Just Under 8 Inches an Hour

If you were looking at something moving at 8 inches an hour, you would notice that wouldn't you? 

20 cm or just about 8 inches per hour is the pace at which wildlife - fauna and flora - is migrating away from the equator due to climate change.  That's almost 5 metres a day.  That's roughly 1.8 kilometres a year or more than 70-kilometres since the migration is believed to have started 40-years ago.

Plant life tends to migrate slowly but animal life, that's another story altogether.  The denizen of the Sea of Cortez, the Humboldt squid, seemed to migrate from the waters of Baja to the beaches of Vancouver Island quite rapidly, possibly within a year.  Sardines from California also seem to have migrated to our waters very quickly with their predators, white-sided dolphins, and their predators, transient orcas, in hot pursuit.   Even the return of large numbers of Humpback whales to our waters may reflect the migration of the whales' prey.  Something must have seemed inviting.

Species have moved towards the poles (further north in the northern hemisphere, to locations where conditions are cooler) at three times the rate previously accepted in the scientific literature, and they have moved to cooler, higher altitudes at twice the rate previously realised.

Analysing data for over 2000 responses by animal and plant species, the research team estimated that, on average, species have moved to higher elevations at 12.2 metres per decade and, more dramatically, to higher latitudes at 17.6 kilometres per decade.

For Alpine species, plants and animals, this migration can be a death sentence.  While climate change may compel them to migrate ever higher, they can go only so far before they reach an altitude at which they can no longer survive.  When they reach that line, they die.

Simply moving to higher latitudes can also be difficult due to both natural and man-made obstacles to migration.  America's fortification of its border with Mexico can present an insurmountable blockage to anything that can't fly over the fence.  Some creatures can't cross waterways, others are unable to cross deserts. 

First author Dr I-Ching Chen, previously a PhD student at York and now a researcher at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, said: “This research shows that it is global warming that is causing species to move towards the poles and to higher elevations. We have for the first time shown that the amount by which the distributions of species have changed is correlated with the amount the climate has changed in that region.”

Co-author Dr Ralf Ohlemüller, from Durham University, said: “We were able to calculate how far species might have been expected to move so that the temperatures they experience today are the same as the ones they used to experience, before global warming kicked in.  Remarkably, species have on average moved towards the poles as rapidly as expected.”

...previous studies suggest that climate change represents a serious extinction risk to at least 10 per cent of the world’s species. Professor Thomas says: “Realisation of how fast species are moving because of climate change indicates that many species may indeed be heading rapidly towards extinction, where climatic conditions are deteriorating."

 

Another Part of the Puzzle - Our Warming Oceans

The playpen of climate change denialists is on temperature change.  They like to cherry pick statistics, sweep the bulk of the data under the carpet, and declare that global warming has stopped.

Not so fast.

Here's an example of what the denialist mantra carefully omits.

This is a depiction of what's happening in the  North Pacific and Bering Sea.  The red areas such as the Bering Sea are up to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. From the US Pacific Northwest along British Columbia up to the Gulf of Alaska it's 2-3C warmer.

As I've written several times before we in coastal BC are seeing species migrating into our waters that we rarely saw before - fish, marine mammals, sea birds.  This translates into massive schools of sardines, white sided dolphins, even brown pelicans.  We've even had an apparent influx of transient orca perhaps in pursuit of the larger dolphin newcomers. That is the face of climate change.

Here's a pod of transients that has herded a school of white-sided dolphins into the ferry dock at Nanaimo's Departure Bay.

 

In Alaskan waters newcomers include thresher sharks, skipjack tuna and the giant sunfish or Moa.

What's important is how this warming weather is building up.

Normally storms and winds roll through to cool off the surface of the Northern Pacific, but a weather pattern popped up for a few months in winter 2013 that inhibited those storms from developing, said Nate Mantua, a NOAA research scientist. Then, from October 2013 through January, the weather pattern came back as a ridge of high pressure (the same one connected to the California drought). All of that made the already warm waters in the Alaskan gulf even warmer, a layer about 100 meters thick, Mantua said.

In the spring, warm water started to develop in other Northern Pacific waters, namely the Bering Sea. There's also a chunk of warm water developing off the coast of California.

"You have lots of warm water, and it's due to weather patterns that basically don't take heat out of the ocean," Mantua said. "They are letting the ocean warm up rapidly, and stay warm."

The oceans are heating because the wind patterns have changed in the northern hemisphere.  It's the same wind pattern change that has brought severe drought to the west coast of the US, that brought the Polar Vortex slamming across eastern US and Canada last winter and that gave us a summer of flash flooding from southern California to Burlington to New England.

Some research suggests we should have had a powerful El Nino by now.  The water conditions changed as expected in the central Pacific but the winds associated with El Nino didn't appear to carry that warm water moisture up into California as hoped.  

We're just beginning to explore what these phenomena could mean in the long term.  Are El Ninos destined to become less frequent and less powerful just as we're discovering how dependent the ecology of the American southwest is on them?  What happens to all this heat that's accumulating in our oceans?  What does it do to the oceans and all life that lives in or depends on them?

The answer is as brief as it is troubling - right now, no one really knows.

What Will Tomorrow Look Like?

There's a human trait called landscape amnesia. It's the tendancy to see what you've seen in the recent past as 'normal' while forgetting about what your world was like a generation or two in the past. But it's more than an amnesia, it can be an anaesthetic numbing us to rapid change that ought to be stirring us to ask what's going on.

Another bad year for the Fraser River sockeye run. There's barely a million, million and a half sockeye returned this year. Sounds like a lot until you realize there ought to be another nine and a half million that are nowhere to be found. Nobody knows what happened. Nobody has seen anything like this before. The run totalled 1.4 million last year, 1.7 the year before that.

Our Department of Fisheries is left guessing. One idea is that rising ocean temperatures may have sharply cut the availability of plankton the sockeye feed on but that's just a guess. Who knows, maybe we'll discover that new predator species have travelled up from the south to take the salmon, spurred on by the earlier collapse of salmon stocks in California and Oregon (both states have shut down salmon fishing entirely for the second year in a row).

We were all taken by surprise this week when 300-500 giant Humboldt squid washed up on Long Beach near Tofino. Those things are supposed to be in the Sea of Cortez down in Baja, Mexico. They shocked the good people of San Diego last month when a mass of them washed ashore down there. How and why the Humboldt migrated up here no one knows.

The once rare giant sunfish, normally from the south, is now spotted fairly commonly in BC waters. Anchovies have moved into regions normally inhabited by herring. Humpback whales now have to migrate into the Beaufort Sea because the krill have moved north out of the Bering.

We're seeing these events with our very eyes and they're occuring over a span of years, not decades. Our ecological landscape is rapidly changing. Makes you wonder how long it will be until we forget the way it was around here even ten years ago. Makes you wonder what tomorrow will look like.