How Long Before These Salmon Are Gone? ‘Maybe 20 Years’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sockeye-retu...
In one of the most dramatic shifts, the federal Department of Fisheries has adjusted the estimated number of returning Fraser River sockeye to slightly more than 600,000, down from an earlier projection of nearly five million.
If you're interested in the counter-argument, take a look at the Washington Grain Commission's fact sheet:
http://wagrains.org/snake-river-dams-facts/
I think the most productive thing that could be done for the debate (assuming you believe that removing the Snake River dams would be a net-positive, as I do), is to focus on solutions that allow farmers to get their grain to major ports, cost-effectively without relying on the dams.
Take a look at this fact sheet on the ratio of barges, to trucks and trains required to move the same amount of grain:
https://www.pnwa.net/factsheets/CSRS.pdf
A single barge-load of wheat going down the Snake would take 538 trucks. Nobody (besides perhaps trucking companies) wants to put that many additional trucks on the road. However, a train car with 140 cars could take the equivalent of a 4-barge run down the Snake.
The latest comprehensive economic impact study performed on the issue is this one: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TDDHFUn5eNoQyH251rscHiKvfRS... - which broadly concluded that dam removal would be a net positive economic impact for the region, but would (as with any major shift) have winners and losers. As long as grain farmers are among the losers, I expect that lower Snake River damn removal will be a non-starter from a standpoint of local support.
Redfish lake was named for the teems of brightly colored red sockeye salmon that once populated it.
As of two years ago, the last time I was up there, it was still mostly devoid of salmon.
In effect dams and the subsequent fish farming efforts to save the salmon end up being a subsidy for the farmers.
In all fairness I would rather just give farmers a subsidy to transport their grain rather than to try to outsmart nature.
In the end we would ask ourselves if the economics of transporting grain from remote areas is worth it economically, and we can leave the environmental issue out of the equation.
And everyone else in the region who uses electricity generated from the dams, which is quite a bit.
EDIT:. Maybe not as bad as some might think. The 4 lower Snake River damns provide only 4% apparently of the regions power.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/apr/08/replacing-powe...
So while yes the hydropower would need to be replaced it may not be a huge cost to do it.
Looking at complex issues - especially issues involving the environment - through the single lens of economics is dangerous. It's like deciding that the best way to get someplace is to drive 140 MPH, because it's the quickest. And you can leave safety out of the equation.
There are also 7 hydro dams on the Snake [2]. I don't see anyone removing them any time soon, without first replacing these major power sources the northwest depends on.
[1] https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/dam...
The NW Energy Coalition actually sponsored a study recently on what it would take to replace that with a combination of wind, solar, energy efficiency, and demand response.
Here's the homepage for the study: https://nwenergy.org/featured/lsrdstudy/
Some of their findings:
* It's doable.
* It'd cost about $1/mo on the average residential power bill in the region.
* Maintenance for the existing lower Snake River dams runs about $245 million/yr, whereas their proposal would cost around $464 million/yr.
* They projected a doable timeline of within the next 10 years.
My concern with such conclusions is that we are measuring different things. Orca survival, and environmental protection in general are not correlated to economic impact.
I haven't studied all the issues enough to have an opinion... I just get nervous when economic drivers make environmental decisions.
The more instructive comparison would be the number of truck miles currently due to agriculture and the additional truck miles that would come from removing a given dam. That way people would be able to estimate the future situation based on their current impression of how many trucks there are.
I suppose for heavily impacted cities, the number of trucks per day would also be interesting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-47698314/is-china-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/opinion/china-wants-fish-...
It seems like by not removing the dams, we'll lose the salmon, the orcas will starve, and we'll litter the ground with dead sea lions trying to keep Idaho wheat cheap. Slow clap. Good job, guys.
I've only caught maybe 1 the last 3 years I've been where usually it's 4-12 a trip (1 week).
All anecdotal but the zebra mussel issue in the river has gotten insanely bad. The entire riverbed feels like dead shells and they're starving the river of nutrients.
It's been a huge loss and I've stopped contributing to Manistee's tourism as a result. Huge bummer.
Also annoying on a totally different level is how actual policy has been to try to counter one blithe, destructive intervention (dams that hinder salmon) with another (killing sea lions which supposedly helps salmon). Just arbitrary, stupid stuff. Why not kill whales to help salmon then? "Well because salmon exist to support the precious precious orcas." But don't they exist to support sea lions too? "Yes but those are bad."
Do people fish out in the middle of the oceans? As vast as they are, wouldn't there be an unlimited supply of fish in the middle of the Pacific? Or are there not as many fish as compared to near the shores.
Probably a weak analogy but think forest vs plains (if not desert). The coasts, fed by nutrient rich rivers is where a lot of the life is.
In CA chinook went up nicely this year.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-22/califo...
PS Our shad numbers were crazy good with 7+ millions crossing the Boneville dam on Columbia.
http://www.fpc.org/currentdaily/HistFishTwo_7day-ytd_Adults....
It's all of a piece.
People seem pathologically unable to understand the concept of variance, which is really a shame, because it's the variance that's going to bite us in the end. It's far more worrisome than a simple downward trend. A few really, _really_ extreme climate events are going to cause destruction and suffering on a scale we have not experienced before. There will be hand wringing and cries of "nobody saw this coming" -- which is true, because long-tail events are by definition hard to predict.
Then maybe people will wake up. Though it will be far too late.
The analogy I use to describe it is speakers, speaker cones in particular. Anyone in their 20s or older who's ever been into electronics, cars or music is likely to have experienced speaker distortion and possibly blown speakers, and most of them as children or teens have watched cones bouncing.
Climate change is like turning the volume up and putting more energy into the system. The cones don't just go higher, they go deeper as well and at some point you start getting distortion. If you can turn the volume down at that point you can avoid damage, but if you keep pushing it higher you'll eventually get lasting damage, and eventually it may be catastrophic. Once the coil is off or the cone has ruptured, turning the volume down isn't going to get you anywhere close to where you started.
We're still in the distortion stage now with some material fatigue setting in, but the people in control of the volume are listening to a crowd yelling to "Pump! Pump!"
... Or perhaps it's "Jump!"
J, K, and L pods of the SRKW are starving to death, and that's hard to make look like good news either.
My concern is that people are willing to be too extreme at a potential expense of the public's perception of science/climate change. I think it's important to be precise and measured with this stuff.
And really, if we still need to convince people of the risks of climate change, we should not prioritize these people - convince if possible, but they're not the focus. Climate change is here. By now, even ~65% of Americans actually understand that, and industry and politicians here have worked really hard to maintain ignorance. The effects are felt in daily life on a regular basis - increased hurricanes, increases wildfires, droughts, rapidly dropping water tables etc.
We're living unsustainably. We can now drive off the cliff in a precise and measured way, or we can choose to change how we live.
But trends are visible, and things are happening. We just ignore them to prevent reducing consumption.
EDIT: Unfortunately there's little room for nuance and discussion when talking about environmental problems in today's political climate. People are just downvoting me because I implied not everyone agrees on climate change, which shouldn't be a controversial fact to state, but alas it is. I would appreciate if the people downvoting me would provide a substantive reply though, because otherwise the downvotes without replies seems to simply just prove that people are unwilling/unable to have a nuanced discussion about environmental problems.
Someone is pouring gasoline in our house and you're suggesting that we talk less about a catastrophic house fire and more about how they're ruining the carpet. How does that help?
Besides, what are these "environmental problems that we can actually all agree on"?
We should have clean water? No, the same people denying climate change have overturned basic protections.
Protection of endangered species? Also overturned.
Protection of national parks? Nope, acreage removed from the park system and existing reserves opened for drilling.
Increasing fuel economy standards? No.
Common sense reductions in coal usage, which is now more expensive than solar and wind (not even including carbon externalities)? No.
Both sides have extremists. But right now, an "economic growth at all costs" extremist regime is making policy. That is undeniable.
If a left-wing "criminalize eating meat, eliminate fossil fuel overnight, outlaw corporate farming and force people to live in yurts" extremist sat in the White House, do you think we should not talk about the risk of global economic collapse?
E.g. clean drinking water, I'd argue that we can all very much agree this is a priorty. I'm not sure what basic protections you're talking about which were overturned, but atleast here in Canada we have towns and reserves that still don't have access to clean drinking water.
also yes, protection of endangered species, but even more broadly just biodiversity in general (often we focus only on saving the cute ones, which is also a bit of a travesty). This topic is more polarized than clean drinking water but arguably less polarized than climate change and has much more realistic and attainable solutions.
The problem being that we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event and it's caused by humans (not human-induced climate change, though that may be a contributor, but it started much earlier than the industrial revolution). Much of the problem is that we destroy habitats e.g. through mass deforestation, pollution, etc.
We're currently in the midst of a massive insect apocalypse which is the result of the aforementioned deforestation and pollution, largely insecticides herbicides, etc. from bad agricultural practices.
I would much rather we focus on reforming forestry, fishing and agricultural practices using less destructive to the environment methods, which are very attainable, than focusing on mitigating climate change, which is largely out of our hands or would require such unattainable changes to society.
I think we are by and large wasting our time and effort on dubious climate change efforts which would be much better focused on real environmental problems that we can actually solve, like e.g. ovefishing, mass deforestation and habitat loss, mass pollution in water and terrestrial ecosystems. That's my point.
I do believe human-induced climate change is happening, but also not neaarrlly to the degree that alarmists and doom and gloomers would have people beleive. It's a question of how much are humans contributing to climate change change not if, but there's too many extremists that claim the apocolypse on very dubious grounds. I honestly believe the extreme alarmists are being incredibly harmful to science in general because people are liable to dismiss all science when inevitably a too-extreme climate model is proven wrong yet again.
So yeah, my point is that there's many more attainable solutions to environmental problems we can mostly all agree on that we should be going after, rather than focusing our efforts on just fighting climate change which is an extremely polarizing topic and has largely unattainable solutions.
I'll throw a few things out there: climate models. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJoMp-k_H3w for a comparison of predictions of major climate models vs. measured temperatures. Many, many articles and peer-reviewed research has covered this.
Overfishing being an "environmental problem that we can actually solve": this massively complex problem involves international policing of illegal fishing, national sovereignty, ecological protections vs. starving populations, increasing economic success leading to increasing consumption (see China's insatiable and growing appetite for fish), cultural issues, and on and on.
Worse, climate and agricultural impacts such as ocean acidification, temperature rise, algae blooms, and nitrogen run-off all contribute to dramatic declines in aquatic populations that lower yields and require ever-more aggressive fishing practices that further destroy the ecosystem.
Regarding the contribution of humans to climate change: there is no doubt that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere. There is no doubt that CO2's overall contribution to warming exceeds that of other factors (including solar maxima and other denialist theories). There is also no doubt that humans emit more CO2 than any other source. See https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... for a good overview. Without a science-based rebuttal to these issues, saying human contribution is "not neaarrlly to the degree that alarmists and doom and gloomers would have people believe" is a belief based on nothing.
You use strawmen like "too many extremists that claim the apocolypse on very dubious grounds." What does this mean? We have 411 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere now, and it continues to grow - at an accelerating rate. This leads to stronger and more frequent extreme weather events like droughts (atmospheric warming) and hurricanes (ocean warming).
So what is this apocalypse the extremists discuss? Apocalypse like having a city burned to the ground (see California)? Like hurricanes devastating coastal communities (see Bahamas)? Like 500 year weather events occurring almost annually? How many of these must happen before they strain the economies of even the richest countries? And that's not even talking about massive flooding from sea-level rise.
Blaming "extreme alarmists" for being "harmful to science" is so disingenuous it makes me angry. You really believe they're more harmful to science than those who lie about, cherry-pick, obfuscate, and bury data (see Exxon) to create the illusion of controversy to protect their trillion dollar businesses or political power? The only reason climate change is polarizing is because their efforts to undermine the science have worked. The only reason you think the solutions are unattainable is because they have convinced you that is so for 40 years. And now, perhaps, they are unattainable. Congrats to them, I guess.
Got it.
But I also agree there is an issue. Which I don't doubt you do too.
Having the simultaneous position of disagreement with zero credibility media and the desire for a cleaner world is possible. Although most are too blinded by ideology to see this. Hence the downvotes, and the non-discussion in many circles on these matters.
Can you be more specific? Which entities are using environmental issues as a power grab? I don't see any of that in the article under discussion, for example.