Boffin computer models project fish are expected to shrink in size by 20 to 30 per cent if ocean temperatures continue to climb due to climate change.

Making everything about ‘climate change’ sure smells fishy to me, it leads to treating the symptoms of the deadly condition not the cause.

Climate change misdirects our attention from the real cause of ‘ocean change’ which is the root problem and cause of climate change not the other way around.

Restoring the ocean pastures to historic health and abundance will restore the climate.

Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes. That is certainly true but the study then shifts from science to political science when it claims that the cause of the ‘warming’ is climate change that warms the ocean when in fact it is ocean change that is warming the climate.

New and Long Term Evidence point to collapse of plankton cooling as main cause of ocean warming. But dogma demands top billing for ocean warming going to the usual suspects, those being of course ‘global warming/climate change.’ – CLICK TO READ MORE

The oceans which cover 72% of this blue planet and which manage the lions share of humanities CO2 emissions are the first and foremost to show the impact of that deadly CO2 which is collapsing ocean pasture plant communities. The collapse of those ocean pastures in turn means the collapse of primary plankton cooling which is a far more potent thermodynamic engine on this blue planet than are atmospheric, aka climate, changing impacts of greenhouse gases.

This point of view however is not consistent with the politically correct and controlled climate change dogma and thus as this new and important new paper reveals misdirects our attention from the cause to the effect. It’s as if your doctor merely chooses to treat the symptoms of a deadly disease as opposed to treating the cause. You’ll merely feel better as you die.

Here’s more of the fishy story

As the oceans warm this speeds up metabolisms of cold-blooded life, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures need to ‘breathe’ more oxygen from the ocean. But at the same time, warmer water can hold less and less oxygen blind siding the growing fish .

Scientists in Canada have long argued, with much opposition from peers, that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“Fish, as cold-blooded animals, cannot regulate their own body temperatures. When their waters get warmer, their metabolism accelerates and they need more oxygen to sustain their body functions,” said William Cheung, co-author

“There is a point where the gills cannot supply enough oxygen for a larger body, so the fish just stops growing larger.”
Daniel Pauly, the study’s lead author.

One clear criticism of this picture is that the existing populations of fish while indeed are shrinking are shrinking more in girth than in overall size. The fish are clearly being seen to be starving at sea as opposed to gasping for breath. – click to enlarge

Pauly explains that as fish grow into adulthood their demand for oxygen increases because their body mass becomes larger. However, the surface area of the gills—where oxygen is obtained—does not grow at the same pace as the rest of the body. He calls this set of principles that explains why fish are expected to shrink “gill-oxygen limitation theory.”

Pauly is well known for his controversial proclamations about overfishing. But since his dissertation in the 1970s, he has researched and promoted a principle that proclaims that fish size (separate from fish abundance) is limited by the growth capacity of gills. Based on this theory, he and other authors published research in 2013 that showed average body weight for some 600 species of ocean fish could shrink 14-24 percent by 2050 under climate change. T

hose claims have been hotly criticized in some corners as overly simplistic. Earlier this year, a group of European physiologists argued that Pauly’s basic premise about gill size was, itself, flawed.

Hundreds of reports of ocean life, whales, sea-lions, seabirds, and fish clearly show that starvation (as opposed to oxygen deprivation) is taking place in the world’s oceans at an increasingly perilous rate. – Click to read more

The idea is that warmer waters increase fish’s need for oxygen but climate change will result in less oxygen in the oceans. This means that gills have less oxygen to supply to a body that already grows faster than them. The researchers say this forces fish to stop growing at a smaller size to be able to fulfill their needs with the little oxygen available to them.

Some species may be more affected by this combination of factors. Tuna, which are fast moving and require more energy and oxygen, may shrink even more when temperatures increase. Smaller fish will have an impact on fisheries production as well as the interaction between organisms in the ecosystems.

All this is a good example of academic scientific debate but where things get fishy is when the debate leads to questions of ‘what do we do about this.’ There it is vital that we understand whether we are to treat the symptoms or the disease.

Treating the disease requires identifying the real root cause and its effects.

Here’s the vital difference to understand. If we are to ‘bring back the fish’ and the root cause of their disappearance is in fact the collapse of their ocean fish pastures as opposed to ‘over-fishing’ and climate driven warmer water oxygen deprivation then we can succeed and do so almost immediately. If we only wring our hands over the nigh unto impossible to treat ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ of which endless debate, demands for trillions of dollars to be spent, and countless decades of time to mitigate — then for the fish all is lost.

The result of the world’s first large scale ocean pasture restoration proves we can bring the oceans back to health and abundance along with the fish. – click to read more

The proven demonstrated facts, as opposed to the mathematical models of the boffins, is that we can indeed restore ocean pastures to historic health and abundance in short order, over the course of mere years not decades. In doing so the replenish ocean plant life will simultaneously repurpose our deadly trillion tonne burden of CO2, yesterday’s CO2, into new ocean life. Choosing life rather than death seems to be a powerfully good intention.

The restored ocean pastures and their phyto-plankton will in turn feed the fish. This is as simple and fundamental to human understanding of living in harmony with nature as opposed to battling or exercising domain over nature as so many seem prone to prefer.

Walt Whitman once put is very simply by describing the vital power of pastures when he said, “ALL BEEF IS GRASS”

I simply repurpose Whitman’s wisdom in saying, “ALL FISH IS PLANKTON”

You may read everywhere on this blog how we have proven we can restore the ocean pastures to historic health and abundance. A fact testified to by hundreds of millions of additional fish that survived, thrived, and were proven to be a second miracle of the fishes as they swam into our nets and onto the plates becoming food to feed all.

The next Voyage of Recovery is signing on shipmates now, join me to help save the world, immediately!