Elegant Terns move house when it gets too hot, and Bob Tisdale tries to cover it up @wattsupwiththat

If you mention global warming in a press release, deniers will be all over you. If seas are sometimes getting much hotter much more often, don't think for a minute it might possibly be part of a world-wide trend. Not even in the context of this:

Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

Nesting behaviour of Elegant Terns has changed this century

Bob Tisdale (archived here) has his knickers in a knot because a press release from the University of California Riverside had this to say (my emphasis):

Increased frequencies of abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of California, possibly as a result of globally warming oceans, coupled with extremely high fishing pressure, are delivering a combined blow to the legendary productivity of the Gulf of California, forcing seabirds to fly away in search for more suitable environments, even if that means abandoning their ancestral nesting grounds and moving into highly transformed industrial landscapes such as the San Diego Saltworks or the LA Harbor Container Terminal.

The study was published in Science Advances and, as the press release said, was about how "warming oceanographic conditions and fishing pressure are driving nesting seabirds away from their ancestral breeding ground in Mexico into California harbors". The study was about nesting Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans). You can read the details yourself in the press release or the paper (I'm short of time right now so this is short and sweet).

The birds used to disappear after a heavy fishing season (not enough food) and after strong El Ninos. But the researchers found (from the paper):

Before year 2000, all warm anomalies observed in the Midriff Region followed by nesting failures of Elegant Terns in Isla Rasa (when terns did not establish nests at all, abandoned the colonies before hatching of the chicks, or had massive chick mortality) were part of large-scale El Niño events (for example, 1992 and 1998), and indices such as SOI were accurate predictors of nesting success (fig. S2A). After year 2000, the numbers of successfully nesting terns in Rasa became uncoupled from large-scale El Niño indices, and local SST anomalies became the most accurate predictors of nesting success (table S3). Simultaneously, more than 70% of the total Elegant Tern nesting population started to be observed in the three California colonies, but especially in the San Diego colony (Fig. 1D), during years in which the SST anomaly in the Midriff was above 1.0°C. By contrast, in years in which the anomaly in the Midriff was low (<1.0°C), less than 20% of the total nesting population was observed in the three California colonies.

Bob Tisdale reckons wrongly (as usual):

It’s sad when claims made in a press release are not supported by the conclusions of the paper its advertising, even sadder when data supplied as part of a scientific study contradict that press release.

Bob did his usual thing of getting averaged sea surface temperature data. He's done this sort of thing before, hiding the detail. In this case he missed the pulses of warm temperature that the scientists found, as shown in Figure 2 below:

Fig 2: Top images depict the general winter-spring conditions during normal and El Niño cycles: (i) February 2013, a highly productive year with cool surface temperatures; (ii) February 1998, the most intense El Niño of the last decades. Lower images show the formation of a local anomaly during a non–El Niño year: (iii) April 2009, an apparently normal year, transitioned in (iv) May 2009 into a high SST condition in the Gulf of California that forced most of the nesting terns to abandon the area. 

And Bob missed this, too, which included nest info as well as sea surface temperature and fishing effort:

Fig. 2 Time series correlations between oceanographic variables, fisheries, and Elegant Tern nesting populations. (A) Proportions of Elegant Tern nests established in California in relation to total nests counted. (B) Midriff winter-spring SST anomaly. (C) SST difference between the Pacific and Midriff. (D) Fishing effort by the Sonora fleet. (E) Total sardine landings.

Once again, Bob Tisdale is full of it. And wrong. He cannot abide anyone discussing global warming or even local warming and its impacts.

From the WUWT comments

Bob Tisdale, pseudo-scientist in true Dunning-Kruger style, tells the scientists:

June 30, 2015 at 5:30 am
PS to Velarde et al: Your paper would have been much better if you had used sea surface temperature in absolute form and shown that the sea surfaces were cooler in the areas the birds had emigrated to when the sea surfaces in the Gulf of California had reached a specific threshold…not simply a 1.0 deg C anomaly threshold.

Paul Westhaver claims he looked for a pulse like variation, except he didn't look at the paper or he'd have found it:

 June 30, 2015 at 5:45 am
Bob,
I love it. I looked at the data and it seems to me that the conclusion was written before the paper was started. That is what lefty activists do, without shame. The dirty little secret is that few people are reading the body of the papers to see if the results jive with the data. I looked at the supplemental data too. Seems like Michael H. Horn, & Robert T. Patton are relying on that reality to sell their study? Where is the peer review? There was a spurious comment on rodent population eradication tossed in there too.
From the abstract:
“Isla Rasa in the Midriff (1980 to 2014) shows that terns migrate northward when confronting warm oceanographic anomalies (>1.0°C), which may decrease fish availability and hamper nesting success.”
In the conclusion:
“there is a pulse-like variation in local SST conditions in the Midriff, which seems to drive nesting pairs to emigrate toward California when surface seawater in the Midriff is too warm,”
I was looking for this pulse like variation…??

Ernest Bush decides it's geothermal activity because "anything but global warming"

June 30, 2015 at 6:07 am
BTW, the SST anomaly map has been showing that the Gulf of California is up to 6 degrees higher than is normal. I find myself wondering if geothermal activity along both coasts is also higher than normal as a contributing factor.

menicholas could be talking about Bob's article, however being at WUWT it's more likely another case of Dunning-Kruger-itis:

June 30, 2015 at 6:07 am
Sea-level warming?
Sounds like they got their alarmist talking points all scrambled up in a mish-mash. Since they do not know what they are talking about, they have a hard time writing about it coherently.
This is so dumb it is almost funny. Or it would be, if this nonsense was not being used to frighten innocent children with no ability to think critically and dismiss such alarmist propaganda for what it is.

Open discussion

I've been tied up with other stuff lately. Normal posting will return soon. In the meantime, feel free to talk about anything at all - as long as it's vaguely climate-related. Treat this as an open thread.

References

Enriqueta Velarde, Exequiel Ezcurra, Michael H. Horn and Robert T. Patton. "Warm oceanographic anomalies and fishing pressure drive seabird nesting north". Science Advances, June 2015 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400210

Why Are Seabirds Abandoning Their Ancestral Nesting Grounds in Gulf of California? - Press release from University of California Riverside.

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale surfs the surface at Florida Keys - HotWhopper article - when Bob did something similar to what he did here.