Roger Warburton: What lobsters tell us about climate change

From ecoRI News

If present trends continue, by the end of the century, the cost of global warming could be as high as $1 billion annually for Providence County, R.I., alone, according to data from a 2017 research paper. That’s about $1,600 per person per year. Every year.

But, before we talk about the future, let’s discuss the economic damage that has already occurred in Rhode Island because of warming temperatures.

Like rich Bostonians, Rhode Island’s lobsters have moved to Maine. In 2018, Maine landed 121 million pounds of lobsters, valued at more than $491 million, and up 11 million pounds from 2017. It wasn’t always so.

Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, has noted that lobsters have migrated north as climate change warms the ocean. In Rhode Island, for instance, days when the water temperature of Narragansett Bay is 80 degrees or higher are becoming more common. From 1960 to 2015, the bay’s mean surface water temperatures rose by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, according to research data.

A 2018 research paper Pershing co-authored said ocean temperatures have risen to levels that are favorable for lobsters off northern New England and Canada but inhospitable for them in southern New England. The research found that warming waters, ecosystem changes, and differences in conservation efforts led to the simultaneous collapse of the lobster fishery in southern New England and record-breaking landings in the Gulf of Maine.

He told Science News last year that with rocky bottoms, kelp and other things that lobsters love, climate change has turned the Gulf of Maine into a “paradise for lobsters.”

However, in the formerly strong lobster fishing grounds of Rhode Island, the situation is grim. South of Cape Cod, the lobster catch fell from a peak of about 22 million pounds in 1997 to about 3.3 million pounds in 2013, according to the 2018 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lobsters provide interesting lessons on the impact of the climate crisis.

A conservation program called V-notching helped protect Maine’s lobster population. “Starting a similar conservation program earlier in southern New England would have helped insulate them from the hot water they’ve experienced over the last couple of decades,” Malin Pinsky, a marine scientist with Rutgers University, told Boston.com two years ago.

Rhode Island’s lack of conservation efforts in the face of the growing climate crisis contributed to the collapse of its lobster fishery. Doing nothing or too little in the face of a changing climate can be economically devastating.

Another existing, and growing, threat to the economic health of Rhode Island comes from Lyme disease, which has increased by more than 300 percent across the Northeast since 2001. A changing climate is a big reason why. There is a growing body of evidence showing that climate change may affect the incidence and prevalence of certain vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, malaria, dengue, and West Nile fever, according to a 2018 study.

Chronic Lyme disease is more widespread and more serious than generally realized. There are some 20,000 cases annually in the Northeast and each averages about $4,400 in medical costs. Most Lyme disease patients who are diagnosed and treated early can fully recover. But, an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent suffer from chronically persistent and disabling symptoms. The number of such chronic cases may approach 30,000 to 60,000 annually, according to a 2018 white paper.

As the lobsters and the ticks vividly demonstrate, prevention is cheaper than cure. The longer we wait, the more painful, and expensive, the consequences will be.

The aforementioned 2017 study Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States by world-renown economists and climate scientists projects the impact of climate change for every county in the United States. The results for Rhode Island and its neighbors are summarized in the map to the right, which depicts the estimated economic damage, in millions of dollars annually for each county in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

The data make clear that the economic damage will not be uniformly distributed. Some counties, such as Providence County, will be hit much harder than others. It also may seem that the southern counties will suffer much less. But that isn’t quite true, as graph below shows. The damage per person per year is projected to be substantial.

The total economic damage to Rhode Island, by 2080, could result in a 2 percent decline in gross domestic product (GDP). To put that in context, during the Great Recession of 2008-2010, there was only one year of GDP decline: minus 2.5 percent in 2009. By 2010, GDP had bounced back to positive growth, at 2.6 percent.

Therefore, the impact of a 2 percent hit to Rhode Island’s GDP from the climate crisis could look like the recession of 2009, only becoming permanent, continuing year after year. Also, it won’t all happen in 2080, the damage will continually get worse.

The economic damage is projected to come from more frequent and intense storms; sea-level rise; increased rainfall resulting in more flooding; higher temperatures, especially in the summer; drought that leads to lower crop yields; increased crime.

In addition, essential infrastructure will be impacted, including water supplies and water treatment facilities. Ecosystems, such as forests, rivers, lakes and wetlands, will also suffer, and that will impact human quality of life.

In the coming two weeks, we will describe how each Rhode Island county faces different levels of the above threats. As a result, each county needs to develop appropriate mitigation strategies.

The damages from the climate crisis will place major strains on public-sector budgets. However, much of the economic damage will be felt by individuals and families through poorer health, rising energy costs, increased health-care premiums, and decreased job security.

As always, prevention is cheaper, and more effective, than cure. Inaction on climate change will be the most expensive policy option.

The lobsters should teach us a valuable lesson: conservation measures based on sound scientific and economic principles could have helped mitigate losses caused by the climate crisis.

Roger Warburton, Ph.D., is a Newport ,R.I., resident. He can be reached at rdh.warburton@gmail.com.

Don Pesci: In the pandemic, separating science and political science

Treating a patient on a ventilator in a hospital’s intensive-care unit

VERNON, Conn.

How scientific is science in the matter of Coronavirus?

There’s science and there’s political science. The one thing we do not want in any confluence of the two is confusion and mass hysteria, which can best be avoided by observing this rule: Politicians should decide political matters and medical scientists should decide medical matters. Occasionally, politicians decide that mass fright can better able convince the general population than rational argument.  

The answer to the above question is simple: In the case of new viruses, science, as defined above, must be silent. There can be no “scientific” view of Coronavirus because it is a new phenomenon, the recent arrival of a stranger on the medical block. Concerning Coronavirus, there are, properly speaking, multiple views of different scientists, many of whom will disagree with each other on important points.

Does Coronavirus remain on surfaces for long periods? A couple of months ago, we were told by politicians, relaying the news from “science”, that hard surfaces were repositories of Coronavirus, and that contamination from hard surfaces was as likely as person-to-person contamination. That notion has withered on the vine now that we know Coronavirus is most often spread person to person.

Do adults spread Coronavirus to children, or are children the Bloody Marys? This is an important datum because if children, who are much less likely than adults to die or be seriously ill from Coronavirus, spread the virus to adults, the wholesale closing of schools might be a protective measure.

But if adults pass the virus to children, the current view of many scientists, remediation efforts would be far different.  We are told that love covers a multitude of sins including, Agatha Christie advises us, murder. The word “science” misapplied covers, we have seen, a multitude of political sins.If we can learn from our past mistakes, we need not carry our mistakes into the future.

If the question is, “Have politicians in the Northeast made a mistake in trusting to some scientists?” the question is wrongly put. It’s not quite as simple as that. It will always be better to take advice from the horse’s mouth rather than from the horse’s posterior. But in the process, politicians must not allow differing scientists to determine the political course of a state.

Politicians, in the face of a pandemic, should not stop being politicians. That is what we have seen in Northeast states, where Coronavirus has dug in its heels. Here legislative activity has been shut down, and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has been festooned with extraordinary – some would say unconstitutional -- powers.

Like his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, Lamont has resorted to state-wide business shutdowns and sequestration. But inducing a long-lived recession in Connecticut, sequestration and data collection are not curative, however “necessary” they seem to be to some politicians who are masters in the art of spreading fear.

A vaccine may cure Coronavirus. What is called herd-immunity may reduce infestation.  Certain people, in many cases younger people, catch the virus and develop a natural immunity, foreshortening the mass of people fatally exposed to the virus. We know that Coronavirus has spread like a wildfire in nursing homes, because clients in nursing homes are older and subject to other infirmities that in their cases have dramatically increased the fatality rate in Connecticut and New York.

“Science” – real science – warned us of this at the very beginning of the infestation. We knew of a certainty that older people with compromised systems were especially vulnerable. So, knowing this, why did not the governors of Connecticut and New York direct more of their resources to nursing homes? That is a question that must be answered by our “savior politicians.”

Home sequestration, we have been told, helps to flatten the Coronavirus curve. What can this mean if not that sequestration prolongs the time during which the sequestered may in the future be exposed to the virus? Flattening the curve is not curative. Ask any scientist.

The Coronavirus pandemic has been Hell, but it is very important that we should not return from Hell with empty hands.

In Connecticut more than 60 percent of deaths “associated with” Coronavirus occurred in nursing homes; the figure is similar in New York. Cuomo recently acknowledged he was surprised to discover that a sizable majority of people in New York infected with Coronavirus had been sequestered at home. His surprise is surprising.

We are told that business re-opening will occur in Connecticut in three stages, somewhat like a rocket on its way to the moon. But surely business opening should be determined with reference to sections of Connecticut that have been severely or mildly affected by Coronavirus, and the distribution of Coronavirus throughout the state has been mapped by Johns Hopkins University ever since the virus penetrated the United States from its point of origin, Wuhan, China.

These are political decisions that should have been codified in law by a quiescent General Assembly. Political science – yes, there is such a thing – would tell us that we no longer enjoy in Connecticut a republican, small “r”, constitutional government. Instead, Governor Lamont has become our homegrown Xi Jinping, China’s communist tyrant who has now provided Connecticut both with a deadly virus and PPEs, the means of thwarting some of its effects.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.