Climate Alarmist Warns: Fish Are the New Global Warming!

The Telegraph’s resident enviro loon Geoffrey Lean has come up with some new terrifying evidence for the existence of “global warming.”

No. Not surface air temperatures. They became totally irrelevant to the global warming debate when they stopped doing what they alarmists wanted them to do round about 1997.

As Geoff helpfully explains of the surface temperature record:

This is the most obvious indicator to humanity, since it records the conditions in which we live, but it is only one of several used by scientists – and not the most important of them.

Phew. Glad we sorted that one out. So what, er, is the new most important metric for global temperature rises, now that it’s not measured global temperature rises, our Geoff?

Well, apparently, it’s…..fish.

Sea temperatures around Britain, for example, have risen by 1.6 per cent – four times the global average – over the last quarter of century partly because they are relatively shallow, and partly because three of them (the Irish and North Seas and the English Channel) are partially enclosed. As a result, says Prof Callum Roberts of York University, “15 of the 36 species surveyed in the North East have shifted latitudes”, moving, on average, 300 km northwards.

Cod and haddock, for example, are now rarely found wild in British waters. They are being replaced by warmer water species like sea bass, hake, gurnard, red mullet and anchovies, while John Dory – once only found off Cornwall – has spread through the North Sea up to Scotland. Diets, however, have yet to change to match.

Even more dramatically, three bluefin tuna – a Mediterranean species – have been caught within 100 miles of the Arctic circle in what Prof Duncan MacKenzie of Denmark’s National Institute of Aquatic Resources called “the first scientifically confirmed presence of the species in East Greenland waters in 342 years”.

But, as several readers have unhelpfully pointed out in the comments below, this is nonsense on fins.

Problem number one: the absence in British waters of cod and haddock, as any fule kno, is the result of the massive overfishing caused since Britain ceded her fishing rights to the European Union.

Problem number two, as commenter Muttley notes:

Atlantic Bluefin tuna is not just a mediterranean species. Hence the full name.It was fished for regularly off the Yorkshire Coast untill the 1950’s, including a world record fish. They followed the Herring and Meckeral shoals. A record fish was even caught off Nova Scotia.

Problem number three, as Alb Einstein advises:

Please read about the Atlantic Multi-decadal oscillation – currently in its warm phase – hence the warm North Atlantic. It will switch now within around 5 years – and the N Atlantic will go cold.There is nothing fishy about this – it’s a natural cycle that has been going on for hundreds of years?!

Incidentally, Geoff, when I was down in Salcombe last week, I saw a grey seal on the beach at Soar Mill Cove, the first time I have seen such a beast in those parts in thirty years.

I wonder if you could point me in the direction of a tame marine biology department – you alarmists seem to have many at your disposal – prepared to tell me that this is near-certain confirmation that global warming is happening, man-made and more dangerous than ever.

Then with luck I can concoct a desperate article out of it, with a view either to securing a lucrative post as an Environment Correspondent, or maybe just flogging it to HuffPo, Salon, or Vice! and getting down with the dumb, young, lefty chicks who seem to like that kind of caring, sensitive, pseudo-scientific drivel.