Posted on 06/21/2005 8:59:24 AM PDT by InvisibleChurch
A new study of the weaning weights of California's elephant seal pups predicts that a 25-year trend of Pacific Ocean warming has ended.
That means that the second half of a 50-year cycle has begun to cool the northern Pacific. In addition, historical fish catch data indicates the ocean cooling trend is likely to last until about 2025.
Burney Le Boeuf and David Crocker (University of California, Santa Cruz) monitored the weaning weights of central California seal pups for 29 years, from 1975 to 2004. The ocean's temperatures generally increased, and the pups' weaning weights declined 21 percent over 24 years from the study's beginning until 2000.
The seal pups' weight decline coincided with an increase in their mothers' foraging time of 36 percent. A decline in the mother's own weights confirmed that fish were relatively scarce. After 1999, however, ocean temperatures began to decline, fish became more abundant and the pups' weaning weights abruptly began to rise. By 2004 the pups weaning weights had recovered to 90 percent of their 1975 weaning size. The previous shift toward warmer temperatures, which disadvantaged the California seal pups occurred in the mid-1970s. Researchers have begun to call the 50-year ocean cycle the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
During the PDO, ocean temperatures rise and fall, fish species wax and wane, and fish are caught in different places, but total ocean productivity remains stable.
What does it all mean? Seal pups are instructing us that even temperature trends as long as 25 years can mislead us about cause and effect in the Earth's climate -- which has been cycling constantly for at least the last million years, say observers.
Source: Dennis Avery, "Trust Seal Pups' Assessment of Climate," Investor's Business Daily, June 20, 2005; based upon: Burney Le Boeuf and Daniel E Crocker, "Ocean climate and seal condition," University of California, Santa Cruz, March, 28, 2005.
For study text:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/3/9
For more on Global Warming: Science:
http://eteam.ncpa.org/policy/Global_Warming/Science/
I wanna see California Puppies!!!
The bigger the better!
(Yes, I DO mean THOSE kind of puppies!)
HAHAHA
... Why ... A Canadian Club on the rocks !!
Well, the PDO is pretty commonly known.
It is a bit of a stretch to use it to try to attack the entire concept of global warming.
There are a variety of currents, oscillations etc. that impact climate. This is just one. There is also the NAO for one.
Oscillations are well-known and don't disprove global warming.
Oscillations and global warming are natural phenomena.
"Proving" or "disproving" such is meaningless.
Environmentalists worked the threat of the loss of the ozone between the 70s-90s to the point where no one is listening anymore after getting the govt to implement vehicle emissions inspection, doing away with the manufacture of spray cans, making movies scaring the bejesus out of the population, etc. Now, they're on the bandwagon again talking about the cooling of the oceans and already have a movie about the disruption of the Atlantic Ocean with "The Day After Tomorrow" starring Dennis Quaid, Sela Ward, & Jake Gyllenhaal. People should tell the story of about the little boy who cried "wolf" all the time and the resulting moral of the story.
So when are the sardines going to return to the Monterey/Carmel area?
RE: A new study of the weaning weights of California's elephant seal pups predicts that a 25-year trend of Pacific Ocean warming has ended.
A number of additional signs:
* Coldest, wettest and windiest spring in 30+ years (wettest since the 1890s).
* Salmon season in Santa Barbara longest in recent memory
* Deer were in upper pastures very early this year (in order to fatten up for onset of a very cold winter?)
I'll add that, our wet spring was not a result of an "El Ninoish" Pineapple Express type storm track, but due to a Siberian Express, that keeps pumping them down from the Bering Sea (in fact, we are wondering about rain on the 4th - this is supposed to be the dry season here ....).
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