Another week of GW News, June 13, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years


This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup

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Another week of Climate Instability News

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

June 13, 2010


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My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk. An overview of my writing is available here.

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-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.


"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do." -Wendell Berry

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The thing that first caught my eye here is the federal inquiry, the Cohen Commission, for understanding the decline of Fraser River sockeye. It's almost out of place in Global Warming News, because a lot of the focus will be on other topics. There is some intersection, however, that might be worth investigating. This goes beyond the warming of the Fraser River and the consequent migratory mortality experienced by the sockeye.

First, we have politicians, lawyers, judges, and interest groups taking up a lot of time and resources to "get to the bottom of things." Really, that is what science is for, and it's too bad the money going to support this stuff (Cohen Commission is probably going to cost over 25 million) isn't instead directed to scientific study (DFOs science budget keeps getting cut).

That brings up a second point, but this one highlights a difference between AGW and the Fraser sockeye problem. WRT AGW, the fundamental science is quite mature -- we know that pumping out too much CO2 has consequences, and politicians, lawyers, judges, and interest groups should be involved in finding solutions. Fraser sockeye are still poorly understood, and the inquiry doesn't even hope to arrive at solutions.

A third point of intersection is the subjectivity owing to the background of the person. Detection of the trend in both cases is less controversial; attribution to cause in both cases is frequently divorced from reality. For AGW it's solar output, cosmic rays, ocean cycles, under-water volcanoes, socialist plots, etc that cause the trends in CO2 or temperature. For Fraser sockeye, it's commercial fishing, native poaching, government plots, etc. All we know is that the freshwater can still produce a lot of young sockeye -- fewer come back from the ocean. There are simply too few fish to be caught.

Something is going on in the ocean. I was interested to see climate change among the topics that the Judicial Inquiry will review, and I was a bit surprised to see ocean acidification left out. There is a workshop starting today, organized by the Pacific Salmon Commission, that will address several leading hypotheses for the Fraser sockeye decline. The workshop involves mostly scientists. It's being held now because the Cohen Commission's findings will arrive too late. Interestingly the Judicial Inquiry is in the news, but the scientific inquiry is not.

By Anonymous runt (not verified) on 15 Jun 2010 #permalink