A demersal or bottom-trawler drags a large net indiscriminately along the bottom seascape (saveourseas.org)

Even in the 1800s trawlers were aware that they were causing huge fish declines. Bottom-trawling spread around Britain from the 1820s, and as fish declined in numbers the inshore trawlers had to travel greater distances and increase their gear size to maintain their catch. By the 1880s they were calling for closing territorial waters to protect nursery and spawning grounds. However, the Royal Commission reports of 1866 and 1887 either disbelieved the fishermen, or simply failed to recommend restrictions. A model for the future.

Trawlers off the coast of Louisiana leave little of the bottom substrate untrawled (Wikipedia.org)

Bottom trawling of course spread around the world, leaving no suitable coast untouched. As inshore fisheries declined and EEZ limits extended to 200 miles, off-shore and deeper-water trawling continued to grow. When sea mounts were discovered and mapped, trawlers extended their reach to depths of 1500 meters. Such deep-water trawling continues, with an impact that is surely devastating though largely unknown.

The damage left by the pass of a single trawler through grass beds (oceana.org)

And yet everyone knows the problems associated with bottom-trawling, whether inshore or deep-water. It ploughs the bottom, removing its sediment, smoothing, radically changing the bottom seascape. It destroys ecosystems through the direct damage of the net, otter-boards and rock-hopper gear. It destroys ecosystems though its destruction and capture of non-target species. It decimates populations of target species through non-selective capture.

Bottom trawlers smooth out the seascape, changing the ecosystem (scientificamerican.com)

What can be done? Well, enter the Marine Stewardship Council. You are probably familiar with it, or at least with its blue logo indicating a fishery it has certified as sustainable. MSC was created in London in 1997, a joint effort of WWF and Unilever. In 1999 it became an independent non-profit organization.

Marine Stewardship Logo, promising the consumer a clear conscience (MSC.org)

Its rules for certification include the following: For a fisheries to be certified, fishing must continue indefinitely without over-exploiting resources. Productivity of the ecosystem must be preserved. All local, national and international laws must be upheld. And every company in the chain from boat to plate must be certified.

Between 2000 and 2004, MSC certified six fisheries, and the commercial benefits of certification began to be recognized. In 2006 WalMart announced that all fish it sold would be MSC certified by 2010. Whole Foods Market has gone the same route. So has Sainsbury’s, and Costco.

What better way to control, restrict, even prohibit bottom-trawling, which in no way meets the essential criteria required for certification? This looked very promising.

Instead, MSC began to certify bottom-trawled fisheries, mostly since 2011. Now certified are the fisheries for North Sea plaice, cod, haddock, and sole; New Zealand Blue whiting; Alaskan pollock in the Eastern Bering Sea (the largest single trawled fishery); and South African Hake, Barents Sea cod and haddock, Baltic cod, Iceland cod, North-west Atlantic shrimp and haddock. Others are in the pipeline.

Crew members opening a zipper in the net full of Alaskan Pollock on the F/V Ocean Hope 3 trawler. This fishery has been certified by MSC, but it shouldn’t be (alaska-in-pictures.com)

In 2011 National WWFs furiously denounced placing any bottom-trawled fish on the MSC list. Remember WWF helped found MSC in the first place. Greenpeace has also denounced it, as has the Pew environmental Group. And so have some of the very fisheries scientists who helped create the MSC.

MSC disagrees, as it proceeds to certify its 200th fisheries. But clearly it has radically loosened its rules for certification. One might be forgiven for thinking that once again the market place sets the rules instead of conservation.

We have not come very far from those disappointing Royal Commissions of 150 and 130 years ago.

There simply is no acceptable justification for bottom trawling. And MSC has failed us.

Belize has banned all bottom trawling within its 200 mile EEZ, a rare exception (uncharteredatolls.com)

Revolution, the new movie by Rob Stewart, (therevolutionmovie.com)

He describes the death of coral reefs, the threat of ocean acidification, the endless use of carbon fuels, the destruction caused by the Alberta Tar Sands, the impact of deforestation, the increase in coastal dead zones, and the occurrence of ‘death by climate change’. He joins and films the growing recognition by people, particularly young people, that action is needed now.

Rob Stewart, film maker and now activist (therevolutionmovie.com)

If you are new to some of this, then Revolution is worth seeing. It certainly has heart. It has won best documentary and audience favorite documentary at film festivals, and it is attempting to have a life in commercial theaters now.

Scattered through the film are some truly unusual and beautiful sequences – a spectacular and poisonous cuttlefish, delicate seahorses clicking their way around a branch of coral, Madagascar lemurs running in their bizarre sideways gallop, reminders of all that we stand to lose.

But a film about saving the planet is the hardest of all to make. The topic is huge, the possibilities for enticing narrative are very limited, the target audience difficult to identify, and the opportunities for depth and insight are limited. Even Al Gore’s famous film Inconvenient Truth struggled with the same problems.

Sharkwater, Stewart’s first movie (sharkwater.com)

Better to focus, I think, on an issue that perhaps represents the whole, but makes story telling possible, and allows time to dig into the issue. Stewart’s first film, Sharkwater, was like that, showing us the beauty of sharks and the ugly practice and devastating impact of shark-finning. It helped, and continues to help, in the efforts to regulate and ban shark-finning, even though the harvest goes on, and sharks remain under threat of extinction. Limited in scope, it is an effective film.

At the end of Revolution Stewart films some of the young people protesting the formal, closed meetings of the climate change conference, COP 16, held at Cancun in 2010. Their concerns were real, justified, and ignored, and emotions ran high.

COP 16 had many thousands of delegates, and no impact (cop16.com)

This was just another protest, however, and not the beginning of any bottom-up revolution. The world continues with business-as-usual, unconvinced that catastrophe lies ahead, irritated with unpragmatic environmentalists.

Except that the predicted human upheaval and global insecurity associated with climate change are now worrying military and intelligence communities, as well as The World Bank. They are considering the probable yet somehow unthinkable consequences of the global temperature rising by 4 degrees, which is where we are headed unless major reductions are made in our CO2 emissions. This is an odd kind of hope – top-down ‘revolution’ is hardly an attractive prospect.

Placard at COP16 – frustration with inertia

The best advice remains, as Will Rogers once said, and Bill McKibbon quotes concerning our current carbon-fueled rush toward a 4 degree increase: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Cape Fur Seals breed on the coast of Namibia, where the annual ‘hunt’ removes about 90,000 seals, most of them pups (africareview.com)

The Canadian government has approved a cull of 70,000 grey seals over the next four years to protect cod (guardian.co.uk)

Seals of course eat fish. As opportunistic feeders, they’ll eat any fish they can catch.

When those fish decline in numbers or fail to recover when fishing is curtailed, a natural response has been to blame the seals.

Culling seals to protect fish populations of interest to human fishermen has been going on for more than a hundred years – California Sea Lions, Ringed and Grey Seals in the Baltic Sea, Harbor Seals in both BC and along US East Coast, Grey Seals on the US East Coast, Iceland, Norway, and the UK, and currently Cape Fur Seals in Namibia. In all cases seal populations experienced huge declines.

Culling, as opposed to harvesting, refers to killing the seals without intent to market them in some way. Though the market for seal parts is now close to non-existent, Canada considers its annual Harp Seal hunt to be harvesting, not culling.

Grey seals on Sable Island: are they really responsible for the failure of cod to recover? (truenorthimages.com)

But have the culls resulted in increased fish stocks for human fishermen? Oddly enough, nobody actually knows! There simply are no data, no experiments, nothing to indicate whether culling is effective or not. If anything, almost all of the examples suggest that no particular impact occurred on the target fish species.

Is there then any evidence we can point to indicating an effect of culling? This is of current concern, for Canada has approved a cull of Grey Seals to encourage the recovery of cod, and the Baltic States are considering a cull for the same reasons.

Fishermen want the cull, politicians are sympathetic, and marine scientists are unanimous in opposing culling. This is a familiar stand-off. What’s needed is evidence.

And now there is some, and it illustrates just how complicated ecosystem dynamics are.

Sable Island is an arc of sand on the Scotian Shelf, where Grey Seals breed in large numbers, in a region where cod were once abundant (oceantrack’org)

It involves cod. Following the moratorium on fishing North Atlantic Cod following the collapse of stocks in the early 1990s, everyone assumed the stocks would recover. They didn’t. But Grey Seal numbers exploded to around 400,000, particularly those breeding on Sable Island on the Scotian Shelf, near one of the past major cod stocks. That seems to indicate that seals have suppressed cod recovery, and therefore culling ought to help.

475 ships have wrecked on Sable Island since the 17th Century. Feral horses are the only permanent residents (getimage.php)

Instead the story goes like this. When the Scotian Shelf populations of cod and haddock, both large bottom predators, crashed from overfishing in the early 90s, the result was a major restructuring of the food web, a ‘regime change’ of the sort we have now learned to expect to occur. With the loss of the cod and haddock, planktivorous fish like herring, capelin and sand lance, as well as macro-invertebrates like Northern Shrimp and Snow Crabs became abundant instead – hugely so in some cases, and they have supported alternative fisheries. A new and stable balance of species seemed to have developed, with cod and haddock unrecovered. Grey Seals numbers increased greatly during this time.

Herring exploded in numbers, but have now crashed (fisherycrisis.com)

But this was not in fact a stable system. The biomass of fish in the system increased to an estimated 10 million tons, where carrying capacity is estimated to be less than half of that amount. The fish ran out of food – the zooplankton abundance crashed, the herring and capelin starved, and their populations crashed.

And then, with the herring and capelin gone as predators on cod and haddock larvae, cod and haddock have begun to recover. Particularly haddock. A return to the earlier food web appears to be underway, though how far it gets is unknown, for of course so much else is also involved, such as the impact of climate change, pollution, and continued fishing.

Cod show signs of some recovery (fisherycrisis.com)

Haddock recovery is greater (fisherycrisis.com)

The really good news is that ‘regime changes’ can reverse back to what previously existed. And in this case, in this ecosystem, the evidence indicates that Grey Seals, though obviously eating fish, are not responsible for preventing the recovery of the cod over the past two decades.

Since culling seals probably has no impact on the recovery of overfished populations, decisions to cull them anyway are then political, disregard science, and are so unfortunate.

Grey Seals, Sable Island, waiting to be culled (theglobeandmail.com)

Lawren Harris painted Baffin Island around 1931. This is a summer impression of the north end of the island, the fifth largest in the world (artcountrycanada.com)

The question is not whether there should be any fishing at all – such environmental idealism now has little influence in our real world – but that the fishing needs to be sustainable. Vast potential fisheries will open up as the Arctic ice thins and recedes with the warming climate, but how will the usual overfishing be prevented?

The Inuvialuit of Canada’s Western Arctic have dealt with this question by getting the Federal Government in Ottawa to declare the Beaufort Sea off limits to commercial fisheries, at least for now. Meanwhile more than 2000 scientists, mostly from the Arctic coastal countries, have signed an open letter calling for zero commercial fishing until the changing ecology of the sea is understood.

Is some optimism therefore justified? The pressures of commercial fishing suggest it isn’t.

Russian trawlers at Murmansk, the main Russian port on the Barents Sea (barentsobserver.com).

To start with, Arctic fish populations have not been in any pristine condition for quite a long time, for catch data from 1950 to 2008 were radically under-reported. About 75 times more fish were caught than the various nations reported – a remarkable total of around 950,000 tons. The main offender was the Soviet Union/Russia, reporting a commercial catch of 12,700 tons instead of the 770,000 tons actually caught. The US and Canada acknowledged subsistence fishing by their coastal native communities, but each reported catches of zero instead of a more accurate 90,000 tons.

And of course the pressure to fish continues to build. Canada’s first Arctic commercial fishery has recently developed in the coastal waters around Baffin Island – in the jurisdiction of Nunavut. The fishery is for northern populations of Greenland Halibut, also known as turbot.

Greenland Halibut, or turbot, is a bottom dwelling cold water species that will shift further north as sea temperatures warm (sirena.dk)

Greenland Halibut grow slowly but live long in cold water (marlin.ac.uk)

The Nunavut communities need jobs, and the fish appear to be plentiful. More vessels, both inshore gill-netters and deeper-water trawlers, are entering the fishery. Quotas are rising and the fishery is expanding. There are calls for a deep-water port in northern Baffin Island for the trawlers to off-load so they don’t have to go to southern Greenland to do so. It all looks like a success story.

But it isn’t. In fact it has all the features of the boom phase of a boom-and-bust fishery, the sort we have endured over and over again around the world over the past century. It is all too familiar and will, as always, be difficult to resolve.

For instance, we don’t know at what age or size the fish become sexually mature, and we don’t know how fast – or slowly – they grow, or how long they live. How can we manage the fishery in such ignorance? We can’t.

Gill-netters are more selective than trawlers, and catch larger (and many fewer fish (from Anna Olafsdottir’s Powerpoint at scibd.com)

Trawlers catch 3-4 million fish and 5-6 thousand tons of them annually, much more than do the gill-netters (from Anna Olafsdottir’s Powerpoint (scribd.com)

The conflict between gill-netters and trawlers is heating up, with the gill-netters upset by the growing intrusion of the trawlers. And they should be. Fewer than 15% of caught fish should be less than 45cm long – the major regulation in place to try to protect the fishery – and most trawlers far exceed this. Because trawlers take smaller fish than the more selective gill-netters, they catch many more fish to meet their quota.

Regulation of the fishery is a responsibility of the DFO of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. This is not an incompetent organization, but the ruling Harper government has so reduced the funding of DFO that no-one is available anymore to do the work. As a result, existing regulations are not enforced, and new ones are not developed.

Collateral damage: Greenland Sharks are the most northern of sharks, grow to about 6 meters long, are considered ‘near threatened’ on IUCN’s Red List – and are worrisome bycatch of the Greenland Halibut fishery (biologybiozine.com)

Solutions exist – support the gill-netters, restrict the trawlers, gather fisheries data, limit the expansion of the fishing fleet, support the coastal communities, and at least remember the precautionary principle. None of this is impossible, but will take community leadership and involvement.

So what do we have? A number of nations are about to compete aggressively for opening resources in the Arctic Ocean; the marine ecosystem is changing in ways we don’t yet understand; coastal fisheries are expanding yet lack meaningful regulations; coastal communities face uncertain futures and are in need of access to commercial fishing; international agreements on how to deal with any such problems don’t exist; and the unreported fishing of the recent past has had an unknown impact on current fish populations.

What we have at the moment is familiar chaos. We know that the Arctic is not a productive, resilient marine ecosystem, but we are treating it as if it is.

Certainly we are capable of learning from our many past mistakes. It still is not too late to ensure our Arctic exploitation is sustainable, and not just business-as-usual.

We can do better this time.

Currently we are seeing too many successful efforts at higher government levels in both the US and Canada to limit and censor discussion of climate change.

In the US, apart from the refusal by the Republican Party in Congress to even address issues of climate change, the censorship has been at the state level. For instance last July the Virginia General Assembly agreed to the removal of all references to sea level rise and climate change from a commissioned study on coastal Virginia. About the same time, the North Carolina legislature insisted that a bill related to coastal development regulations be based only on historical records, rejecting any reference to predictions of sea level rise. And then in Texas state legislators made it illegal for state planners and zoning officials even to mention climate change or rising sea levels.

A recent report on the impact of rising sea levels in Galveston Bay estuary on the coast of Texas was censored, removing reference to rising sea levels. (rawstory.com)

In Canada, it is actually worse. When the Conservative Harper Government came to power in 2008 they began to muzzle their own scientists. Scientists could publish their research, but they could not talk to the media about it. This censorship has grown to include discussion of Arctic climate change, polar bear protection, tar sands damage to the environment, and even reasons for the decline in sockeye salmon on the BC coast.

Canadian government scientists protested government actions in Ottawa in summer 2012 (therecord.com)

Last summer, 2000 Canadian government scientists actually held a protest in Ottawa, lamenting ‘the death of evidence’ and surprising everyone since scientists are not renowned as activists. Theirs was a response not only to muzzling, but also to the extraordinary attack by the Harper government on its own federally-funded labs involved in environmental research: the closing of the world famous Experimental Lakes Area as well as the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Lab are breath-taking examples of government cynicism. The Harper Government would like to see its support of the tar sands, its development of pipelines, its plans for Arctic development, and its management of fisheries all remain unexamined and uncriticized, free from the inquiring research of scientists or the glare of media interest.

Closing the Experimental Lakes Area in Canada is an absurd political decision by the Harper government. (wildernesscommittee.org)

So is closing the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Lab at Eureka, Nunavut, at 80 degrees latitude (pearl.candac..ca)

And now, most recently, US and Canadian scientists working on a joint US-Canada Arctic research project were required to sign sweeping confidentiality agreements – an arrangement rejected by at least some of the US scientists.

The muzzling of scientists, the unfunding of inconvenient research, the censoring of commissioned reports, the passage of laws restricting even the use of the appropriate words – altogether, this is lousy news. Not surprisingly, criticism and ridicule in the national and international media have been ineffective.

Of course this a serious abuse of power, and such disdain for evidence erodes our democracies. Given what’s at stake, it is also very dangerous.

Famous writers have written seriously scary books about this sort of thing.

The Great Barrier Reef, managed well since 1994, remains threatened by pollution, warming seas and now coal and natural gas facilities at its southern end (bayrun.com.au)

The GBR has suffered stress from the usual suspects for decades – overfishing, mining, Crown-of-Thorns starfish plagues, run-off from adjacent mainland coastal farms. Now add to those the coral bleaching and intense cyclones of recent years associated with climate change, as well as the looming devastating impact of ocean acidification. Not surprisingly, half the coral cover has been lost or damaged since the 1980s.

Coral bleaching has killed and damaged corals on the GBR just as it has on reefs around the world (scienceonline.org)

The World Heritage Committee based its threat on the recent developments at Gladstone and nearby Curtis Island, at the southern end of the reef. Gladstone has become the largest center for coal export in Australia – there are huge seams of coal running north-south in the eastern part the country adjacent to the reef. The coal is sent where you would expect, to Japan, China, South Korea and India. Now the port of Gladstone is being dredged even deeper to handle ever more and larger ships.

The eastern part of Australia is rich in coal resources (Haliburton.com).

That’s part of UNESCO’s concern.

The other part involves coal seam gas, gas that is or can be extracted during the coal mining process. Curtis Island, lying close to Gladstone, is actually part of the GBR World Heritage Area. However, it is now under extraordinary development to liquefy the coal seam gas to liquid natural gas (LNG), and send it off in refrigerated tankers to consuming nations where it will rendered back into natural gas. The liquid takes up 1/600th the volume of the gas, so the advantage of shipping it as liquid is obvious.

The World Heritage Committee report (p20-22) calls for these developments to cease and for a review of their impact. Since no actual sanctions by UNESCO are possible, beyond downgrading of the status of the Reef, what kind of response can we expect?

The Queensland Government has now submitted a defensive response, promising an independent review of the the Port of Gladstone, and commenting on existing water quality improvement programs, research initiatives, the GBR zoning plan, the Coral Sea reserve, and the recently implemented national carbon tax. The number of gas ports under development will be limited, but they will still be in the World Heritage Area.

However, as the Premier of Queensland said early on, ‘We are in the coal business’. That hasn’t changed.

So there will be no reconsideration, no precautionary plan, no delay in port or LNG development. The long-term threat to the reef is dismissed.

Is this anyway to treat a World Heritage Area? Liquid Natural Gas facilities under development on Curtis Island (Greenpeace.org)

We shouldn’t be surprised. Extract and sell is the mantra of resource exploitation in Canada, the US, Africa, South America, Asia – and Australia. The exported coal and LNG from Gladstone and Curtis Island will no doubt support the Queensland economy, providing jobs and infrastructure. Unfortunately, given the other stresses that already exist, there isn’t any reason to think that a severely damaged GBR will be able to recover.

The tension between extracting resources and conserving natural ecosystems is familiar to us everywhere. You would think one place where conservation trumps extraction would be The Great Barrier Reef. Apparently not.

Will anyone listen to the outcry in defense of the Great Barrier Reef? If you would like to add your voice, visit: ‘Save the Reef’ It could only help.

So worth protecting (ngm.nationalgeographic.com)

Over the past few decades global capture fisheries have added most of the large fish species of any commercial value to the list of missing apex predators. Among those that are still with us, an unexpected response has occurred.

In a comparison of 37 commercially fished stocks, the majority matured earlier and at a smaller size. The effect is clearest in heavily fished populations.

The size of first spawners of Arctic cod has declined, as it has in many other heavily fished species (nature.org).

Is this a genetic change, an evolutionary shift towards smaller size-at-age due to the selective harvesting of the oldest, largest and fast-growing individuals? If it is, it is a dramatic change, and will be difficult to reverse.

It could as well be a response to climate change, with physiological declines in growth rates occurring due to increasing sea temperatures and decreasing oxygen in warmer oceans.

At the same time, we wonder why fish that we have overfished don’t recover when we stop harvesting them. With their huge reproductive potential, fish surely should be resilient, and recover quickly. Famously, though, the cod of the northwest Atlantic have not recovered from their collapse.

The famous graph of exploitation of cod in the northwest Atlantic, leading up the moratorium in Canada in 1992. (Wikipedia.org)

Why not? What stops or delays recovery? And what have we actually learned about the impact of the damage we have done to marine ecosystems?

In fact we have learned quite a lot. We have learned that the responses of an ecosystem to the loss of apex predators are likely to be complex and convoluted, and often unpredictable. Shifts occur within the community of species, involving changes in mortality rates, growth rates, competitive interactions, and prey-predator relationships. (Two fine reviews worth reading were published in Science: Estes et al, July 15, 2011; and Garcia et al, March 2, 2012)

Pandalus borealis, the northern shrimp, became abundant after the collapse of cod, and is in part responsible for the lack of cod recovery. It is also the sweetest shrimp you would ever want to eat. (biology.com)

We have also learned that sufficiently perturbed ecosystems break abruptly into alternative stable states that are usually of lower trophic status and of far less commercial value. Coral reefs have become algal covered rubble. Jellyfish have replaced fish as top consumers.

We have learned that trophic degradation is an inevitable outcome of eliminating or radically reducing apex predators.

And we have learned that there are limits to resilience.

Iconic cod are showing signs of recovery in the northwest Atlantic – not enough to lift the moratorium, but enough to suggest hope lives (ctv.news0

Out of these fisheries disasters has comes some decent advice. For instance, fishing pressure should be spread over more species and sizes, probably netting more fish, but reducing the risk of wiping out a species or restructuring the community. Biomass drops but not biodiversity,
a more ecosystem-based approach.

But also we are aware that the only truly reasonable response is to try to restore the apex predators. If we don’t, biodiversity will decline, trophic degradation will continue, ecosystem phase shifts will occur, and the current global mass extinction will just continue. The world becomes ever more diminished.

Cod captured by trawler in 1949 were often huge. Nevermore. (heritage.nf.ca)

Does it help to understand the reasons for a catastrophe, if there seems to be little chance of preventing or recovering from it?

The answer must be yes. If recovery from the catastrophe is even remotely possible, we can encourage it. And we can use our knowledge to mitigate the impact of other catastrophes-in-waiting.

Given the Congress he has been dealt, there is little that he can actually do that requires Congressional approval. But those working at other levels of government should feel reassured.

And there are critical initiatives at other levels, planning various efforts to mitigate climate change, not just adapt to it with fortifications.

The principle of cap-and -trade is simple. Making it work in the real world can be very complicated (climatepedia.org).

Both the State California and the Province of Quebec have now instituted cap-and-trade policies to try to curb carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade may not be everyone’s preferred approach to mitigation, but it is a start, and the two jurisdictions are attempting a concerted effort – in itself an important event.

Governors of some states – New York and New Jersey, so battered by Hurricane Sandy come to mind – are determined to protect their coasts from the predicted greater storms accompanying climate change, and they are also exploring mitigation, seeking ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Hurricane Sandy was the largest hurricane yet seen (telegraph.co.uk)

But what if a state governor or provincial premier provides no leadership, or even worse, like Governor Rick Scott of Florida, still denies that climate change is human-caused? The four counties of southeast Florida provide us with a remarkable model for response.

The counties are Monroe (includes Key West and the Everglades), Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Five million people live there, responsible for 37% of the state economy. Political leaders from both political parties have formed the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, ratified by all four counties in late 2009 and early 2010. Last month they held their 4th annual meeting.

Using the best science available, they are responding to what is already happening and preparing for what’s ahead. Rising sea level, salt-water intrusion into underground aquifers and increased violence of storms bashing the coast are their major concerns. And they should be concerned – all the maps of rising sea level indicate that southeast Florida is one of the most vulnerable regions in the US.

Southeast Florida is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise

Although adaptive engineering (raised and rerouted roads, pumps on canals, protected buffer areas to create resilience) understandably dominate their plans, they also plan to reduce carbon emissions and to create and encourage rapid public transit. Most importantly, though, they show us that significant action can occur at the county level.

Probably the most effective of all the initiatives are occurring at the city level. The World Mayors Council on Climate Change emphasizes initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. At their meeting three months ago, chaired by the mayor of Seoul, they said the appropriate things, but many of the 260 cities represented are small, and real action is limited. Still, the Council is an important one if only for political reasons.

The most impressive global organization though is C40 Cities Climate Change Leadership Group. Membership in C40 depends on the existence of actual action to mitigate carbon emissions. The mayors of the 63 included megacities and innovator cities share efforts to reduce carbon emissions, providing models for other cities and national governments. This month Vancouver, Oslo, Venice and Washington,D.C. were invited to join.

As NYC Mayor Bloomberg points out, city government has the ability to be ‘nimble’, able to take action quickly.

Adaptation to climate change of course remains essential everywhere on the planet. But mitigation of carbon emissions is not a futile hope. President Obama may not be able to deliver Congressional action to reduce carbon emissions, but he can encourage nimbleness at the state, county and city level. His endorsement can only help.

Now we have to find some way to encourage Canada’s Prime Minister Harper to say something helpful.

Pacific Red Lionfish invaded the US southeast coast and the Caribbean about a decade ago, and they have now successfully invaded the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, including the coasts of Belize and Texas. They are most common on coral reefs, but they are generalists, and turn up in grass beds, mangroves and rocky caves as well, down to depths of 200 meters.

The Pacific Red Lionfish perhaps looks like seaweed, but in any case it is unfamiliar to small Atlantic fish who are easy prey (ucgs.org).

The invasion probably started from a dumped aquarium on the US south east coast sometime in the 1980s. Now it is the single best example of a successful invasion of a marine fish species. We’re accustomed to invasive marine plants and invertebrates, but fish species are rarely successful. This one is.

Lionfish still had a limited distribution in 2001 (insights.wri.org)

By 2007 they were common in the Bahamas and parts of the northern Caribbean (insights.wri.org)

By 2011, lionfish had spread throughout the Caribbean.

For a continually updated map of the invasion, check the US Geological Survey website.

With its elaborate fins, stripes and spines, this is one very beautiful fish. The tips of its spines concentrate a powerful neurotoxic venom that protects it from most predators – including any human who handles it too casually. By the time it is an adult it about 45cm (20 inches) long, able to reproduce a few times each month all year long.

The beautiful predator (luis rocha nytimes.org)

It is a slow-swimming predator, eating fish up to about half its size. At the high densities it is now reaching in many communities on many reefs, prey species are declining by 90% or more. The degraded reefs of the Caribbean need an abundance of herbivores if they are ever to recover. so the invasion of lionfish is a further catastrophe in the sad litany of catastrophes that have converted so many of the reefs to algal rubble.

In the Indo-Pacific, large predatory fish like eels, sharks and groupers somehow manage to eat lionfish and help to keep their numbers under control. In the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico we’ve fished out most large fish already, and those that remain are learning to avoid them, not how to eat them without being stunned.

No wonder it is such a successful invader – an efficient and cryptic, with a rapid growth rate and huge reproductive potential, and pretty well free of predators.

So what’s ahead? Either lionfish will become so abundant that they will eat up all the available prey, wreck the available ecosystems, and then starve – a miserable outcome to say the least.

Or we can eat them.

This is an astonishing development. Everywhere in the Caribbean, in the Gulf of Mexico and around Florida we are now encouraged to hunt them down by spear, line or trap. Fishing derbies have emerged in many places. There are no restrictions – just catch and kill as many as you can.

What about those spines and their neurotoxins? Internet videos show you how to handle the fish and clip off the spines. What’s left is free of the toxins.

How to spear a Lionfish: Easily done since it swims slowly, but still be very careful. (seabelize.org)

And lionfish are not just safe to eat, but they are tasty. Again, the internet offers lots of advice on pan frying, stewing, grilling and filleting the fish.

So go forth and kill. As many as you can. We may never have an opportunity like this again – a chance to exploit a new fishery, free of any regulations, a last echo of the old days when all fish were superabundant and we were not.

And if you can’t go killing lionfish, ask your restaurant to include them. This is not a trivial matter – if we don’t stop them, lionfish will wreck whatever is left of the precarious reefs in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Almost all the glaciers on the planet are in retreat – we’ve known this for years – but still the images are impressive, and those of the collapse are new. The glacier lying before us appears to deflate, leaving a pile of dirty rubble on the ground.

Huge icebergs break off from the Greenland ice sheet, while the glaciers retreat at an ever faster rate (chasingice.com)

Chasing Ice has played in theaters in many North American cities throughout the autumn and will continue to do so through much of the winter. James Balog, who made this movie, thinks – hopes? – that seeing his images will make climate change appear more real to us, and maybe even prod us into action.

Will anyone not already convinced of the reality of a warming planet go to see the movie? I hope so.

Melting glaciers in Tibet will result in short-term flooding and then long-term drought in China and northern India (the hindu.com)

Chasing Ice isn’t quite a great movie, though it is long-listed for an Academy Award. It lacks the rich data and fine graphics of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth that upset so many people. It also lacks the human drama of Ric O’Barry’s Oscar-winning The Cove. But it is interesting enough, and some of it is quite arresting. It is worth seeing.

If we experience evidence of global warming directly, as many did with the wave surge of Hurricane Sandy, perhaps then we will be convinced to act. In Chasing Ice we follow one man’s obsession with showing some of the other evidence of global warming. Like most documentary movies it was made to try to disturb us, to engage us more emotionally.

Seeing it happen on film is not the same as experiencing it, of course. On the other hand, watching a glacier retreat in real time is less than a gripping experience. Seeing it in time-lapse turns it into the real drama that it is.

This movie can only help.

Even a single picture can have a powerful impact: in 2012 the Arctic ice cap melted further than ever on record, to half of what it was 20 years ago (wunderground.org)