I'm out here fighting, hungry
The fish ain't biting
Life's so frightening
I'm out here stumbling
Broke and crumbling
And nothing's happening
And aye aye, captain
--Lamont Dozier, "Fish Ain't Bitin' "
Hank Williams at Scientific Blogging has grown weary of the cliches that headline writers use to describe how scientists react to the unexpected. Too bad for him. "Baffled," "stunned" and that good old standby for the climate crowd, "alarmed," are just too tempting for editors to ignore and always will be. But I used to be paid to write headlines, and I understand Williams' point of view.
Which is why it was so refreshing to come across this story in Salon with the relatively prosaic headline of "Will the salmon be back in 2009?" The story, by Jacoba Charles, explores the rises and falls in the fortunes of the salmon stocks of the Pacific coast of North America. It wasn't the headline that made the story memorable, though. It was a quote from a biologist.
To set it up, you need to know that the prevailing wisdom concerning the cause of the recent deviation from what used to pass for normal is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. This cyclic pattern of oceanic conditions brings with it all sorts of consequences for the marine ecosystem, and the fate of salmon is determined, in part, by the PDO. It used to be sort of regular, with a period of two or three decades. So explains fisheries biologist Bill Peterson of Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center.
"But" ;;;; and here comes the gem of the quote to which the title of this post refers ;;;; "in the last decade, he added, the PDO has "gotten all goofy."
Now, that's good communicatin'.
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Which probably would have been more effective if it hadn't ended up double-posted.
One of the things that i love about science is that no one is above reproach.
Goofiness is indeed better than alarm. It helps to put things in perspective to think of global warming as just kind of goofy.
Frankly, I'm alarmed at your attitude. Well no, not really.
All - Although the earth is clearly now on the brink of entering another Ice Age (according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science), and even though most unbiased sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years, and regardless of the fact that ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years - forget all that. We can STILL achieve our goal of forcing people to live their lives without oil and buying only products that WE think should be allowed.
Now, WE just need to come up with a new scam. Something that will take more than 20 years to get laughed off this time. And something better than a retarded single-variable computer model. It was easy enough to get a few dummies in the media buying the whole 5 ppm CO2 catastrophic manmade global warming thing, at least for a short period of time. It should be easy enough to come up with our AGW Hysteria scare Plan B to force people to do what WE want. Anyone get any good ideas for hysteria Plan B? The sooner WE get started the sooner WE can get to our goal of forcing people to live their lives like WE want them to. C'Mon people, WE can DO THIS!! Put your thinking hats on.
James you are so pseudo academicia pesudo psientifica pseudo stupido pseudo hysterical pseudo pretendio at whatever you do or say. Pseudo (i.e. fake false a joke.) Dude just go away. thank you. - your pal Phil Collins. pseu pseu pseudio. (what's with the lame poetry and lyric quotes? did you think that would be cool and original? loser.)