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Submitter: Keith H. Sketchley
Community: Victoria
Date Submitted: May 7, 2010
Summary:
This submission discusses methods of evaluating submissions, points to the need for data and provides an example of a promising project, discusses the food-finding nature of animate objects, and points to studies showing a probable reason for variation in salmon populations over time.
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Submission:
Beware that there is a lot of nonsense out there – in many cases false claims, which could easily have been checked by going to the seashore and looking. Typically ideology-driven, especially by those who have not lived with or studied the entities in question.
Beware that there is much incomplete science out there – supposed scientists produce a limited study then ask for more money to do a better job. The big picture must be kept in mind to really learn much.
Be advised that there is much evidence disproving the alarmist claim that humans are causing warming of the oceans, including an increasing amount of evidence that temperature data past and present is badly handled (for example, Eureka is the only reporting station in NASA’s database to represent all of the high Arctic, proxy analyses were shown by the leak from the CRU to be manipulated and based on botched software, the more accurate satellite sensors show cooling for the last several years, and the ARGO buoy network shows the ocean is losing heat in the last few years). The basic truth is that climate fluctuates. Note there are worthwhile alternative theories, the most plausible to me being that certain types of solar activity through a complex cloud and ocean mechanism.
You should focus on known factors and identify needed data. For example:
- where do the fish go in the big ocean? Look at extending the accoustic reporting network that successfully tracked very young salmon from a tributary of the Columbia river to the north end of Vancouver Island. (The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project)
- look at accuracy of counting methods (what if fish circle back to wait for better conditions to get to spawning grounds?).
- consider known fluctations in fish population, such as described in “A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production” from the American Meterological Society and “Inverse production regimes - Alaska and West Coast Pacific salmon” by Hare, Mantua, and Francis, available from the International Pacific Halibut Commission. http://www.iphc.washington.edu/Staff/hare/html/papers/inverse/abst_inv.html and http://www.iphc.washington.edu/Staff/hare/html/papers/pdo/abst_PDO.html (The thesis of those papers being that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which besides changing ocean water temperature affects stream flow inland, causes a long-period oscillation of quantity of fish in each area, BC waters varying with type of salmon far more than Alaska and US lower coast waters. The latter makes sense, as we know that animate entities move to find better food supply and their industriousness and cleverness in doing so varies with type. (I use a human attribute “industriousness” even though fish are not humans, but point out that animals tend to be good at finding food – it is their survival. Your pet cat for example may wake you up if you try to sleep in, or start whining in late afternoon – they are focused on survival, they know about food.)
- observe that last fall’s bad sockeye return to the Fraser was accompanied by very good fishing of other types to the northwest.
- I also point out that those individuals and schools/flocks/herds or such that are more clever and industrious do better. That is shown by the grey whales who prosper by feeding off the BC coast or don’t go north of Oregon instead of depending on the sometimes ice-clogged Bering Sea area – the latter have been in the news this spring as some died of starvation due to lack of food there last summer.
- So given the movement of fish to where the food is that decade, the salvation of the fishing business is to allow crossing of those artificial concepts called borders? (That should put a shark among the xenophobes. ;-)
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