Fishing News

Federal disaster loans offered to commercial Dungeness crab fishermen

Monterey – Help is on the way in the form of federal disaster loans for commercial fishermen who have suffered financial losses from California’s canceled commercial Dungeness crab season this year.

That’s according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which announced this week that it is offering low-interest federal disaster loans to small business commercial fishermen. With a “disaster” declaration made by Gov. Jerry Brown, fishermen can receive immediate access to the loans of up to $2 million at an interest rate of 4 percent (2.625 percent for private, non-profit organizations) with terms of up to 30 years. Those eligible include any small business owner or worker engaged in crab fishing in the waters affected by the delay of the season itself or by the closure of Rock Crab Fishery. That includes the suppliers of fishing gear and fuel, docks and boatyards, processors, wholesalers, shippers and retailers. The declaration covers 39 counties in California including Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, and two counties in Nevada and two counties in Oregon.

“If anybody feels like they’re impacted in any way, shape or form, than they should apply,” said Susheel Kumar, Public Information Officer for the Small Business Association.

It was in November that state officials closed the Dungeness crab fishing season after finding unsafe levels of a toxin called domoic acid, caused by a massive coastal algae bloom fueled by El Nino.

The season was originally set to kick off on Nov. 15.

“We run crab combos from November until April where we put the pots out in the water and go pull out the crab pots in the afternoon,” said Chris Arcoleo of Chris’s Fishing Trips and Whale Watching in Monterey. “So without having the crabs to make the trip worthwhile for those people, it really affects you. And once you get into January and February, all we can fish for is flat fish, and it affects the amount of fish you can take trips out for.”

The closed crab fishing season has also impacted Phil’s Fish Market in Moss Landing, according to owner Phil DiGirolama.

“We didn’t have any local crab so we’re bringing crab up from Oregon and the price reflects that,” said DiGirolama.

But for Mike Ricketts of the Monterey Commercial Fishing Association who has made his living from crab and salmon fishing for the last 40 years, it has been a combination of the recent bad salmon season and now crab season that has really hit him and other fishermen hard.

“No one saw it coming so nobody could prepare for it,” said Ricketts. “Fishermen had already spent a considerable amount of money without having any way to repay it.”

Ricketts said that probably 80 percent of income from crab fishing has gone by.

“Most guys are living off their credit cards,” he said. “And now the further we go into the season, the less demand there is for crab.”

Ricketts is also leery of the SBA loans.

“That doesn’t help a lot of people because of the collateral they want,” he said. “If you own a boat and you can’t pay it back, they’ll want your boat and that scares a lot of fishermen. If we don’t get to go fishing, there are no ways for these to be repaid.”

But Kumar said that help is there if needed and those interested can learn more at two different information sessions in the Monterey area, one at the Moss Landing Harbor District at 7881 Sandholdt Road on Wednesday and the other at the Monterey Harbor Office at 250 Figueroa St. on Friday, Feb. 12. Applicants can also go online at https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela.

Last year, California crab fishermen caught 16.8 million pounds of Dungeness, worth $58.3 million. That was considered a “strong” season, according to the 2014 Dungeness Crab Report put out by the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission.

This year, the commercial season is scheduled to end June 30.

Carly Mayberry can be reached at 726-4363.

Read the original post: http://www.marinij.com/

Harmful Algal Blooms: A Sign of Things to Come?

Pseudo-nitzschia, a marine algae that produces a toxin called demoic acid. Excess production of pseudo-nitzchia can result in a harmful algal bloom such as the one that shut down shellfish fisheries along the U.S. West Coast last year. Photo: NOAA Fisheries.

Scientists from NOAA Fisheries and the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab have developed the Environmental Sample Processor, a robot that monitors the water for harmful algal blooms. This one is being deployed in Puget Sound, just north of Seattle. Credit: NOAA Fisheries/Stephanie Moore.

Fish toxins at lowest levels in decades

Fishermen unload their catch on April 16, 2015 in the Baja California town of San Felipe. / photo by Misael Virgen * U-T

Fish in today’s oceans contain far lower levels of mercury, DDT and other toxins than at any time in the past four decades, according to a major review by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

In what’s billed as the first analysis of its kind, the researchers looked at nearly 2,700 studies of pollutants found in fish samples taken from all over the world between 1969 and 2012. They saw steady, significant drops in the concentrations of a wide range of contaminants known to accumulate in fish — from about 50 percent for mercury to more than 90 percent for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

At high enough concentrations, these toxins can cause cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects, thyroid problems and other ailments in people who consume tainted fish.

Echoing what marine experts have said over the years, the Scripps scientists conclude that clean-water regulations, lawsuits and other forms of public pressure have led to bans or sharp reductions in the use of industrial and agricultural contaminants that end up in creeks, rivers and oceans.

But they also tempered the good news with a sobering reminder: Many fish in the wild still have pollutants at levels considered unsafe for frequent human consumption.

And forget the longstanding belief that smaller fish — those lower on the food chain — generally contain fewer toxins than large predator fish, or that fish caught in certain areas of the world are safer than those harvested in other zones.

“Maybe there’s a little pattern of those predators through bioaccumulation having more [contamination], but it wasn’t a common pattern. So it doesn’t mean you’re safe as long as you eat a halibut,” said Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at Scripps and co-author of the new analysis.

“There’s just a lot more complexity out there that washes away that very clean and easy signal of, ‘Eat something that’s not a predator and you’ll be OK,’” he added.

The new report found no predictable pattern of contamination.

Some mackerel and sardines had far greater pollution than some swordfish and shark. In addition, oceanographers have come to realize that an unexpectedly high number of fish species migrate for thousands of miles. Even within a school of fish caught in the same location, the degree of toxins can vary greatly from one individual fish to another.

To further complicate matters, today’s increasingly international seafood market means that U.S. stores typically sell fish shipped from Southeast Asia, South America and elsewhere.

“Some fish [surprisingly] showed low concentrations and some showed very high concentrations” of toxins, Sandin said. “So it’s a little bit of a gamble.”

Rita Kampalath, science and policy director for the environmental group Heal the Bay, said while the decrease in contaminant levels is welcomed news, it isn’t particularly surprising. “It’s great that that’s documented. I would hope that they would drop since many of these contaminants haven’t been produced for a long time,” she said.

The report, published Thursday in the journal PeerJ, focused on five contaminants or classes of contaminants that are widespread in the oceans: chlordane, DDT, mercury, PCBs and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs.

Sandin and his colleagues didn’t try to assess the health effects of these chemicals because that field of science has long been established. Instead, they sought to identify geographic and other patterns in the chemical contamination of fish worldwide.

Their analysis showed that on average, pollutant concentrations now meet federal safety guidelines in the United States for occasional fish consumption — two or three servings per week, based on various marine groups’ standards. For example, mercury and PCBs were found at levels acceptable for occasional human consumption and DDT was consistently below the established threshold for concern.

Still, with millions of people worldwide relying on fish as their main source of protein, the threat of contamination continues to loom large.

“We label a lot of things like whether it’s sustainable or whether it’s wild-caught or farmed, but one of the things that we still haven’t figured out how to do is to address whether it’s contaminated or not. I think that’s something most people want to know,” said Amro Hamdoun, a biology professor at Scripps and co-author of the new report.

Attempts to track contamination by species, geographic region and other factors revealed a complex set of circumstances that researchers have yet to fully understand.

“The pollution does not stay in one place,” Sandin said. “We thought that we would find something like that. But when you start increasing the scale, that predictability goes away. We didn’t find any evidence that when you’re near shore versus 100 miles off shore that you had more or less chemicals in the seafood.”

Currently, chemical testing for seafood is limited and expensive.

“One of the things that we’re working on right now in the lab is new technologies that could be used to rapidly screen fish and other types of food for these different types of contaminants,” Hamdoun said.

He and his Scripps colleagues also are collecting data about yellowfin tuna from around the world, in part to develop techniques for studying how various contaminants interact with one another. They said such testing is needed because one specimen of fish often contains several types of pollutants.

“For a consumer, if you’re eating something that has a high chemical concentration of one you’re getting a bunch, you’re getting a cocktail of these chemicals,” Sandin said. “And we’ve yet to explore the health consequences of mixing these chemicals.”

Kampalath of Heal the Bay agreed with the Scripps team that further research is needed.

“I think the authors acknowledged there are confounding factors that would make the conclusions less clean,” Kampalath said. “The coarseness of the scale presents a challenge in identifying patterns in [pollutant] concentration levels.”

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Fishing Not to Blame for Sea Lion Deaths

Complex, proactive management efforts have been in place for decades to prevent overfishing in California, efforts are working.

Buellton, California (PRWEB) February 01, 2016

Recent media accounts report how sea lion pups are stranding on shore and dying in record numbers because there aren’t enough sardines and anchovies – sea lions’ favorite food – to support their growing population. For example, the Orange County Register, even after acknowledging the cyclical nature of the ocean and marine species, points to overfishing as the problem. (see story here).

“While it seems all too common these days to blame the ocean’s woes on overfishing, the truth is far different in California. Fortunately, we do have an accurate picture. It’s a graph that shows natural sardine booms and busts for the past 1,400 years,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director for the California Wetfish Producers Association. “Oceanic core samples were extracted from an anaerobic trench in the Santa Barbara Channel and study findings were reported by Dr. Tim Baumgartner and others in a 1992 California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) report. The study correlated alternating periods of sardine and anchovy population recruitments and collapses related to warm and cold water oceanic cycles. Sardines tend to favor warm water cycles while anchovy favor cold.

“It’s important to note that most collapses in this timeframe occurred when there was virtually no commercial fishing. The great fluctuations experienced by sardines and anchovies have been known for a long time to be part of a natural cycle,” said Pleschner-Steele.

Fishery scientists can confirm that the recent sardine decline was not the result of overfishing. The less than 8,000 tons of sardine harvested in California in 2014 were still below the federally mandated overfishing limit.

When sardines began returning to abundance in the 1980s, they became perhaps the best-managed fishery in the world – the poster fish for effective ecosystem-based management. The current harvest control rule – established 17 years ago and updated in 2014 with more precautionary science – sets a strict harvest guideline every year that considers ocean conditions and automatically reduces the catch limit as the biomass declines.

Since federal management began in 2000, the sardine biomass estimate has declined more than 70 percent from the 2006 high of 1.3 million mt, and harvest limits have fallen from 152,564 mt in 2007 to a U.S. catch target of 23,293 mt in 2014 – an 85 percent decline. In 2015, the estimated sardine biomass fell below the established “cutoff,” the biomass level above which sardine fishing is allowed, and the directed fishery was closed. This is a perfect example of our fishery management at work to prevent overfishing.

Compare this to the 1940s and ’50s when the fishery harvest averaged 43 percent or more of the standing sardine stock with little regulatory oversight and no limit on the annual catch. The historic sardine fishery collapse devastated Monterey’s Cannery Row.

But that was nearly 70 years ago. The current sardine fishery harvest is less than a quarter of the rate observed during the historical sardine collapse. The current harvest regulations leave close to 90 percent of sardines in the ocean as forage for marine life.

As for anchovy, harvests have actually averaged less than 8,000 tons annually over the last 14 years. Reports often cite a new study alleging a recent anchovy “collapse,” but the study period stopped in 2011 and excluded nearshore egg and larval data where young anchovies always live and spawn. In fact, field surveys in 2015 recorded recruitment of sardine and anchovy larvae and juveniles as “the highest ever” in Central California and relatively high in Southern California. Fishermen in both Monterey and Southern California attest to the abundance of anchovy and sardine along the coast.

“Complex, proactive management efforts have been in place for decades to prevent overfishing in California, efforts are working,” said Pleschner-Steele.

About the California Wetfish Producers Association
The California Wetfish Producers Association is a nonprofit dedicated to research and to promote sustainable Wetfish resources. More info at http://www.californiawetfish.org.

Read the original post: http://www.prweb.com/

U.S. Fisheries Management Clears High Bar for Sustainability Based on New Assessment

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January 28, 2016 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Today, NOAA Fisheries announced the publication of a peer-reviewed self-assessment that shows the standards of the United States fishery management system under the Magnuson-Stevens Act more than meet the criteria of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s ecolabelling guidelines. These same guidelines serve as a basis for many consumer seafood certification and ranking schemes. The assessment demonstrates that the U.S. fisheries management system is particularly strong when considering responsiveness and science-based criteria. Beyond the biological and ecosystem criteria, the assessment also pointed out that the U.S. system incorporates the social and economic components of fisheries essential for effective long-term stewardship.

This assessment was authored by Dr. Michelle Walsh, a former NOAA Fisheries Knauss Fellow and current member of the Marine Science Faculty at Florida Keys Community College. Walsh evaluated the sustainability of how U.S. federal fisheries are managed using the FAO’s Guidelines for the Ecolabelling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries. These guidelines are a set of internationally recognized criteria used to evaluate the sustainability of fisheries around the world.

“While the performance of U.S. fisheries clearly illustrates that the U.S. management system is effective, my colleagues and I wanted to evaluate the U.S. approach to fisheries management as a whole against these international guidelines for ecolabelling seafood,” said Walsh.

Walsh found that the U.S. federal fisheries management system meets all of the FAO guidelines for sustainability. In particular, the assessment highlighted some key strengths of the U.S. system (represented by white/green dots on infographic) including:

• Complying with national and international laws
• Developing and abiding by documented management approaches with frameworks at national or regional levels
• Incorporating uncertainty into stock reference points and catch limits while taking actions if those limits are exceeded
• Taking into account the best scientific evidence in determining suitable conservation and management measures with the goal of long-term sustainability
• Restoring stocks within reasonable timeframes

Evaluating Sustainability

DANIEL PAULY FEEDS MEDIA THE WRONG STORY ABOUT GLOBAL FISHERIES DECLINE; OTHER SCIENTISTS OBJECT

— Posted with permission of SEAFOODNEWS.COM. Please do not republish without their permission. —

Copyright © 2016 Seafoodnews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton – January 25, 2016 — Last week the media was full of a new round of global fishery disaster stories, prompted by an article in Nature Communications by Daniel Pauly & Dirk Zeller affiliated with the Sea Around Us project.

Pauly and Zeller state that FAO global fisheries data has underestimated prior catch, and that therefore if this is taken into account, the decline in fish catch from the peak in the late 1990’s is not 400,000 tons per year, but 1.2 million tons per year.

“Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another,” said Pauly to the Guardian newspaper.  As a result, a new round of handwringing ensued about global overfishing.

But, the facts don’t support Pauly’s interpretation.  Catch rates are simply not a suitable measure of fisheries abundance.  In fact, declines in catch rates often are due to improvement in fisheries management, not declines in abundance.

Over at cfood, a number of scientists specifically rebutted the premise of Pauly’s article.

Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington says:

This paper tells us nothing fundamentally new about world catch, and absolutely nothing new about the status of fish stocks.

It has long been recognized that by-catch, illegal catch and artisanal catch were underrepresented in the FAO catch database, and that by-catch has declined dramatically.

What the authors claim, and the numerous media have taken up, is the cry that their results show that world fish stocks are in worse shape than we thought. This is absolutely wrong. We know that fish stocks are stable in some places, increasing in others and declining in yet others.

Most of the major fish stocks of the world, constituting 40% of the total catch are scientifically assessed using a mixture of data sources including data on the trends in abundance of the fish stocks, size and age data of the fish caught and other information as available. This paper really adds nothing to our understanding of these major fish stocks.

Another group of stocks, constituting about 20% of global catch, are assessed using expert knowledge by the FAO. These experts use their personal knowledge of these fish stocks to provide an assessment of their status. Estimating the historical unreported catch for these stocks adds nothing to our understanding of these stocks.

For many of the most important stocks that are not assessed by scientific organizations or by expert opinion, we often know a lot about their status. For example; abundance of fish throughout almost all of South and Southeast Asia has declined significantly. This is based on the catch per unit of fishing effort and the size of the individuals being caught. Estimating the amount of other unreported catches does not change our perspective on the status of these stocks.

In the remaining fisheries where we know little about their status, does the fact that catches have declined at a faster rate than reported in the FAO catch data tell us that global fisheries are in worse shape than we thought? The answer is not really. We would have to believe that the catch is a good index of the abundance.

Figure 1 of the Pauly and Zeller paper shows that a number of major fishing regions have not seen declines in catch in the last 10 years. These areas include the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the Eastern Central Atlantic, the Eastern Indian Ocean, the Northwest Pacific and the Western Indian Ocean. Does this mean that the stocks in these areas are in good shape, while areas that have seen significant declines in catch like the Northeast Atlantic, and the Northeast Pacific are in worse shape?

We know from scientific assessments that stocks in the Mediterranean and Eastern Central Atlantic are often heavily overfished – yet catches have not declined.

We know that stocks in the Northeast Pacific are abundant, stable and not overfished, and in the Northeast Atlantic are increasing in abundance. Yet their catch has declined.

Total catch, and declines in catch, are not a good index of the trends in fish stock abundance.

Michael Kaiser of Bangor University commented:

Catch and stock status are two distinct measurement tools for evaluating a fishery, and suggesting inconsistent catch data is a definitive gauge of fishery health is an unreasonable indictment of the stock assessment process. Pauly and Zeller surmise that declining catches since 1996 could be a sign of fishery collapse. While they do acknowledge management changes as another possible factor, the context is misleading and important management efforts are not represented. The moratorium on cod landings is a good example – zero cod landings in the Northwest Atlantic does not mean there are zero cod in the water. Such distinctions are not apparent in the analysis.

Also David Agnew, director of standards for the Marine Stewardship Council, said:

It is noteworthy that the peak of the industrial catches – in the late 1990s/early 2000s – coincidentally aligns with the start of the recovery of many well managed stocks. This point of recovery has been documented previously and particularly relates to the recovery of large numbers of stocks in the north Pacific, the north Atlantic and around Australia and New Zealand, and mostly to stocks that are assessed by analytical models. For stocks that need to begin recovery plans to achieve sustainability, this most often entails an overall reduction in fishing effort, which would be reflected in the reductions in catches seen here. So, one could attribute some of the decline in industrial catch in these regions to a correct management response to rebuild stocks to a sustainable status, although I have not directly analyzed the evidence for this. This is therefore a positive outcome worth reporting.

This opinion piece originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

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CFOOD: DO “CATCH RECONSTRUCTIONS” REALLY IMPLICATE OVERFISHING?

January 22, 2016—The following is commentary from Michel J. Kaiser of Bangor University and David Agnew of the Marine Stewardship Council concerning the recently published article, “Catch Reconstructions Reveal that Global Marine Fisheries Catches are Higher than Reported and Declining” by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller in Nature.

A new paper led by Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia that found global catch data, as reported to the FAO, to be significantly lower than the true catch numbers. “Global fish catches are falling three times faster than official UN figures suggest, according to a landmark new study, with overfishing to blame.”

400 researches spent the last decade accumulating missing global catch data from small-scale fisheries, sport fisheries, illegal fishing activity and fish discarded at sea, which FAO statistics, “rarely include.”

“Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another,” Pauly says.

Despite these findings, Pauly doesn’t expect countries to realize the need to rebuild stocks, primarily because the pressures to continue current fishing effort are too strong in the developing world. But this study will allow researchers to see the true problems more clearly and hopefully inform policy makers accordingly.

Comment by Michel J. Kaiser, Bangor University, @MicheljKaiser

Catch and stock status are two distinct measurement tools for evaluating a fishery, and suggesting inconsistent catch data is a definitive gauge of fishery health is an unreasonable indictment of the stock assessment process. Pauly and Zeller surmise that declining catches since 1996 could be a sign of fishery collapse. While they do acknowledge management changes as another possible factor, the context is misleading and important management efforts are not represented. The moratorium on cod landings is a good example – zero cod landings in the Northwest Atlantic does not mean there are zero cod in the water. Such distinctions are not apparent in the analysis.

Another key consideration missing from this paper is varying management capacity. European fisheries are managed more effectively and provide more complete data than Indian Ocean fisheries, for example. A study that aggregates global landings data is suspect because indeed landings data from loosely managed fisheries are suspect.

Finally the author’s estimated catch seems to mirror that of the official FAO catch data, ironically proving its legitimacy. “Official” FAO data is not considered to be completely accurate, but rather a proportionate depiction of global trends. Pauly’s trend line is almost identical, just shifted up the y axis, and thus fails to significantly alter our perception of global fisheries.

Michel J. Kaiser is a Professor of Marine Conservation Ecology at Bangor University. Find him on twitter here.

Comment by David Agnew, Director of Standards, Marine Stewardship Council

The analysis of such a massive amount of data is a monumental task, and I suspect that the broad conclusions are correct. However, as is usual with these sorts of analyses, when one gets to a level of detail where the actual assumptions can be examined, in an area in which one is knowledgeable, it is difficult to follow all the arguments.  The Antarctic catches “reconstruction” apparently is based on one Fisheries Centre report (2015 Volume 23 Number 1) and a paper on fishing down ecosystems (Polar Record; Ainley and Pauly 2014). The only “reconstruction” appears to be the addition of IUU and discard data, all of which are scrupulously reported by CCAMLR anyway, so they are not unknown. But there is an apparent 100,000 t “unreported” catch in the reconstruction in Figure 3, Atlantic, Antarctic (48). This cannot include the Falklands (part of the Fisheries Centre paper) and it is of a size that could only be an alleged misreporting of krill catch in 2009. This is perhaps an oblique reference to concerns that CCAMLR has had in the past about conversion factors applied to krill products, or perhaps unseen (net-impact) mortality, but neither of these elements have been substantiated, nor referenced in the supporting documentation that I have seen (although I could not access the polar record paper).

The paper does not go into much detail on these reasons for the observed declines in catches and discards, except to attribute it to both reductions in fishing mortality attendant on management action to reduce mortality and generate sustainability, and some reference to declines in areas that are not managed. It is noteworthy that the peak of the industrial catches – in the late 1990s/early 2000s – coincidentally aligns with the start of the recovery of many well managed stocks. This point of recovery has been documented previously (Costello et al 2012; Rosenberg et al 2006; Gutierrez et al 2012) and particularly relates to the recovery of large numbers of stocks in the north Pacific, the north Atlantic and around Australia and New Zealand, and mostly to stocks that are assessed by analytical models. For stocks that need to begin recovery plans to achieve sustainability, this most often entails an overall reduction in fishing effort, which would be reflected in the reductions in catches seen here. So, one could attribute some of the decline in industrial catch in these regions to a correct management response to rebuild stocks to a sustainable status, although I have not directly analyzed the evidence for this. This is therefore a positive outcome worth reporting.

The above-reported inflection point is also coincident with the launch of the MSC’s sustainability standard. These standards have now been used to assess almost 300 fisheries, and have generated environmental improvements in most of them (MSC 2015). Stock sustainability is part of the requirements of the standard, and previous analyses (Gutierrez et al 2012, Agnew et al 2012) have shown that certified fisheries have improved their stock status and achieved sustainability at a higher rate than uncertified fisheries. The MSC program does not claim responsibility for the turn-around in global stocks, but along with other actions – such as those taken by global bodies such as FAO, by national administrations, and by industry and non-Governmental Organisations – it can claim to have provided a significant incentive for fisheries to become, and then remain, certified.

David Agnew is the Director of Standards at the Marine Stewardship Council, the largest fishery sustainability ecolabel in the world. You can follow MSC on twitter.

Read the commentary at CFOOD

Read the original post: http://www.savingseafood.org/

CFOOD: WHAT IS THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF OUR FOOD?

January 20, 2016—The following is a commentary from Dr. Ray Hilborn, Professor of Aquatic and Fishery Science at the University of Washington, concerning the recently published article, “Eating Right Can Save the World”  by Tim Zimmerman in Outside Magazine.

“The endless cascade of nutritional information—about localism, vegetarianism, veganism, organic food, the environmental impact of eating meat, poultry, or fish, and more—makes the simple goal of a healthy, sustainable diet seem hopelessly complex. We talked to scientists, chefs, and farmers to get the ultimate rundown on how you should fuel up.”

Author Tim Zimmerman’s discussion of this topic focuses primarily on carbon footprint of different foods. When it comes to seafood, he cites Dalhousie University professor, Peter Tyedmers, who argues, “when it comes to nitrogen and phosphorous, greenhouse gases, and other global-scale phenomena, absolutely most seafood is much better than most terrestrial animal production.”

But seafood sustainability certifications like Monterray Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch do not calculate emissions into their ratings. For example, some pot-caught species that are considered a “Best Choice” or “Good Alternative” by Seafood Watch standards might actually have greater greenhouse gas emissions than beef because of the exhaustive extraction practicalities of this gear type.

Zimmerman recommends mussels, clams, forage fish that “aren’t caught by a trawler,” and Pollock from the, “reasonably managed” Alaskan Pollock fishery as the best choices for consumers looking to maximize Seafood Watch ratings and minimize carbon footprint. Aquaculture is more complicated because the more “sustainable” choices are typically from closed re-circulating systems that require more energy and water use than open net pens.

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington, @hilbornr

At last – a great article on the environmental impacts of our food choices. The material on fish is particularly good and relies on the acknowledged world expert Peter Tyedmers. In the past decade, environmental impacts of capture fisheries has been put under the microscope. A tour through high end grocery stores will show you labels about what fish are “sustainable,” but step over to the meat or vegetable counter and there is no sustainability labeling, just information such as “organic” or “GMO free.” The implication is that meat and vegetables are obviously sustainable, as farming has been practiced for thousands of years.

In his book, The Perfect Protein, Andy Sharpless, the CEO of the environmental non-profit, OCEANA points out that fish are caught without fertilizer, pesticides, antibiotics or freshwater. Combine that with the generally low carbon footprint of most fisheries compared to the protein alternatives, and you have “The Perfect Protein.”

Another issue that has had great publicity in fisheries is biodiversity impacts, often through by-catch of non-target species. Species like sharks, turtles, marine birds and mammals are caught in some kinds of fishing gear. While such by-catch can often be largely eliminated by good fishing practices, there is no denying that fishing impacts biodiversity. But again we see agriculture and livestock getting an almost clean bill of health. This ignores the fact that agriculture transforms land dramatically: in most farmed areas the native large animals are essentially gone. While it is hard to compare the oceans directly, they have seen far less loss of biodiversity than farmed areas.

Zimmerman and Outside Magazine provide an excellent and much needed perspective on most of these issues; lets hope that it is the start of a rational conversation on the environmental impacts of what we eat.

Ray Hilborn is a Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Find him on twitter here:@hilbornr

Read the commentary at CFOOD

Read the original post: http://www.savingseafood.org/

2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say

Clockwise from top left: A family sleeping on the roof of a house in New Delhi last May; people navigating a flooded street in a canoe in Arnold, Mo., on Dec. 31; tourists in a haze-shrouded Singapore last September; the drought-stricken Molatedi Dam in South Africa in November. Credit Clockwise from top left; Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press, Jeff Roberson/Associated Press, Edgar Su/Reuters, Stuart Graham/Associated Press

Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year in the historical record by far, breaking a mark set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world.

In the contiguous United States, the year was the second-warmest on record, punctuated by a December that was both the hottest and the wettest since record-keeping began. One result has been a wave of unusual winter floods coursing down the Mississippi River watershed.

Scientists started predicting a global temperature record months ago, in part because an El Niño weather pattern, one of the largest in a century, is releasing an immense amount of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere. But the bulk of the record-setting heat, they say, is a consequence of the long-term planetary warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The whole system is warming up, relentlessly,” said Gerald A. Meehl, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

It will take a few more years to know for certain, but the back-to-back records of 2014 and 2015 may have put the world back onto a trajectory of rapid global warming, after a period of relatively slow warming dating to the last powerful El Niño, in 1998.

Politicians attempting to claim that greenhouse gases are not a problem seized on that slow period to argue that “global warming stopped in 1998,” with these claims and similar statements reappearing recently on the Republican presidential campaign trail.

Statistical analysis suggested all along that the claims were false, and that the slowdown was, at most, a minor blip in an inexorable trend, perhaps caused by a temporary increase in the absorption of heat by the Pacific Ocean.

“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”

The Hottest Year on Record

Globally, 2015 was the warmest year in recorded history.

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, calculated that if the global climate were not warming, the odds of setting two back-to-back record years would be remote, about one chance in every 1,500 pairs of years. Given the reality that the planet is warming, the odds become far higher, about one chance in 10, according to Dr. Mann’s calculations.

Two American government agencies — NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — compile separate analyses of the global temperature, based upon thousands of measurements from weather stations, ships and ocean buoys scattered around the world. Meteorological agencies in Britain and Japan do so, as well. The agencies follow slightly different methods to cope with problems in the data, but obtain similar results.

The American agencies released figures on Wednesday showing that 2015 was the warmest year in a global record that began, in their data, in 1880. British scientists released figures showing 2015 as the warmest in a record dating to 1850. The Japan Meteorological Agency had already released preliminary results showing 2015 as the warmest year in a record beginning in 1891.

On Jan. 7, NOAA reported that 2015 was the second-warmest year on record, after 2012, for the lower 48 United States. That land mass covers less than 2 percent of the surface of the Earth, so it is not unusual to have a slight divergence between United States temperatures and those of the planet as a whole.

The end of the year was especially remarkable in the United States, with virtually every state east of the Mississippi River having a record warm December, often accompanied by heavy rains.

A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and an intensification of rainstorms was one of the fundamental predictions made by climate scientists decades ago as a consequence of human emissions. That prediction has come to pass, with the rains growing more intense across every region of the United States, but especially so in the East.

The term global warming is generally taken to refer to the temperature trend at the surface of the planet, and those are the figures reported by the agencies on Wednesday.

Some additional measurements, of shorter duration, are available for the ocean depths and the atmosphere above the surface, both generally showing an inexorable long-term warming trend.

Most satellite measurements of the lower and middle layers of the atmosphere show 2015 to have been the third- or fourth-warmest year in a 37-year record, and scientists said it was slightly surprising that the huge El Niño had not produced a greater warming there. They added that this could yet happen in 2016.

When temperatures are averaged at a global scale, the differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree. In the NOAA data set, 2015 was 0.29 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 2014, the largest jump ever over a previous record. NASA calculated a slightly smaller figure, but still described it as an unusual one-year increase.

The intense warmth of 2015 contributed to a heat wave in India last spring that turns out to have been the second-worst in that country’s history, killing an estimated 2,500 people. The long-term global warming trend has exacted a severe toll from extreme heat, with eight of the world’s 10 deadliest heat waves occurring since 1997.

Only rough estimates of heat deaths are available, but according to figures from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, in Brussels, the toll over the past two decades is approaching 140,000 people, with most of those deaths occurring during a European heat wave in 2003 and a Russian heat wave in 2010.

The strong El Niño has continued into 2016, raising the possibility that this year will, yet again, set a global temperature record. The El Niño pattern is also disturbing the circulation of the atmosphere, contributing to worldwide weather extremes that include a drought in southern Africa, threatening the food supply of millions.

Read the original post: http://www.nytimes.com/

El Niño is here, so where’s SoCal’s non-stop rain?

So far in terms of rainfall, this winter’s El Niño weather pattern has been more of a gecko than a Godzilla.

Southern California, which usually sees the bulk of the state’s El Niño-related storms, only experienced a few wet days in the first half of January. Overall, precipitation in Los Angeles and the rest of California is several inches behind where it was at this time during the last big El Niño in 1998.

(Recent rainfall totals for California as of January 15th (in black) compared with rainfall from the five strongest El Niño systems on record. Image: California-Nevada Climate Applications Program / NOAA.)

Still, scientists are telling us this El Niño is one of the strongest ever recorded. So what gives?

Well, first off, it’s still early in the game, said Anthony Barnston, Chief Forecaster for Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

“California typically shows its greatest responses to El Niño during January-March, rather than the earlier part of the winter,” he noted.

In short, there is still plenty of time for a good soaking.

That’s welcome news since much of the state is still below where it typically would be for an average water year.

Nate Mantua with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there may be another factor worth considering.

Sure, this El Niño is strong when it comes to some key indicators like record warm surface temperatures in a swath of the Pacific associated with the weather pattern.

But Mantua noted that it is weaker in other climate signals, like the strength of the trade winds or the temperature of the ocean below the surface.

“It has a lot of the same characteristics as big El Niños of the past, but it also has some differences that may end up leading to different outcomes for what it does to weather in California and along the whole pacific coast,” he explained.

For example, he says the Pacific Northwest is getting a lot of heavy rain this winter, which isn’t typical for strong El Niño years.

So, expect surprises from this climate pattern.

(This map shows the amount of rain in CA for this water year which starts on October 1st and ends on September 30th. Yellow and orange areas are below average precipitation and blues and purples are above average. Image via NOAA.)

Recent observations of the El Niño signal have noted that it seems to be weakening, as is often the case by this point in the winter.

That shouldn’t stop it from sending storms our way through the spring, though, Mantua said.

By summer, it’s likely the El Niño pattern will have completely disappeared, and scientists will start watching the signals again to see if it will return or if the world will see a neutral or La Niña pattern instead.

Read the original post: http://www.scpr.org/