We agree that Harris has publicly stated that there is a possible link between climate change and puffin declines. I agree with his position which I think is well supported by the present literature concerning sea surface temperatures, plankton, sand eels and pipefish. These lines of evidence show a possible link between a warmer north sea and puffin declines. You can place greater certainty upon the disruption of plankton, pipefish and sand eels by these warmer seas where specific studies show the physiological effects of temperature changes in more detail. What emerges out of that for puffins is less clear.

Regarding pipefish, seabirds and puffins, specifically, there is well documented evidence from various sources at various locations indicating the disruptive effect pipefish are having upon young puffins. The pipefish are too big so the young puffins are apparently choking or simply not eating them….either way their chances of survival become diminished. Researchers are finding puffin nests filled with dead rotting pipefish and dead young puffins at different locations around the British Isles.

My post dealt with a comparison between the BBC wording and Harris’s Independent quote:

‘The exact cause of the dramatic fall in numbers remains a mystery, but Professor Harris believes the decline could be the result of climate change. He says that as the seas warm up, it is affecting the numbers of fish available for the puffins to eat.

“We think there’s been some change in their native environment in the last couple of years. One possibility is that there’s been a big change in the sea, from intense fishing and marine climate change. This has affected the development of plankton, which in turn has an impact on the numbers of fish for the puffins to eat.”

and the BBC:

“So whatever the problem is, it’s got to be a widespread one,” said Professor Harris.

The suspicion is that climate change is altering the distribution of plankton across the North Sea.

This disrupts the entire food web, including predators such as puffin.

————–

I don’t see an inconsistency between what Harris is saying, what the BBC stated and the apparent causal links between plankton, pipefish and sand eel disruptions seemingly due to SST changes seen in the scientific literature.

“Furthermore, as the CEH sources (yours and ours) demonstrate, that possible link is not sufficiently robust to merit their mentioning it in any of their publicity material.”

But Harris is making public comments about possible links between climate change and puffin declines

You ask why I am now examining news articles instead of peer reviewed literature. Earlier you made points suggesting that I wasn’t really dealing with the substance of your post. In an attempt to address this concern I posted information regarding the apparent source of the “climate change” comments in the BBC article. The wording of the BBC article remains consistent with Harris’s own comments. The wording of the BBC article seems to indicate that the origin of the “climate change” comment is not from the RSPB but from Harris. We have Harris saying that the problem has to be a widespread one and then we have unattributed remarks citing a suspicion of climate change…..which appears to fit with Harris’s opinion indicated elsewhere. The RSPB quotes don’t mention climate change and nor do they cite it as a cause….they agree that the observed “problem” is a widespread one.

In summary, you claim that the BBC is making statements about climate change and puffins using the RSPB as a source, but this is not clear from my reading of the article and of Harris’s opinions elsewhere. Also, the BBC’s language does not place great certainty upon this, only saying there is a suspicion….this fits with the language used by Harris i.e. “possible”. And finally, Harris’s position is likely not derived solely from his population study but from the other empirical evidence regarding pipefish, plankton etc.

In reply to your complaint that ‘the statements highlighting the possible link between climate change and puffin population declines in the BBC article originated from Harris and not the the RSPB’, let us remind you of your earlier comment: ‘The “factoids” are evidence which emerged in the peer reviewed literature.’ In which case, why do you now resort to trawling through the popular press?

Perhaps it is because your ISI search merely turned up papers linking the pipefish explosion to climate change (climate variability?), when as far as we can see, the pipefish are not themselves being blamed for seabird declines – it’s just that pipefish are a poor substitute for sand eels.

Otherwise, all you have provided us with is a link to an article in the Independent and press releases from BES, NERC and CEH. The latter, like the CEH press release we flagged up, makes no mention of climate change. The BES document concerns kittiwakes, a species that was declining while the puffin population was still increasing. The NERC release again concerns the pipefish explosion.

You are right that Harris mentions climate change in the Independent article. But his phrasing is extremely cautious:

‘The exact cause of the dramatic fall in numbers remains a mystery, but Professor Harris believes the decline could be the result of climate change. He says that as the seas warm up, it is affecting the numbers of fish available for the puffins to eat.

“We think there’s been some change in their native environment in the last couple of years. One possibility is that there’s been a big change in the sea, from intense fishing and marine climate change. This has affected the development of plankton, which in turn has an impact on the numbers of fish for the puffins to eat.”‘

So, yes, ‘Harris has publicly stated that there is a possible link to climate change’, but we fail to see how a cautious, qualified statement made to a newspaper is ‘inconsistent’ with our argument that that the BBC did not get their information from Harris himself. Furthermore, as the CEH sources (yours and ours) demonstrate, that possible link is not sufficiently robust to merit their mentioning it in any of their publicity material.

Your argument would carry more weight if, rather than getting bogged down in the semantic integrity of our post, you could explain how it is reasonable for the BBC to mutate the idea of a ‘possible’ link between bird numbers and climate change to a matter of established, unqualified fact.

We have not deleted any of your posts. In the history of the site, we have only deleted one post – from a very tedious troll. We are not afraid of criticism. We encourage it, and we try to answer it fully.

We are not in control of the software which filters comments, nor can we interrogate it to see what might have triggered it. Perhaps you could post it again.

Bill Oddie at his worst will convince a few cottagers in Burford or Lechlade that the birds are dying off because they left the electricity on overnight. The BBC is what it is entertainment, but the big boys on Capitol Hill are moving ideologically in a way that would have surprised me even a year ago. It’s a major political shift. All sorts of serious political and economic consequences will flow from this capitulation. You did a post below that outlined how David Cameron (my MP btw) has already anticipated this trend with his proposal for decentraized energy production.

The resistance of America’s hard right and center right to the more hysterically funny assertions of environmental politics died this year. It’s one of the biggest stories to happen this year.

In the first of his four comments, he agrees that we would have a good argument, were it not for there being no restriction on how many sources the BBC are allowed to report in one article. According to Anon, the RSPB do research too. But the RSPB didn’t do any research in this case. They merely gave an opinion, seemingly in order to give the spin put on the press release credibility. The population study announced in the press release had just been published. A study undertaken on behalf (or by) of the RSPB attributing the decline to global warming would have to have been completed exceptionally quickly.

As an aside, we reported recently on other ‘research’ commissioned by the RSPB which appeared to cite loss of biodiversity as a risk factor in mental health. As we said earlier, asking the RSPB for their views on what is or isn’t caused by climate change is a bit like asking Exxonmobil. They are not impartial.

Anon moves on, the ‘evidence’, which ‘supports the fact that sand eel populations have declined partially due to warmer sea surface temperatures’ apparently gives credibility to the claim that puffin populations have declined due to global warming. Bu that is irrelevant. This is what the article claimed:

“Researchers believe the decline is linked to changes in the North Sea food web, perhaps related to climate change.”

Which is similar to the claim made in the Independent article linked to by Anon, which says;

“Warmer seas blamed for rapid decline of Scottish puffin colony…”

Yet the content reveals a far less certain picture than the headline promises:

“The exact cause of the dramatic fall in numbers remains a mystery, but Professor Harris believes the decline could be the result of climate change. He says that as the seas warm up, it is affecting the numbers of fish available for the puffins to eat.”

This is just a population study. It is not a study which attributes population change to any cause. Furthermore, the articles explain that the population was last recorded in 2003, and had been increasing by 10% per year. Now, it appears to have fallen 30% in 5 years. Why can we attribute the smaller decrease to climate change, but the larger increase to something else? Why is an increase in the puffin population – in spite of climate change – ‘normal’, but the increase in pipe fish alarming? If the story could not have been attributed to climate change, it would not have been an interesting story. It wouldn’t have been in the BBC site, and it would not have been in the Independent.

It’s also interesting how much weight Anon gives to the cautious speculation that climate change might have been involved, even though the very pages he links to contradict his claim:

“There have been changes in water temperature in the North Sea since about 1988 but large numbers of snake pipefish have only appeared during the last three or four years. These major outbreaks of previously rare species do occasionally ‘just happen’ in marine ecosystems and they can have a startling effect on marine food webs. Interestingly, they are often associated with very poor breeding seasons in seabirds.”

We were particularly puzzled by Anon’s remark that our posts represented some kind of ‘ad hominen’{sic} attack on the RSPB. The RSPB have their agenda. Over the recent years, the conservation agenda has converged with climate change, and both issues have become politicised. The RSPB are not above politics, nor of spin, nor above self-interest and partiality. Questioning the role, influence and opinions of NGOs is entirely legitimate, and essential to understanding what function they are actually performing. Is Anon claiming otherwise? Too often, the opinions of NGOs are given uncritical treatment, yet they can have significant consequences.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/warmer-seas-blamed-for-rapid-decline-of-scottish-puffin-colony-839600.html

Interesting, he says he believes that climate change is partially responsible here. That was easy to find, on the same page as the CEH article about this:

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/2008_news_item_16.html

which was found at the first hit by searching for puffins on their website.

http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2006/pipefish.asp

Which is interesting. Prof. Harris pops up in an article which does partially cite climate change for the decline in sand eel numbers.

Further, if you research on ISI there are articles there which directly linked the pipefish explosion to climate change. By which I mean pipefish larvae numbers correlate very well with SSTs.

And more information on seabirds, sand eels and pipefish:

http://www.ntsseabirds.org.uk/File/NTS%20seabird%20season%202007(1).doc

Also, you do know that the RSPB conducts research don’t you? They collect data and make observations about bird feeding habits on their colonies. Were you aware that Puffins had mysteriously started to feed their young pipe fish instead of sand eels? Were you aware that the young puffins are unable to eat pipe fish due to their size. Funny too that something rather odd seems to be happening to pipe fish populations in the North East Atlantic, but that is just pesky evidence…best to ignore that.

Access to scientific literature can be found at your local library. If you are at a university you can access this freely. Either way you could have done some research on this. Needless to say, writing a post about how the BBC wrote more than was written in a press release and carried out some further investigation which lead to them writing stuff which turned out to agree with the scientific evidence is bizarre. Doing the research yourself would have saved you all the bother.