Climate change altering how outdoor industries operate on Long Island

Climate change is causing not-so-subtle shifts in the way Long Island’s outdoor industries do business, altering some planting and harvest schedules, changing fish migrations and population densities, and intensifying work to fortify outdoor infrastructure such as the electric grid.

And attempts to address climate change are leading to new challenges, as Long Island’s commercial fishers do quixotic battle with legions of new offshore turbines they say are squeezing them out of fishing grounds. Homeowners across the Island are similarly taking on large lithium-battery storage systems, worried about the potential for fires as the state and utilities say they are essential for storing power when demand is low.

The changes are happening in real time, as grape growers this year finish off a largely rainless harvest weeks earlier than decades-old norms; lobstermen and shell-fishers shift work to make up for a lack of scallops and lobsters, and utility workers gear up for another round of grid hardening to prepare for more severe, erratic weather.

While the debate over climate may rage on in political arenas, these largely outdoor industries have been adapting to the changes for years (even while some may deny the science).

Lobsters, for instance, have largely disappeared from the western Long Island Sound, done in, experts say, by a combination of runoff from toxins and warming waters, and forcing fishermen to seek out other species to make up for the losses.

The Peconic Bay scallop this year is seeing a sixth season of severe decline. But after years of blaming climate-change related warming, scientists have more recently zeroed in on a new pathogen that may be more to blame than the warming waters they have blamed for years. Vineyard owners now see bud-break weeks earlier in the growing season, and harvest weeks sooner than in the past.

Keeping Long Island electrified also has been impacted by the changes as LIPA customers deal with more momentary outages from passing severe storms, flooding threatens power stations, and poles and wires need replacement at tougher wind standards. The utility operator, PSEG Long Island, recently presented a 30-point plan to help further batten down the grid, one that could cost ratepayers as the work moves forward.

Commercial fishing

Sixty years ago, Riverhead commercial fisherman Phil Karlin was among scores of lobstermen who set and hauled pots on Long Island Sound and made a decent living from the hard work. Today, Karlin, 83, is among a select group of fishermen who still work the Sound from Mattituck, but the lobsters have long since disappeared, lost, experts say, to warming waters, toxins in runoff and other factors. His boat still hauls traps, but these days mostly for whelk, or conch, as the locals call the large snaillike creatures. He also sets trawl nets as he fishes the Sound, but migration patterns linked to warming waters have changed the seasons for target fish such as striped bass, he said from his boat earlier this month.

"It's pushed things back," he said of the changing climate. "Things show up later." He rarely if ever sees lobsters in his gear, and this year the market for conch has been depressed, the result of a waning export market, Karlin said. But he's not complaining of the impacts. He still hauls enough fish to sell from a small shop on his property in Riverhead, and to green markets in New York City on weekends.

Lobsters aren't the only fishery impacted by warming waters. Scallop season is underway on Long Island, but it’s another year of disappointment — the sixth in a row that has seen mature adults die off after spawning in the summer. Scientists have long tied the scallop die-off to warming waters of the Peconic Bay and resulting lower oxygen levels, stressing scallops during the spawning season, but Harrison Tobi, who leads the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s bay scallop restoration program, says the agency believes the cause may be more complicated. 

While early assessments pointed to the stressors of warming waters and reduced oxygen levels tied to climate change in the Peconic Bay and surrounding waters, Tobi said scientists more recently settled on a known pathogen as decimating the population after its summertime spawn. That combined with narrower genetic diversity resulting from years of spawning scallops in the hatcheries to restore dwindling populations may have left scallops less able to cope with the disease. They are now using wild scallops from other waters, from Martha’s Vineyard and Moriches Bay, with known tolerance to the pathogen, in hatcheries to diversify the breeding stock and help ensure a return of the population.

Changing waters have also altered the commercial market for finfish. Black sea bass have seen a relative explosion in their numbers, said Scott Curatolo-Wagemann, fisheries lead for the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Marine program, even as targeted fish such as striped bass, fluke and blue fish have been subject to changing restrictions tied to altered abundance.

Curatolo-Wagemann said changing water temperatures are suspected for the abundance of black sea bass and the migration north of cobia, another species not normally seen around New York waters; fisheries managers are working to see if the catch limits can be adjusted to accommodate.

But there’s another man-made impact of climate change that fishermen say is impacting them, despite the government’s best intentions. The first dozen offshore wind turbines in federal waters are already spinning in deep waters off New England, bringing power to Eastern Long Island. Fishermen say that despite findings that the underwater structure of turbines attract fish, working in close quarters to the turbines is hazardous, and as more are installed their fishing grounds are more limited.

The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association has been among the region’s most vocal opponents of offshore wind, which is slated to largely replace fossil fuel plants over the next two decades. Environmentalists and the state say the switchover to green energy, with wind expected to produce more than 50% of Long Island’s power needs in coming decades, is needed to cut fossil-fuel emissions from the current fleet of mostly natural gas powered plants. Fishermen aren’t convinced. "They’re putting these things where we fish," said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the association. "They’re destroying our livelihood by putting them in areas of incredible diversity and fishing grounds."

Energy

Cutting emissions by adding more wind and solar power to the Long Island grid are only part of the work the state and LIPA say needs to be done as climate change shifts weather patterns, increases local flooding and is tied to more extreme weather events.

Keeping the lights on becomes more challenging, PSEG said in its report, as "climate change makes extreme weather events such as heat waves, intense precipitation, flooding, and high-wind events more frequent and severe."

In September, PSEG Long Island, which manages the grid under contract to LIPA, released a 30-point plan it says will address the utility’s ability to keep the lights on, and allow for a quicker recovery, in the event of another Superstorm Sandy. The plan also looks at the prospect of increased wildfires like those that have beset the American West and large parts of Canada, though on a much smaller scale here and chiefly in the eastern pine barrens. The plan also envisions replacing existing poles and wires with those rated to withstand higher wind speeds. Some local power stations need to be raised or moved to be better equipped for the prospect of floods.

The plan proposes the greater use of technology to help monitor problems and trends, and having more equipment on hand to help deal with problems in real time.

All that is going to cost money. LIPA has been the beneficiary of more than $2 billion to conduct hardening projects across the Island in the past decade, and there’s more to come. Whatever costs the federal government doesn’t pick up, local ratepayers will.

In any case, the job of dealing with harsher weather will go to the mostly unionized workforce on Long Island, and to outside contractors called in to help restore power and cut away tree branches and trees to facilitate it.

It’s also mostly a unionized workforce who are working on the new cables, substations and other new infrastructure needed for offshore wind energy. It's been a boon for local companies such as Haugland Group, which did built the land-based infrastructure for South Fork Wind, and is now working on Sunrise Wind, employing hundreds. 

Here’s a list of "key takeaways" from the PSEG’s climate-change vulnerability study. 

• Long Island is expected "to be exposed to extreme heat by 2060 under both temperature variables and both emissions scenarios."

• It's projected to "experience reduced exposure to cold temperatures

from 2030 onwards due to a general warming trend."

• "A small proportion of LIPA assets could be exposed to future coastal flooding, with up

to 13% and 15% of assets being exposed to a 100- and 500-year coastal flooding

events at midcentury, respectively." 

• "More than 90% of LIPA assets are projected to be exposed to one-in-10-year hurricanes

maximum sustained wind speeds exceeding 110 mph by late century."

• "Thunderstorms and tornadoes could increase in frequency in the future, potentially

exposing LIPA assets to this hazard more frequently."

• "Ice storms could become less frequent but more intense in the future, potentially

exposing LIPA assets to events with greater than normal radial ice accumulation."

Agriculture

November was just two days away, and Ed Densieski stood in the surprising fall heat on his East Quogue farm, the ground around him powderlike after another rainless month.

"Long Island is turning into a desert," quipped Densieski, whose family has farmed his East Quogue fields since 1918 — one of the Island’s last remaining potato farmers. This year marked one of the driest, and potentially the hottest, on record. "The dryness is terrible," he said, noting that even the remnants of a hurricane didn’t deliver a significant rain. Warmer weather overall has changed some harvest times.

Long Island's grape growers, for instance, are already adjusting to the change of seasons. As winters have grown more mild, the typical spring "bud break," when grape vines put out their first tiny grape clusters, is happening a week or two sooner each year, while harvesting at summer’s end is happening a week or two sooner as well. That may seem like good news for vintners like Pindar Damianos of Pindar Vineyards, one of Long Island’s largest wine producers, but it can complicate the work, and lead to setbacks. Too early a bud break can be undone by unexpected cold that damages the clusters. Pindar’s white grapes, including chardonnay, were impacted by a spring frost after bud break, he said last month, reducing the year’s production of white wine. But red grapes greatly benefited from the warm sunny summer, he said, and red wines from this year's vintage look outstanding, he and others said. 

"It’s definitely a global thing," said Damianos. "When you’re farming and growing grapes you really just try to roll with the seasons. You’re never going to beat Mother Nature but you always have to play the cards you’re dealt."

Rob Carpenter, administrative director for the Long Island Farm Bureau, said climate change had added new levels of unpredictability to the business of farming. This year it was the lack of rain that Densieski had to deal with, but last year it was too much rain, in some cases impacting the agritourism business that depends on weekend visitors. 

"This year we've had a lack of rain for quite a long period of time, and that's caused farmers to do extra irrigating," he said. "Last year during the season we had rain for eight or nine weekends in a row, everything was wet, and it was a very difficult year." 

The earlier start to the season, Carpenter said, had been a factor for all land-based agriculture, from fruit trees to vegetable crops. "We are seeing earlier maturation of seedlings into full-grown crops," he said. "And we're seeing either earlier harvest or the ability to harvest later into the season."

Carpenter knows one farmer who was able to harvest a "huge amount" of tomatoes through Halloween, a rare event. "They had a bumper crop this year because of the weather," he said. 

The trend: more extremes of weather, and a general unpredictability. "I don't know if this is going to be normal or a one-year aberration," he said.

For some, such as Paumanok Vineyards in Aquebogue, which also owns nearby Palmer Vineyards, technology is providing some solutions. At a 2023 symposium on grape-growing, Paumanok noted it had been planting more weather-resistant varietals to help cope with more extreme weather, including plants more resistant to disease, winemaker Kareem Massoud told Newsday at the time.

And the prospect of automated, 24-hour farming may not be far off. Paumanok led the way recently by piloting an autonomous vehicle tractor that uses battery power and satellite communication to keep the equipment running at hours when pests may be more prominent, including overnight. The equipment uses GPS guidance to stay in rows, and, in the case of Paumanok, can be recharged using any excess power available from the vineyard’s solar panels. In the future the technology could use UV light overnight to help zap fungus spores, he said.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.