I have never seen a more succinct and telling argument to refute carbon dioxide governed climate change than the following graph from a study by L.B. Klyashtorin pubished as a technical paper by the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation.
from http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e1l.gif
The study entitled ‘Climate change and long term fluctuations of commercial catches: possibilities of forecasting’ concludes that 60-year climate oscillations correspond to the regular fluctuations of the populations and catches of the main commercial fish species.
“Analysing roughly 30-year alternation of the so-called “climatic epochs” characterised by the variation in the Atmospheric Circulation Index (ACI), the study revealed two ACI-dependent groups of major commercial species correlated positively with either “meridional” or “zonal” air mass transport on the hemispheric scale.
“Climate periodicity serves as a basis for a predictive model of the population and catches of major
commercial fish species. The model has two basic limitations.
(1) It is applicable to the abundant fish species only (commercial catch > 1.0 – 1.5 million tons) yielded over large areas, such as North Pacific or North Atlantic as a whole;
(2) The model is intended to analyse and forecast the long-term trends in the population of major commercial species with the assumption that general intensity of commercial fisheries will stay at its average level over the last 20 – 25 years.
“The concept of generating forecasts of anthropogenic climate change and consequent changes in fish production is beyond the scope of this study. However, there is a clear link between fish production and climate, so projecting future climate changes is of importance. Not only can climate be used to forecast commercial fish yields, but also it may be possible to estimate general changes in biological production on the global scale. It is therefore important to maintain databases on routine fisheries data and climate indices in the long term, in order to track these critical processes.”
This study trashes most of the classic examples of fishery collapse due to overfishing. Incidentally, the Pacific Dedadal Oscillation (PDO) has this year switched into its cooler phase.
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) catastrophists are now belatedly accepting natural influences on global temperature to explain the current cooling. If natural cooling is possible then warming must be also and a similar amount of natural influence to that now being attributed to cooling would reduce the greenhouse contribution to the previously observed warming to little or nothing. AGW is beginning to look like the more and more convoluted epicycles invented to maintain the geocentric theory before it finally had to be abandoned.
Walter Starck
Townsville, Australia
————
Klyashtorin L.B. 2001. Climate change and long term fluctuations of commercial catches: the possibility of forecasting. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 410, 98p. FAO (Food Agriculture Organization) of the United Nations, Rome.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Walter,
It would be good to get more precise data on which these graphs are based.
As empircally determined observations, they seem to be quantifying some arcane geophysical periodicy.
But what remains subject to continued research.
This is, of course, science in its purest essence – pseudoscience, or these days better described as technologically sophisticated religion, maintain that its core assumptions remain correct but that it’s the interpretation of the data that are flawed.
I don’t doubt some influence of the PDO on fish species abundance – especially salmon – but how much of the “correlation” is simply catch effort?
And surely our catch effort interacts with the decadal patterns and if sustainable should move in tandem with these patterns.
Doesn’t explain Southern Bluefin Tuna or Newfoundland Cod. Does it explain overfishing in the South Atlantic?
And how do we reconcile with papers such as
Nature 423, 280-283 (15 May 2003) | doi:10.1038/nature01610; Received 25 November 2002; Accepted 25 March 2003
There is a Brief Communications Arising (28 April 2005) associated with this document.
Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities
Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm
1. Biology Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4J1
Correspondence to: Ransom A. Myers Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to R.A.M. (Email: Ransom.Myers@dal.ca).
Top of page
Serious concerns have been raised about the ecological effects of industrialized fishing1, 2, 3, spurring a United Nations resolution on restoring fisheries and marine ecosystems to healthy levels4. However, a prerequisite for restoration is a general understanding of the composition and abundance of unexploited fish communities, relative to contemporary ones. We constructed trajectories of community biomass and composition of large predatory fishes in four continental shelf and nine oceanic systems, using all available data from the beginning of exploitation. Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% within 15 years of exploitation. Compensatory increases in fast-growing species were observed, but often reversed within a decade. Using a meta-analytic approach, we estimate that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels. We conclude that declines of large predators in coastal regions5 have extended throughout the global ocean, with potentially serious consequences for ecosystems5, 6, 7. Our analysis suggests that management based on recent data alone may be misleading, and provides minimum estimates for unexploited communities, which could serve as the ‘missing baseline’8 needed for future restoration efforts.
Oxygen Depletion Zones In Tropical Oceans Expanding, Maybe Due To Global Warming
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080501143406.htm
One useful species with wide global distribution is Pomatomus saltatrix:
Tailor (Australia -east and west coasts)
Elf (South Africa)
Bluefish ( USA)
Lufer (Turkey), and several other countries etc.,etc.
My own purely speculative notion is that in Australia (east coast) the recreational catch is related to plentiful rainfall [ the ‘boom’ fishing years of the 1950s,followed the wetter than average 1950s; a tailor drought period of 3-5 years in rec catches seems to lag just behind the onset of the grip of an El Nino event.
It would be interesting to chart the commercial and recreational ( fishing club records) catches in Australia since 1950.
Alec Pemberton