When fisheries collapse, “we often wonder if it’s fishing or climate, but it’s both,” said Janet Nye, a scientist at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, at a news conference in Washington on Thursday.

The researchers also project how long it will take for the cod population to rebuild if rising temperatures are taken into account: from two to eight years longer than the upper limit of 10 years required by the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act for the rebuilding of overfished populations

Dr. Pershing and his colleagues speculate that the warmer waters might result in young cod starving from a lack of prey or dying from increased exposure to predators before they reached maturity. The cod, they say, might move from shallow to deeper waters where more predators lurk, and earlier seasons might extend predation. The researchers also report a link between temperatures and mortality in adult fish, though some other scientists questioned that finding.

Some marine experts praised the study for highlighting the challenges that climate change poses for the management of fisheries, and for focusing attention on the interaction between environmental shifts and overfishing.

“We know the ecosystem is fundamentally changing and that the cod stock is not recovering and management has not been as effective as we hoped,” said Jake Kritzer, an ocean and fisheries expert at the Environmental Defense Fund and the chairman of the scientific and statistical committee of the New England Fishery Management Council. He called the report “an important step toward reconciling the science we use for management and the reality of a changing ecosystem.”

Other scientists said they were “delving into the details” of the study and needed to understand more about how the researchers reached their conclusions before accepting them as valid. Some experts noted that there were competing theories about why cod had failed to rebound: for example, the building of dams that reduced the availability of prey and the disappearance of traditional spawning sites from overfishing in those areas.

Michael Fogarty, the chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, who has studied the potential effect of climate change on cod, said one reason that the warming waters in the Gulf of Maine affected cod adversely was that the region was at the southernmost edge of the fish’s range, where the water is already warmest, even without temperature rise.