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Fish Seek Cooler Waters, Leaving Some Fishermen’s Nets Empty

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Fish Seek Cooler Waters, Leaving Some Fishermen’s Nets Empty

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Fish have been moving north to cooler waters, as the ocean temperature rises, causing the fishermen in the south to have empty nets. Two thirds of the marine species have broadened their range. Fishing regulations are unable to keep up with this change. The fishermen are still confined to certain areas within the seas and cannot extend their territory to catch more fish. This has increased tensions between states and recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen. However, fishery managers are trying to take into account the changing fish locations. Many scientists want to move to an ecosystem-based management.The regulators must act fast in order to keep up with marine life and ocean temperatures.

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POINT JUDITH, R.I. - There was a time when whiting were plentiful in the waters of Rhode Island Sound, and Christopher Brown pulled the fish into his long stern trawler by the bucketful.

"We used to come right here and catch two, three, four thousand pounds a day, sometimes 10," he said, sitting at the wheel of the Proud Mary - a 44-footer named, he said, after his wife, not the Creedence Clearwater Revival song - as it cruised out to sea. But like many other fish on the Atlantic Coast, whiting have moved north, seeking cooler waters as ocean temperatures have risen, and they are now filling the nets of fishermen farther up the coast.

Studies have found that two-thirds of marine species in the Northeast United States have shifted or extended their range as a result of ocean warming, migrating northward or outward into deeper and cooler water.

Lobster, once a staple in southern New England, have decamped to Maine. Black sea bass, scup, yellowtail flounder, mackerel, herring and monkfish, to name just a few species, have all moved to accommodate changing temperatures.

Yet fishing regulations, which among other things set legal catch limits for fishermen and are often based on where fish have been most abundant in the past, have failed to keep up with these geographical changes.

The center of the black sea bass population, for example, is now in New Jersey, hundreds of miles north of where it was in the 1990s, providing the basis for regulators to distribute shares of the catch to the Atlantic states.

Under those rules, North Carolina still has rights to the largest share. The result is a convoluted workaround many fishermen view as nonsensical. Because black sea bass are now harder to find in their state waters, North Carolina fishermen must steam north 10 hours, to where the fish are abundant, to even approach the state's allocation. Mr. Brown and other New England fishermen, however, whose states have much smaller shares, can legally land only a small fraction of the black sea bass they catch and must throw the rest overboard. And New England states like Maine, where fishermen are beginning to catch black sea bass regularly, have only a tiny allocation and no established fishery.

"Our management system assumes that the ocean has white lines drawn on it, but fish don't see those lines," said Malin L. Pinsky, an assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University, who studies how marine species adapt to climate change. "And our management system is not as nimble as the fish."

The mismatch between the location of fish and the rules for catching them has pitted recreational fishermen against commercial ones and state against state. It has heightened tensions among fishermen, government regulators and the scientists who advise them and raised questions for fishery managers that have no easy answers.

Reflecting these tensions, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Christopher S. Murphy, both Democrats of Connecticut, noted in a letter to the acting inspector general of the Commerce Department in June that fishermen in their state were experiencing "extreme financial hardship" because the apportionment of resources was so outdated.

"We request that your office investigate how the current system impacts the region's fishermen and whether the structure should be reformed to bring quota allocations in line with current data on actual fish population distribution," the senators, joined by Representative Joe Courtney, also a Democrat of Connecticut, wrote. "As species of fish move north, the allocation levels should migrate with them."

Although such shifts in allocations are possible, said Tom Nies, the executive director of the New England Fishery Management Council, in practice they are difficult to execute.

"If you're giving fish to somebody, you're taking them away from somebody else," Mr. Nies said.

But, he added, fishery managers at state and federal levels are examining ways to take into account the effects of warming ocean temperatures. Those approaches include changes in how permits are structured and giving states with nascent fisheries representation in councils that oversee states where the fish are well-established.

"I would be surprised if you find very many fishermen who will tell you that climate change is not happening," he said. "I think there's a clear recognition from everybody that this is a problem, and a lot of people are working on how to address it."

One approach being actively pursued by scientists and managers is developing methods to incorporate temperature data and other characteristics of the environment into the surveys that regulators use to set fishing quotas.

Richard J. Seagraves, the senior scientist for the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, said that in a series of surveys distributed and town hall-style meetings held by the council, "the most pressing concern expressed by all parties was the failure to address ecosystem considerations, like a changing climate and the physical effects on fish stocks."

The government periodically monitors fish species to see if they are thriving or at risk of extinction. The surveys are intended to determine how much fishing a given species can sustain, in order to avoid overfishing.

But even in the best case, trying to estimate the size of fish populations is an uncertain proposition. And the migration of species in response to warming temperatures has made the task considerably harder.

"From a scientific perspective, there are some really interesting questions," Dr. Pinsky said. "Where did the fish go? Did we eat them? Or did they go somewhere else? Those are questions we haven't really had to grapple with."

A 2014 survey of butterfish - a small, silvery fish that provides food for many larger fish species and is popular in Japan - illustrated the problem with traditional assessment methods.

A previous survey of butterfish had been unsuccessful at figuring out how robust the population was - there was too much uncertainty in the assessment's sampling of the fish. Because regulators could not make a judgment about the status of the species, butterfish fishing was temporarily suspended.

But when a team of scientists began talking to fishermen, they realized that the earlier survey had not taken into account the movements of the butterfish in response to changes in water temperature.

"What we learned from working with the fishermen was that the animals were probably occurring outside the survey," John A. Manderson, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's northeast fisheries science center.

Dr. Manderson and his colleagues developed a way to factor movement patterns and temperature shifts into models for assessing the fish. Once their work was incorporated into the next survey, which found that butterfish were still plentiful, the fishery reopened.

Dr. Manderson said that listening to fishermen, who are often in the best position to know how many fish there are and where they are, was the key to understanding what was occurring.

"What started out as an academic exercise turned into a collaborative one," Dr. Manderson said.

Yet it remains difficult to tease apart how much of the dip in a fish population is a result of climate change and how much is a result of overfishing, or even of a natural fluctuation in population numbers from year to year.

"I think you've got to be careful when you react to these things," Mr. Nies, of the New England fishery council, said. "You want to make sure you're reacting to a signal and not to noise."

He noted that there had been cases where regulators incorrectly concluded that a species had collapsed, citing the haddock population in the mid-1990s.

"Here we are 20 years later and we've got more Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank haddock than has ever been detected in the last 100 years," he said.

A growing number of scientists and managers favor moving eventually to what they call ecosystem-based management, a system that is focused on the environmental niche a species occupies, rather than individual species themselves.

Under such a system, regulation would be aimed at making sure that there are enough fish available to maintain an ecological balance of predators and prey, and quotas might be based on a category of marine species, rather than specific fish. The West Coast has already adopted some version of this approach in the north Pacific, setting an overall quota for groundfish caught in the Bering Sea.

Temperature affects fish species differently.

"Climate change is going to make it hard on some of those species that are not particularly fond of warm or warming waters," said Mr. Brown, who is the president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen's Association, a trade group. "But as the impacts of climate change descend upon us, there are also species that are going to be victorious, hugely victorious."

Yet the changes are happening so fast that regulators will have to adapt quickly if they are to have any hope of keeping up. Marine species, Dr. Manderson said, are moving north at 10 times the rate of animals on land.

"Our ideas of property rights and laws are purely land-based," he said. "But the ocean is all about flux and turbulence and movement."

He added, "Even the science is too slow."

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Fish Seek Cooler Waters, Leaving Some Fishermen's Nets Empty

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POINT JUDITH, R.I. - There was a time when whiting were plentiful in the waters of Rhode Island Sound, and Christopher Brown pulled the fish into his long stern trawler by the bucketful.

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California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won’t Back Down to Trump

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California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won’t Back Down to Trump

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Even though Trump has decided to ignore climate change, governor Jerry Brown has said that California will work directly with other nations and states to uphold the strict environmental regulations in place. California already plays a very high role in climate change issues. The state has also vowed to block any attempt by Washington to regulate undocumented immigrants. Some have argued that if California is the only state to enforce carbon emission regulations, then they may fall behind other states in the market. However, 69% of Californians are in support of the state regulating carbon emissions.

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The environmental effort poses decided risks for this state. For one thing, Mr. Trump and Republicans have the power to undercut California's climate policies. The Trump administration could reduce funds for the state's vast research community - including two national laboratories - which has contributed a great deal to climate science and energy innovation, or effectively nullify state regulations on clean air emissions and automobile fuel standards.

"They could basically stop enforcement of the Clean Air Act and CO ₂ emissions," said Hal Harvey, president of Energy Innovation, a policy research group in San Francisco. "That would affect California because it would constrain markets. It would make them fight political and legal battles rather than scientific and technological ones."

And some business leaders warned that California's embrace of environmental regulations - from emission reductions to new regulations imposing mandatory energy efficiency standards on computers and monitors - could put it at a disadvantage, all the more so as conservatives elsewhere move to roll back environmental regulations.

"If the other states pursue no-climate-change policies, and we continue to go it on our own with our climate change policies, then we would be at a competitive disadvantage for either relocating companies or growing companies here, particularly manufacturing factories," said Rob Lapsley, the president of the California Business Roundtable.

When California enacted its climate reduction standards last year, it drew fierce criticism from state business leaders.

The bills "impose very severe caps on the emission of greenhouse gases in California, without requiring the regulatory agencies to give any consideration to the impacts on our economy, disruptions in everyone's daily lives or the fact that California's population will grow almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2030," the California Chamber of Commerce said.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment

Democrats relish the prospect of challenging Mr. Trump on climate change, noting that other states have followed California in trying to curb emissions. And California has the weight to get into the ring: It is one of the 10 largest economies in the world, with a gross domestic product of approximately $2.5 trillion.

"California more than ever is strongly committed to moving forward on our climate leadership," said Kevin de Leon, the leader of the State Senate. "We will not deviate from our leadership because of one election."

The state has been at the forefront of climate and energy policy for more than half a century, beginning with setting appliance and vehicle emissions standards in the 1960s. Those policies will continue, analysts said, in no small part because they are overwhelmingly popular here: 69 percent of Californians said they supported the law requiring the state to roll back emissions in a July survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California.

"This is not something that's going to be fueled by dislike of Donald Trump," said Adrienne Alvord, the western states director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This will be fueled by people liking these policies and wanting to see them continue. Our leadership and the people of California support the science."

Ms. Alvord said that in the new political climate, the fossil-fuel industry may feel emboldened to take on some of the state's energy and climate initiatives. "But they would be fighting a very uphill battle," she said. "Politically, it's going to be very difficult to really slow this train down."

California's economy is powered by a high-tech industry and prominent research institutions that make it well placed to continue to lead on energy and climate. The state has already taken on an international role. Mr. Brown has spearheaded the Under 2 MOU initiative, backed by a coalition of state, local and regional governments in 33 countries - more than 160 jurisdictions with a total population of more than 1 billion - that have agreed to deep emissions cuts to try to keep global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

California's cap-and-trade program, which imposes a limit on greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell emissions credits, is linked with one in Quebec. The program has suffered recently from weak sales, and it is facing a legal challenge from the state Chamber of Commerce. Its future is likely to be the subject of debate by the Legislature. State officials have also had discussions with other countries, including Mexico and China, about joining forces on cap-and-trade policies.

Domestically, California has long been a leader on vehicle emissions. The federal Environmental Protection Agency allowed it to have tougher standards under the 1970 Clean Air Act, and more than a dozen states have adopted its standards. The Trump administration could deny the state a new waiver, as the George W. Bush administration did, which would lead to a court fight.

The clean-air initiatives here have become an intricate part of the economy and a source of growth and jobs. Federal cutbacks would no doubt hurt the state to some extent, but analysts say the very energy-efficiency policies that may soon come under attack by the new administration have been a significant factor in California's economic reversal.

"If the president-elect and his administration work to undermine our climate leadership, they will hurt our economy," Mr. de Leon said. "They will kill jobs. And ultimately, they will hurt the economy of the United States. We are 13 percent of the overall G.D.P."

Still, California officials and environmentalists said climate measures in place here will undoubtedly be undercut if the Trump administration rolls back environmental policies put in place by President Obama.

"Our system works better - our cap-and-trade system and other ways of addressing climate change - if we have more company," said Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the Assembly. "The more company we have, the better."

Dan Jacobson, the state director of Environment California, said the state can "keep doing what we are doing, leading the way."

"But will that be enough, soon enough? Not without the partnership of other cities, states, and nations. So that's why it's so dangerous for Trump to pull out of the accord," he wrote in an email, referring to the Paris climate agreement.

Mr. Brown will be a critical player in this fight. He has presented himself as an environmental advocate since he first served as governor in the 1970s. As he enters what will probably be his last two years in public life, he has seized on the prospect of leading an anti-Trump environmental movement.

"We've got the lawyers and we've got the scientists and are ready to fight," Mr. Brown declared in a speech in San Francisco earlier this month to the American Geophysical Union. "We're ready to win."

Mr. Brown, in the interview, called Mr. Trump's election a setback for the climate movement, but predicted that it would be fleeting.

"In a paradoxical way, it could speed up the efforts of leaders in the world to take climate change seriously," he said. "The shock of official congressional and presidential denial will reverberate through the world."

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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California, at Forefront of Climate Fight, Won't Back Down to Trump

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The environmental effort poses decided risks for this state. For one thing, Mr. Trump and Republicans have the power to undercut California's climate policies. The Trump administration could reduce funds for the state's vast research community - including two national laboratories - which has contributed a great deal to climate science and energy innovation, or effectively nullify state regulations on clean air emissions and automobile fuel standards.

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Scott Pruitt, Testifying to Lead E.P.A., Criticizes Environmental Rules

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Scott Pruitt, Testifying to Lead E.P.A., Criticizes Environmental Rules

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Scott Pruitt testified to lead the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, and claimed he would enforce a states' rights approach to environmental regulation.
Pruitt has attempted to sue the EPA 14 times to block air and water regulations. Critics claim that he has been working to benefit his the energy industry and campaign donors, instead of the public good.
There were many protesters outside of the hearing, showing the fierce opposition to Trump's plan to dismantle the agency. Pruitt was also involved in a 27 state lawsuit against Obama's Clean Power Plan, claiming the administration was overstepping it's boundaries. However, Pruitt did acknowledge that the EPA could have taken more action when it came to the lead tainted water in Flint.

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WASHINGTON - Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald J. Trump's choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, offered a vision of a far smaller and more restrained agency at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He criticized federal rules protecting air and water and tackling climate change, and forcefully advocated a states' rights approach to environmental regulation.

Faulting the agency for what he called overreach under President Obama, Mr. Pruitt said that as Oklahoma's attorney general, he had seen "examples where the agency became dissatisfied with the tools Congress had given it to address certain issues, and bootstrapped its own powers and tools through rule-making."

Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee pressed Mr. Pruitt aggressively on his record, noting that he had sued the E.P.A. 14 times in an effort to block federal air and water pollution regulations. In particular, the senators criticized Mr. Pruitt repeatedly about letters drafted by energy lobbyists that were sent on state stationery to federal agencies and even to Mr. Obama, outlining the economic hardship threatened by the environmental rules.

Speaking to critics who have said that Mr. Pruitt has worked on behalf of the energy industry and his campaign donors rather than the public good, he said, "We must reject as a nation the false paradigm that if you're pro-energy you're anti-environment, and if you're pro-environment you're anti-energy."

Mr. Pruitt was introduced by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who is Congress's most prominent member in rejecting the established science of human-caused climate change.

Mr. Inhofe praised Mr. Pruitt as a "champion of state and individual rights" who had "fought against federal overreach."

"Yes, as attorney general, Scott fought the E.P.A., the Fish and Wildlife Service and the outgoing administration on many fronts, but all of these suits were brought to protect state and local interests from overzealous and activist agencies," Mr. Inhofe said.

Both environmental activists and coal miners crammed into the hallway outside the Senate hearing room where Mr. Pruitt was testifying, a show of robust opposition to and support for the nominee for an agency that Mr. Trump has said he wants to essentially dismantle. Protesters, some dressed in oil rig gear and pink knitted hats associated with the women's march against Mr. Trump planned for Saturday, occasionally broke into the room, shouting, "We don't want the E.P.A. gutted!"

Still, it is highly likely that Mr. Pruitt will be confirmed by the full Senate. He is expected to receive support from all 51 Senate Republicans and from Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.

Mr. Pruitt addressed climate change directly in his opening remarks, saying: "Science tells us that the climate is changing and human activity in some manner impacts that change. The human ability to measure with precision the extent of that impact is subject to continuing debate and dialogue, as well they should be."

That statement is not consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change. A 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that reviews and summarizes climate science, found it "extremely likely" that more than half of the global warming that occurred from 1951 to 2010 was a consequence of human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Mr. Pruitt's hearing took place on the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2016 was the hottest year on record, surpassing marks set in 2015 and 2014.

Among the largest and most contentious regulatory obligations facing the E.P.A. will be the enactment of Mr. Obama's signature climate change policy, the Clean Power Plan, which would require states to curb their planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants. Mr. Pruitt has played a leading role in a 27-state lawsuit against it, accusing the agency of vastly overstepping its authority.

However, Mr. Pruitt said that he would not revisit a landmark 2009 E.P.A. finding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger human life by warming the planet. That finding created the legal requirement that the E.P.A. regulate those climate-warming emissions. "It is there, and it needs to be enforced and respected," Mr. Pruitt said. "There is nothing that I know that would cause it to be reviewed."

But Senate Democrats pressed Mr. Pruitt to recuse himself from regulatory decisions on cases he has filed against the agency, including the Clean Power Plan.

"What the American people are expecting here is that the E.P.A. doesn't turn into every polluters' ally," said Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. "The only way to do that is for you to recuse yourself from every case you brought."

Mr. Pruitt responded that the E.P.A.'s ethics counsel had advised him that he must recuse himself from cases in which he had a role as plaintiff, if they were filed within a year of the time he would review them as E.P.A. administrator. But he would not commit to recusing himself from all the cases he had brought.

While Mr. Pruitt repeatedly stressed his view that environmental regulation should primarily be the purview of the states, he said the E.P.A. could have taken a more forceful role in responding to the crisis over lead-tainted water in Flint, Mich.

He acknowledged a lack of familiarity with lead poisoning. "I would be very concerned about any level of lead going into a human body, but I'm not familiar with specific research on that," he said.

After Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, pressed Mr. Pruitt on the crisis, he responded: "In Flint, the E.P.A. should have acted faster. With air quality, water quality across state lines, there is a role where E.P.A. is important."

But he noted that state-level water infrastructure was the problem in Flint. "Water infrastructure is very important," he said. "The states play a vital role."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. Nominee Criticizes Rules to Protect Climate. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Scott Pruitt, Testifying to Lead E.P.A., Criticizes Environmental Rules

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WASHINGTON - Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald J. Trump's choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, offered a vision of a far smaller and more restrained agency at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He criticized federal rules protecting air and water and tackling climate change, and forcefully advocated a states' rights approach to environmental regulation.

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Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

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Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

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Scientists have recently reported that Earth reached it's highest temperature in 2016. Many believe that temperatures are rising to dangerous levels that will be a threat to the natural world and human civilization. In 2015 and 2016 the Earth's temperatures were increased because of El Nino. However, there is still a long term trend of rising temperatures.
This issue is especially prominent in the Arctic where temperatures are rising 20 to 30 degrees above normal. This is causing rapid coastal erosion in the Arctic, billions of tons of ice are rapidly falling into the ocean. This is also causes coastal regions in the U.S. to spend more money on protection from increased tidal flooding.
However, it will be even more difficult to address this conflict with the new President Donald Trump. He has ignored climate change it believes it was invented by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Without action from the U.S. it will be impossible to combat this issue globally.

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"What's going on in the Arctic is really very impressive; this year was ridiculously off the chart," said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a unit of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that tracks global temperatures.

But Arctic people were hardly alone in feeling the heat. Drought and starvation afflicted Africa. On May 19, the people in the town of Phalodi lived through the hottest day in the recorded history of India, 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

El Niño has now ended, and climate scientists almost universally expect 2017 to be cooler than the year before. But the scale of the heat burst has been startling to many of the experts, and some of them fear an accelerated era of global warming could be at hand over the next few years.

Even at current temperatures, billions of tons of land ice are melting or sliding into the ocean. The sea is also absorbing most of the heat trapped by human emissions. Those factors are causing the ocean to rise at what appears to be an accelerating pace, and coastal communities in the United States are beginning to spend billions to fight increased tidal flooding. Their pleas for help from Congress have largely been ignored.

The finding that a record had been set for the third year in a row was released on Wednesday by three government agencies, two of them American and one British, that track measurements made by ships, buoys and land-based weather stations. They analyze the figures to correct for known problems, producing an annual average temperature for the surface of the Earth. The national meteorological agency of Japan confirmed the findings in a preliminary analysis.

In the British data set, 2016 set a record by only a small amount; the margin was larger in the NOAA data set and larger still in NASA's. NASA does more work than the other groups to take full account of Arctic temperatures, and several scientists said they believed the NASA record to be the most accurate for 2016 for that reason.

NASA's calculations suggested that the planet had warmed by well over a half-degree Fahrenheit from 2013 to 2016. That is a huge change for the surface of an entire planet to undergo in just three years, and it appears to be the largest temperature increase over a three-year period in the NASA record, which begins in 1880.

The findings about a record-warm year were also confirmed by the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project, a nonprofit California group set up to provide a temperature analysis independent of governments. That group, however, did not find that three records had been set in a row; in its analysis, 2010 was slightly warmer than 2014.

In addition to the surface measurements, satellites are used to measure the temperature of the atmosphere within a few miles of the surface. Two groups that analyze these figures showed a record-warm 2016 in data going back to 1978, though in one data set it was a record by only a small margin.

Since 1880, NOAA's records show only one other instance when global temperature records were set three years in a row: in 1939, 1940 and 1941. The Earth has warmed so much in recent decades, however, that 1941 now ranks as only the 37th-warmest year on record.

The modern era of global warming began around 1970, after a long stretch of relatively flat temperatures, and the past three years mark the first time in that period that three records were set in a row. Of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 have now occurred since 2000.

Two of the agencies that issued Wednesday's figures, NOAA and NASA, will soon report to cabinet secretaries appointed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has expressed doubt about the findings of climate science. In 2012, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive."

Fear has erupted within the agencies about whether their data will now be subject to political manipulation. Mr. Trump and his cabinet nominees have given no detailed indication of what their broad climate policies are likely to be, much less how they will manage the scientific enterprise of monitoring the climate.

Since he was elected president, Mr. Trump has acknowledged there may be "some connectivity" between human activity and climate change, and he promised to keep an open mind on the subject.

On Wednesday, in questioning before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Trump's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, said, " I do not believe that climate change is a hoax." He did not, however, say whether he believed that Mr. Trump was wrong on climate change.

The three record-setting years in a row undercut longstanding claims by a handful of contrarian scientists that global warming stopped after 1998. That argument was never backed by good statistical evidence, but it was highlighted repeatedly in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail in 2016.

When the heat buildup in the ocean is taken into account, global temperatures are rising relentlessly. Scientists have calculated that the heat accumulating throughout the Earth because of human emissions is roughly equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day.

It is true that at the Earth's surface, the warming seems to be proceeding in fits and starts. "The arc of global warming will be variously steep and less steep," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "It never stopped."

In fact, the rate over time has been reasonably close to predictions that scientists first offered decades ago. Those same scientists have long warned that humanity is courting disaster by failing to bring fossil-fuel emissions under control.

For example, many experts on sea level believe that a rise of 15 or 20 feet has already become inevitable, though they cannot say how fast it will happen. A rise that large would drown most of the world's coastal cities without heroic efforts to fortify them.

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year

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"What's going on in the Arctic is really very impressive; this year was ridiculously off the chart," said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a unit of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that tracks global temperatures. But Arctic people were hardly alone in feeling the heat.

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Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find

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Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find

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Primatologists have recently done a study on primates, and found that three-quarters of primate species are in decline. They also found that 60% are threatened with extinction due to devastation from agriculture, hunting and mining. Collecting data on all of the primate species was very difficult, due to the fact that so many new species are discovered each year. They are able to locate new species due to deforestation and they have found mutations within species due to DNA testing. The species that are threatened are those that are not able to adapt as easily.
The destruction of rainforest for agriculture, hunting, and the rapid increase in palm oil plantations are all factors contributing the primates declines. These primates are crucial to their environments and to us. They spread pollen among the trees, and allow us to study them in order to better understand ourselves. That is why is essential that humans take care of these species instead of increasing their chances of extinction.

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Just last week, a team of researchers described a new species of gibbon in China. Dr. Rylands said he knows of at least seven new primate species to be announced this year.

Scientists are finding so many new primate species in part because the destruction of forests is making it easier to reach populations that were once remote.

"There is a certain rush of people in a panic, realizing that if they don't find and describe them, they will be lost without us ever knowing them," said Dr. Rylands.

Another reason for the burst of discovery is that scientists have started investigating the DNA of primates, finding that some populations had unique mutations..

"There are distinct species that have been around for millions of years, even though they look to our eyes very similar," said Dr. Yoder. Unfortunately, she noted, new species revealed by DNA often turn out to exist in perilously low numbers.

The new research was not all bad news for primates.

"Some species are doing O.K.," said Katherine C. MacKinnon, an anthropologist at Saint Louis University and a co-author of the study. "The ones that are doing O.K. are the ones that aren't super-specialists, the ones that are most flexible."

But most species are not so flexible. Every species of ape (including gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and 19 species of gibbons) is threatened, while 87 percent of lemur species are. Other species that are critically endangered include the brown-headed spider monkey of Ecuador, the Niger Delta red colobus, and the crested macaque, an Indonesian species famous for having taken a selfie with a photographer's camera.

"It's worse than we thought 10 years ago," Dr. MacKinnon said.

She and her colleagues identified a number of human activities pushing primates to the edge, such as hunting. In West Africa, for example, there is a strong demand in local markets for primate meat.

"The forests are still standing, but they've shot everything out of it," said Dr. Rylands.

The incentives to kill primates are not only local, though. A lot of primate meat is making its way to China, along with body parts falsely believed to have healing powers.

"They'll import enormous amounts from around Southeast Asia," said Dr. Rylands. "They're a driving force through the whole region."

Primates are also threatened by the wholesale destruction of forests to make way for agriculture. In the Amazon, the jungle is being converted to cattle ranches and soybean fields, while in Madagascar, rice paddies are taking the place of lemur forests.

Western countries are also helping push primates toward extinction. Palm oil can be found in everything from doughnuts to lipstick to biodiesel fuel. New palm oil plantations are completely replacing forests in Southeast Asia - one of the most primate-diverse parts of the world.

Even cellphones can add to the risks. In central Africa, miners go into rain forests to dig for an ore called coltan that ends up in phone circuits. Those miners hunt for their meals. "They live on primates," said Dr. Rylands.

Humans have already driven some primate species extinct, but it's hard to say exactly how many. Madagascar was once home to giant lemurs that could weigh as much as 350 pounds.

While Western scientists never laid eyes on these remarkable creatures, the fossil record shows that 17 lemur species became extinct after humans arrived there 2,000 years ago.

More recently, a monkey called Miss Waldron's red colobus has disappeared from its range in West Africa. It has not been spotted for over 25 years and is believed to be extinct. In China, a subspecies called the white-handed gibbon may have gone extinct as well.

Some of the most endangered primate species are down to just a few dozen survivors. Their prospects are grim, because many of them live in parts of the world where human populations are projected to grow the fastest.

In Madagascar, for example, humans may have to move deeper into lemur habitats for new farmland. "It's a pressure cooker, and there's no way to relieve the pressure," said Dr. Yoder.

The authors of the new study offer a number of reasons it is worth trying to halt the crisis.

Recent research has shown that primates are extremely important to the ecosystems in which they live. As they feed on leaves and fruit, for example, they move pollen between trees. They pass seeds in their droppings, allowing plants to spread across a healthy range.

"People used to think of primates as icing on the cake, as not being vital for ecosystems," said Dr. MacKinnon. "But now we know they are."

Primates have also been invaluable for understanding ourselves.

The first primates evolved roughly 80 million years ago, and then split into the living lineages over millions of years. By comparing our biology to those of other primates, we have learned about the evolution of our brains, our vision and our vulnerability to diseases.

If those species become extinct, we will lose the opportunity to learn more.

While the prospects are dire, Dr. Rylands said there were concrete steps that can be taken to help primates. "You have to stop hunting them and give them a place to live," he said.

That is easier said than done, he acknowledged, since the local communities where primates live are often struggling to feed their families. In some cases, it may be possible to take the pressure off primates by building fish farms as an alternate source of protein.

In other cases, communities may be able to make more money over the long term from tourist operations in intact forests than from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Dr. Rylands pointed to the golden lion tamarin as an example of how a primate species can be saved. It once lived in huge numbers in the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil. After the forests were nearly wiped out to make way for sugar plantations and other forms of agriculture, the species nearly vanished.

In 1983, the U.S. National Zoo led an international effort to bring them back. Monkeys were bred in captivity, forests were conserved and hunting was banned.

Today, the species has a small but stable population of some 3,500 individuals in the wild.

"There are cases where you can bring them back from the brink," said Dr. Rylands. "But the immensity of the destruction of tropical forests makes it very difficult."

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Most Primate Species Threatened With Extinction, Scientists Find

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Just last week, a team of researchers described a new species of gibbon in China. Dr. Rylands said he knows of at least seven new primate species to be announced this year. Scientists are finding so many new primate species in part because the destruction of forests is making it easier to reach populations that were once remote.

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Tasmanian Tigers’ Brains Yield Clues Long After Extinction

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Tasmanian Tigers’ Brains Yield Clues Long After Extinction

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The Tasmanian Tiger species has been extinct since the 1830s, when it was branded with the name sheep killers. The last Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in 1936. The tigers were rarely studied when they were alive, so researches have recently  begun to observe the carnivores. They have discovered that although Tasmanian tigers look closely related to dogs, it is actually a result of 150 years of convergent evolution.
A researcher, Dr. Berns, further studied the species by comparing their brains to that of a Tasmanian Devil's. He found that the tigers were smarter and hunted, unlike devil's who are known as scavengers. The brains of the Tasmanian tigers are still under observation and have opened up many new questions about the extinction of the species.

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To better understand thylacines, Dr. Berns spent two years tracking down two preserved Tasmanian tiger brains, one at the Smithsonian Institution and the other at the Australian Museum. Their brains, like those of all marsupials, are very different from the brains of placental mammals. The biggest difference is that they lack a corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres.

Because of the differences, Dr. Berns said, if he wanted to make any sense out of the Tasmanian tiger brain, he could not compare it with one of his dog brain scans. Instead, he needed to analyze it against something much more similar.

"That's where the devil comes into the picture," Dr. Berns said.

The Tasmanian devil, a carnivorous marsupial that mostly scavenges for food, is one of the Tasmanian tiger's closest living relatives. Dr. Berns collected two Tasmanian devil brains, scanned them and compared them with the two Tasmanian tiger brains.

For the brain scans, he used magnetic resonance imaging to study the gray matter, and diffusion tensor imaging to study the white matter. From the scans Dr. Berns found that Tasmanian tigers had a larger brain, particularly the frontal lobes.

The differences suggested that Tasmanian tigers were smarter than Tasmanian devils and used their cortex more for planning and decision-making, Dr. Berns said. That, he said, further supported the idea that Tasmanian tigers were avid hunters, rather than scavengers like Tasmanian devils.

Leah Krubitzer, a neuroscientist from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, called the work a "heroic effort" for scanning brains of the extinct animal.

"The authors cleverly used the best available techniques to examine brain organization in nonliving brains that were in not very good condition," she said.

And Dr. Berns said his research could change our understanding of these extinct Australian predators.

"Go back 100 years, people dismissed thylacines as stupid animals because they weren't fast moving," he said. He added that what he could see of the Tasmanian tigers' brains revealed that "they were probably quite intelligent."

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Tasmanian Tigers' Brains Yield Clues Long After Extinction

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To better understand thylacines, Dr. Berns spent two years tracking down two preserved Tasmanian tiger brains, one at the Smithsonian Institution and the other at the Australian Museum. Their brains, like those of all marsupials, are very different from the brains of placental mammals.