From the Center for Global Food Issues...

Federal Judge Kept in Dark About Recovering Salmon
By:Dennis Avery

A federal judge recently rejected the government's plan for salmon recovery in the Pacific Northwest because it wouldn't breach four dams on the Snake River that environmental groups claim are killing the fish.

I feel sorry for the judge, James Redden of Portland, OR. Neither the government's National Marine Fisheries Service (designer of the plan) nor the 17 eco-groups suing to get the dams breached have been willing to tell him that the Northwest salmon are in no danger from logging, farming, pollution--or the dams. They're already recovering, without any federal plan.

Last year's Columbia River salmon runs were the best in more than a decade. The total for Columbia River chinook salmon was the largest on record!

The real reason for the 25-year decline in Oregon-Washington salmon -- and its resurgence in the last two years -- is a natural cycle that shifts the salmon food back and forth between the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf of Alaska. When Oregon has salmon, Alaska doesn't, and vice versa.

The fishermen have known about this natural cycle for almost a century.

In 1939, the Pacific Fisherman Yearbook wrote:
"The Bristol Bay [Alaska] Red [sockeye salmon] run was regarded as the greatest in history. . . . The [May, June and July Chinook] catch this year is one of the lowest in the history of the Columbia [Washington and Oregon]."

In 1972, the National Fisherman said:
"Bristol Bay [Alaska] salmon run a disaster . . .Gillnetters in the Lower Columbia [Washington and Oregon] received . . .the largest run of spring chinook since counting began in 1938."

Pacific Fishing wrote in 1995:
"Alaska set a new record for its salmon harvest in 1994, breaking the record set the year before. . . . Columbia [Washington and Oregon] spring Chinook fishery shut down; west coast troll coho [salmon] fishing banned."

The scientists call it "co-variance" an event that impacts two separate situations in opposite ways. The event is a huge, robust recurring pattern of ocean-climate variability called the Pacific Interdecadal Climate Oscillation. It shifts the phytoplankton (which feed the bait fish that feed the salmon) back and forth between the Washington-Oregon coast and Alaska every 25 years or so.

When the Pacific Northwest salmon catches began to decline after 1975, the environmental groups told us logging and farming were killing the fish by allowing more sediment to reach salmon spawning streams. The logging was sharply reduced, but no salmon recovery occurred.

Then the eco-activists said the problem was dams, and huge amounts of cash were spent making the dams and power plants more fish-friendly. The salmon continued to decline.

There were no big manmade stream changes in the last two years to trigger the current salmon recovery. The Portland Oregonian credited "changes in ocean conditions" without mentioning the natural cycle.

The Oregonian doesn't want to admit it's been fanning an eco-hoax for the past two decades. The federal fishery managers don't want to give up their crisis funding. The eco-groups want to get rid of the dams and their electrical generating capacity. All continue to mislead the public.

Noting that President Bush has described the dams as crucial to the economic life of the Pacific Northwest, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club said "We are not so rich that we can afford to lose our wild salmon or so poor that we must keep the Snake River dams that are killing them."

The National Wildlife Federation said, "By rejecting the administration's salmon plan because it lacks scientific credibility, the door is open to fashioning a plan based on sound science that will save salmon."

However, Dr. Nathan Mantua, of the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans, notes that the Pacific Oscillation reversed itself in 1925, 1947, and 1977. The latest reversal is right on schedule. Dr Mantua also says federal and state fish management cannot alter the dominant role of ocean conditions in the salmon cycle. He expects the Northwest's salmon catches to surge for the next two decades, with or without Sierra Club help.

Sacrificing thousands of jobs for dam breaching would help the salmon no more than did sacrificing thousands of logging jobs when the Feds shut down the forests.

I'm going to do my part for the future of the Pacific Northwest. I'm going to mail Judge Redden -- and President Bush -- a copy of this column, along with Dr. Mantua's 1997 peer-reviewed paper from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

C'mon, Plunker......you know it's the cows that poop and the dogs that play in the rivers that are the cause of salmon depletion. Good thing they got them salmon killers under control so the runs could rebound!

Funny how when the runs are in trouble, it's my fault.....and when they are good, it's a "factor of the ocean".

I question the use of the term "best available science" when what I see is presentation of "most supportive data".

Gotta keep those Federal funds rollin' in! Don't we?



Good Post!!

Plunker, interesting to note that the "largest run on record" in the Columbia that the author talked about did not mention how many of those fish were wild and how many were hatchery.

If you are prepared to put your faith in hatchery fish that are raised by the government, then I've got some bottom land that I'd like to show you. I am not as confident as you. I'm also not prepared to recommend the breaching of the Snake River dams. I am waiting for some good science to show me the way. I would submit that going to some of the links that the Center for Global Food Studies has on their site did not fill me with confidence that they posess good unbiased science.

That's what I like about your input Eddie. You can be critical yet analytical and open minded.

BTW - I never said that I beleived in or subscribed to what was presented in the article. I simply felt that it's polarity served to balance some otherwise unchallenged bias previously presented here.

Plunker,

As so often happens, the truth that lies between the extremes doesn't garner much press. Fishery scientists I know don't deny the role of marine survival and its likely relationship to a Pacific Decadal Oscillation. However, to say that fish are recovering because of it is extremely narrow minded as well as wrong.

It's true that we cannot control ocean survival. But what about freshwater survival? Are you saying that logging impacts that have made tributary streams nearly barren of spawning and rearing capacity due to mass wasting and so forth are irrelevant to salmon production or recovery? What if we had both healthy freshwater systems coinciding with high marine survival? Now, that would really look like something I could call recovery.

Calling the present temporary increase in production that is due solely to improved marine survival salmon recovery is specious and duplicitous. You seem knowledgable enough to already know that, so I'm surprised you'd be fueling this fire with misinformation.

Recovery is when significant productivity and capacity exists in anadromous fish habitat to sustain both the population and a viable fishery during periods of both high and low marine survival rates. We ain't even close to that kind of recovery. Sorry to pop the balloon.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

The media spin on science seems to hate nuance and love a the simplest interpretations. It is my opinion, and the opinion of virtually everyone in the climate research world, that we cannot now predict what will happen with our climate in the next 2 to 20+ years. The only skill we now have in making climate predictions comes from an ability to keep track of El Nino and then predict what it will do for about 1 year into the future. That skill is also limited, mostly to years when something especially strong develops in the tropics. Looking farther into the future (say a 30 to 100+ years), there is a growing body of evidence that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will warm the planet--"global warming". There is also a lot of evidence that we've already started to experience the early stages of global warming. It's not to say that the science of global warming is settled, but in most of science that's what we're faced with. Tough issues that require careful statements about what we know and what we don't know. So let me try and lay out a few things with regard to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation:

1. we know that Northwest climate over the past century had warm eras from ~ 1925-1946 and 1977-present, and relatively cold eras from ~1890-1924 and 1947-1976; coincident with these climate eras were changes in ocean temperature patterns: warm in the coastal waters when it was warm in the NW, and cool in the coastal waters when it was cool in the NW. The cool eras had relatively good salmon production in the NW (CA-OR-WA and Southern BC), but relatively poor salmon production for Alaska. The warm eras were especially good for salmon production in Alaska, but especially poor for salmon production in the NW. We don't know why the climate more-or-less got stuck in those patterns for 20 to 30 year periods.

2. In the past 5 years, the coastal ocean from around British Columbia south to California has been in a cooler period, especially compared to the exceptionally warm period that ran from 1991-spring 1998. This cool period has not consistently been seen in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. In fact, the past 5 years have seen a prevalence of very warm ocean temperatures around Alaska. The recent cool period is clearly different than the cool period that dominated from 1947-1976.

3. The "pattern" of salmon abundance of the past few years does not match the pattern observed in the previous cold period: Alaska salmon production has remained mostly high, while NW salmon production has also rebounded for many stocks that were in steep decline in the early-to-mid 1990s.

4. While our coastal ocean (Calif to BC) has been on the cool side most of the past 5 summers, NW temperatures over land have been either near-average or well above average.

All these observations suggest that the "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" pattern of the past century has not been a good model for explaining what's been happening since 1998. This issue will be the topic of a session in a national meeting of oceanographers and climate scientists in Portland next January. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of answers for why these recent climate changes look the way they do, and we don't have any confident predictions for what our climate will do in the next 2 to 20 years or so.

What does this all mean for salmon recovery? Don't count on the ocean or climate to bail us out of the big problems created in our watersheds and estuaries, and with hatcheries and harvest.

Nathan Mantua, PhD
Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans
University of Washington

NM-
With regard to your point #3, could it be that we are within a transitional period from a warmer to cooler climate that is being adversely affected by global warming ... and that the salmon are simultaneously "rebounding" in both areas as a result?

Sky-Guy,
I don't think the recent changes are as simple as "PDO+global warming", but it is a possibility. One of the really interesting things about the climate of the past few years is that it has brought us some incredible extremes-- recall the record snowfall winter of 1998/1999, the extreme drought of 2000/2001, some of the lowest summer streamflows on record this summer and fall, and then some of the highest flows ever recorded this fall. In the climate research business, we try to find patterns amid all this variation, and sometimes clear patterns are hard to find. The climate of the past few years, in my opinion, has been difficult to characterize in any simple way.

Thanks, Nathan. Good post. Clear and cogent.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Terrific post NM...

...thank you.