or at least a challenge, to the industry. It will require fishermen and regulators — like the fish and shellfish they catch and monitor — to adapt. One possible measure that has been proposed is adjusting fishing seasons and allowable catches based on observed population shifts, such as the growing emergence of black sea bass in southern New England waters.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries scientist Jon Hare carried baskets of fish during the 2006 winter trawl survey along the Northeast continental shelf. This annual survey started in the 1960s and has been instrumental in documenting changes in fish distributions. (NOAA)
Adult-only conversations
While numerous studies have shown that adult marine fish distributions in the Northeast are changing, few studies have looked at the early-life stages of these adult fish.
A 2015 study by NOAA fisheries researchers, including Hare, has provided some answers, finding that distributions of young stages and the timing of the life cycle of many fish species are also changing.
Hare said most marine fish have complex life histories with distinct stages — much like frogs. Marine fish spawn tiny planktonic eggs that move at the whim of ocean currents. Over a period of weeks to months, while drifting in the ocean, larvae develop and grow until they reach a point where they transition into juveniles recognizable as a fish.
The distribution of larvae in the sea is determined by where adult fish reproduce and by currents that move these early-life stages around. In the study published last September, researchers used long-term survey data to compare the distributions of larvae between two decades, 1977-87 and 1999-2008. They also used long-term survey data for the entire Northeast shelf, from Cape Hatteras to Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, to compare distributions of adult fish over the same time periods.
“The distribution and timing of the life cycle of many fish species are changing,” said the study’s lead author, Harvey Walsh, a fisheries biologist at NOAA’s Narragansett Laboratory and a colleague of Hare’s. “The consequences of these changes for fisheries management need to be considered, but an important first step is documenting that change is occurring.”
Walsh and his colleagues found that larval stages of 43 percent of the species studied changed distribution, while adult stages of 50 percent of the species shifted distribution over the same time period. Shifts were predominantly northward or along the shelf for both life stages, which they said is expected given the warming ocean in the region.
But not all the shifts were northward, or along the shelf. Butterfish and Atlantic mackerel, for example, shifted inshore, while red hake and silver hake moved into deeper but more inshore waters in the Gulf of Maine. Adult spiny dogfish, little skate and offshore hake shifted southward, perhaps because of differences in fishing pressures and changes in habitat, according to Walsh.
“It is clear significant changes are underway,” he said. “It is apparent that fish stocks in the Northeast shelf have changed over decades for both larvae and adults. These changes will impact the productivity and distribution of these stocks, and that will have significant implications for their assessment and management.”
Frank Carini is the editor of ecoRI News.
Editor’s note: John Torgan is an ecoRI News board member. Also, the article's author is an Eating with the Ecosystem board member.
The way Putin works
It is surprising that anyone would be surprised that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko murdered in London.
He was only one of many people that this cold and narcissistic thief and killer has done away with.
--- Robert Whitcomb
Peter Certo: Americans' absurd exaggeration of the terror threat against them
Via otherwords.org
One in 3.5 million: That’s the risk you’ll die from a terrorist attack in the United States, Ohio State Prof. John Mueller estimates. Rounded generously, that chance comes to 3 one-hundred thousandths of a percent.
That’s not how most Americans see it, though.
In a recent Gallup poll, 51 percent of respondents said they’re personally worried about becoming a victim. If you’ll forgive my amateur number crunching, that means we’re overestimating the terrorist threat by factor of about 1.7 million.
No wonder people play the lottery.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is trying hard — with mixed results — not to get pushed into another Middle Eastern war. But that’s a tall order when Americans are more fearful of attacks than at any time since 9/11 — and when politicians like Ted Cruz are calling for bona fide war crimes like “carpet-bombing” Syria.
Obama tried hard to walk that line in his final State of the Union address.
He dismissed critics who likened the fight against the Islamic State to “World War III,” and insisted (correctly) that the group poses no existential threat to the United States. But he also assured listeners that the militants would be “rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”
To that end, Obama boasted, American planes had already launched 10,000 airstrikes on Iraq and Syria.
This appeal to the carpet-bombing constituency was Obama’s attempt to break the political taboo against counseling modesty about the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, it only illustrates a much deeper taboo against admitting that foreign terrorism against our country is almost always a response to our foreign policies.
You know, policies like launching 10,000 airstrikes.
Political scientist Robert Pape should know. He’s studied every suicide attack on record.
Pape argues that while religious appeals — Islamic or otherwise — can help recruit suicide bombers, virtually all attacks can be reduced to political motives. “What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common,” he concludes, “is not religion.” Instead, there’s “a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention.”
In the years before al-Qaida pulled off the 9/11 attacks, for instance — and since, for that matter — Washington propped up repressive regimes in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which ruthlessly subjugated Islamist and liberal challengers alike. It armed and enabled Israel, even as the country bombed its Muslim (and Christian) neighbors in Palestine and Lebanon.
And in between its two full-scale invasions of Iraq, Washington imposed devastating sanctions that caused well over half a million Iraqi children to die from a lack of food or medicine.
In his letter explaining the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden mentioned all of these things and more to argue that U.S. intervention in the Muslim world had to be stopped. That’s an opinion shared by plenty of people who aren’t mass murderers.
Similarly, before it expanded to Syria, the infamous Islamic State emerged out of a Sunni rebellion against the repressive Shiite government Washington set up in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein. To the extent that it’s engaged in international terrorism, ISIS has mostly targeted countries — like France, Turkey, Lebanon, and Russia — that have plunged into Syria on the side of its enemies.
None of this excuses terrorism in the least. But it strongly suggests that senseless wars only increase the risk of attack — especially when there’s not a bomb on this planet (much less 10,000 of them) powerful enough to put Iraq and Syria back together. Diplomats may do that someday. Carpet-bombing won’t.
Until then, a 0.00003 percent risk of terrorism is high enough. Why multiply it by acting rashly?
Peter Certo is the editor of Foreign Policy In Focus and the deputy editor of OtherWords at the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS-dc.org
Another precious quarter hour
"The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer. Minute by minute they lengthen out. It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change. It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, as you watch it day by day, until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise we realize that we can stay out of doors in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour.
-- Vita Sackville-West