The world fishing industry ought to be shaking in its gumboots at the latest strategic moves by scientists on two areas - their estimates of the loss of global biodiversity and the suggestion that marine life is under threat from rising levels of acidity in the oceans caused by carbon dioxide (read C02 from global warming).
The good news for the industry is that you should not always believe everything you read in a scientific report. The bad news for the scientists is that 'real people' will believe less and in the scientific community.
It is not uncommon to find university professors who find students a nuisance -- they seem to have forgotten that it is only because students exist that profs exist.
Before we test the Acid report we can look at the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 'Ecosystems and Human Well-Being. Launched at the Royal Society in London the speakers went to great pains to point out that "It was carried out by approximately 1,360 experts from 95 countries through four working groups and encompassed both a global assessment and 33 sub-global assessments" and had taken four years et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You would expect the interface between land and sea and the impact of man on the sea (which covers 70 per cent of the globe) to figure largely in the report. It did not. There was something on nitrates affecting coastal waters (as well as increasing food production of course) but….
It was interesting to see within the sea references the influence of a very vocal scientific group who have been highlighting their issues such as coral damage and fishing. There is a raging debate about foragers/predators (with fishermen saying certain stocks are booming) but the scientific view -- generalised decline -- was presented as hard fact. We were told catch estimates were based on the "scientific consensus on a range of things including the catch" and that this consensus had been sent out for peer review (including 180 governments)….
Yet at Norfishing last year, at the "speaker's corner" for public debate everyone heard a leading Norwegian stock scientists saying, openly and honestly, that the scientific stock estimates they did and which were often used by governments could differ + or - by 50 per cent!
Where are the fishermen?
The fisheries data was thin in the 85-page "summary", and some figures seemed incorrect compared to 'official figures'. Your correspondent asked how many fisheries sources were asked for input -- shock, horror, the scientists had not asked the people who actually work the sea and farm fish and shrimp on or by the land for their advice or experience. Why - because this was peer-reviewed data from the scientific community. Why that should be justification for a gap as deep as the Unknown Trench is to say the least disturbing.
To read this report one would think (and we asked of course!) that all the efforts which had been made by the public, companies and governments to clean up their act on land sea and in the air over the last 30 years had had no impact. Oh! Yes… well, but our focus….
Where they trying to frighten us or tell it how it really is? I have not given names (including the new British minister present, appointed a week earlier), in order to protect the guilty.
I was back again in the building of the oldest scientific academy in the world, The Royal Society (RS) for what sounded like a very worrying report from the RS itself: Global warming (how much man-made?) was producing too much CO2 and it was turning the seas acid so all the animal and plant life were at risk…. Phew!
Nearly 15 years ago marine scientists at the Canadian government Bedford Institute of Oceanographic research complained bitterly to me that the land scientists elsewhere were getting big research money and buildings and lots of publicity for 'global warming' research and yet the same scientists were not taking into account the NATURAL warming cycles of the oceans and their bio gases which were vastly greater than those produced by man on land. The Bedford folk, stuck in St John's Halifax, did not see the press very often….
In the early 1980s, local fishermen off the Californian coast in Santa Cruz told me the squid had moved on because of the water temperature change caused by El Nino. The restaurants believed them. But, when your correspondent mentioned "El Nino" to scientists back in Europe their reaction was that it was some Mexican wives' tale -- so much for openness to new ideas.
The Acid group (as I shall call them) may be complimented for noticing something which some of their other colleague scientists had not and raising the issue a year ago in Paris. They began testing PH levels in the sea. Now of course all fishermen know about water salinity and algal blooms and how certain fish prefer to be in the outer ocean, others puddling around in mangrove coastal waters or making a beeline for bulk suppers in plankton-rich waters. So it seems the scientists are trying to catch up and one would have expected them to talk to the everyday experts - the fishermen and fishfarmers.
In contrast to not naming the guilty in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, I am happy to name the acid report leader, Professor John Raven, school of life sciences at the University of Dundee. It is not that I was impressed by the report -- I definitely was not. But when the panel and he got something of a bashing about how little evidence of impact the report contained, he was honest enough to admit that they had not been able to address enough areas or enough detail in the issues. Bearded and sporting a fine kilt and sporran to show he was proud of his Scottish roots… our Celtic fishermen would also have given him a plus point for that.
The report made great play about the potential long-term impact of more acid waters on crustaceans (theoretically having thinner shells because of potentially reduced calcium-producing ability). But, I suggested to Prof Raven, someone fish farming in coastal waters at the moment could NOT use their acid report evidence to decide what to do because it just did not show any quantifiable or certain impact.
"I think that's fair to say. Yes. Yes. Sorry about that….. We could not put our hands on our hearts and say we know what is happening."
The report did make much of the need for more money to be spent on research and I asked the whole panel to put a figure on this and suggested they had hyped to try to get funding, as well as timing the report so it came out at the same moment as the G8 Summit (specifically mentioned in the Royal Society press release). I got no adequate answers.
They told us they were worried about the impact on larvae in the early stages of their growth -- had they talked to the feed companies who do massive research on larval growth and water conditions?….No…… They said that sea mammals such as seals and whales and squid might eventually have trouble breathing because of a reduction of oxygen in the water through acidification.…..They said squid might be particularly affected because they need oxygen for propulsion. Affected how? Where? In what waters? To what degree? What types? Where was the evidence? …They had no idea.
At least, by the end of the discussion, they were prepared to say that they might have been better to highlight the ignorance of the scientific community(rather than hype the acid threat) and then get a sensible, moderate debate going which involved everyone in a discussion about what might happen.
Thank goodness they had remembered at least to raise the "socioeconomic" issue and what this 'acid threat' to marine life would have on people. Alas, I had been duped again! They produced "hard" evidence affecting those towns which rely on snorkelling tourists who pay lots of money now to look at (acid-threatened) coral reefs (the coral lobby again) and who would vanish when the coral went.
The other "hard" evidence was how certain towns, such as those in the US relying on marine tourism, would find it hard to attract investors to build holiday flats on the coast if the coral reefs disappeared. They had no data on fishing villages, on catch issues, economic changes in sale of catches, subsistence fishing and local food production in subsistence economies, this ocean or that ocean, this stock area or that stock area.…
I felt fully justified in prefacing my questions saying that there seemed to be as "many 'ifs', 'buts' and 'maybes' in their report as there are plankton in the sea. One wonders whether a 16-year-old geography student would have failed her/his exam if they had so poorly answered a question about the socioeconomic affects on marine areas of acidification of the oceans.
This kind of half-baked kite-flying, about possible evidence ( I await Mars' dust's effects on soya bean production somewhere in the galaxy in 2050) serves little purpose. Indeed it only increases the already deep decline in the "stock" of scientists in the public mind and even more so when viewed by members of the fishing and seafood-processing industries.
