No Worries About Salmon This Year
by Ken Schlichte
Note: Ken Schlichte is an expert forest soil scientist in western Washington
“Worries rise as ocean oxygen levels sink — CLIMATE CHANGE?: NW waters among those facing food chain woes” is the title of an article alleging low offshore oxygen levels that appeared in the March 8 issue of The Olympian [here]. The article included the following statements:
Lower levels of oxygen in oceans, particularly off the Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say. They warn that the oceans’ complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.
-and-
If the Earth continues to warm, the expectation is we will have lower and lower oxygen levels,” said Francis Chan, a marine researcher at Oregon State.
-and-
Scientists have long known of a natural low-oxygen zone perched in the deeper water off the Northwest’s continental shelf. During the summer, northerly winds aided by Earth’s rotation drive surface water away from the shore. This action sucks oxygen-poor water to the surface in a process called upwelling. Though the water that’s pulled up from the depths is poor in oxygen, it’s rich in nutrients, which fertilize phytoplankton. These microscopic organisms form the bottom of one of the richest ocean food chains in the world.
-and-
Scientists are unsure how low oxygen levels will affect the ocean ecosystem. Bottom-dwelling species could be at the greatest risk because they move slowly and might not be able to escape the lower oxygen levels. Most fish can swim out of danger. Some species, however, such as chinook salmon, may have to start swimming at shallower depths than they’re used to. Whether the low oxygen zones will change salmon migration routes is unclear.
This March 8, 2010 article suggests that climate change warming is associated with the recent coastal Northwest low-oxygen zones and that chinook salmon may be negatively impacted.
The NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center report [here], however, indicates that 2008 was the most negative (coolest) Pacific Decadal Oscillation year since 1956 and that these negative (cool) conditions continued on into 2009.
Figure 2. Time series of shifts in sign of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), 1925 to 2009. Values are averaged over the months of May through September. Red bars indicate positive (warm) years; blue bars negative (cool) years. Note that 2008 was the most negative since 1956.
Forecasts for returns in 2010 are for large numbers of fish, and again, these anticipated returns are associated with the strongly negative PDO (and cold ocean) in effect for juvenile Chinook and coho that entered the ocean in spring 2008.
NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center has also reported that:
During 2008, the trend of cold ocean conditions, which started to become established in 2007, has continued. The fact that cold ocean conditions have now become well established bodes well for marine fish (especially salmon) and bird species, since many of them will almost certainly have a good recruitment year.
Tacoma News Tribune reported on the December 17, 2009 [here] that the biggest run of spring chinook salmon since before the completion of the Bonneville Dam in 1938 is forecast to enter the Columbia River in 2010.
In 2005 the Seattle Times reported [here] that many scientists suspected that climate change may have been involved in the warmer waters along the Northwest coast, even though the article also indicated that these warmer waters, the seabird deaths and other marine food source shortages were apparently caused by a lack of northerly winds and the absence of upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface.
Northerly winds and the upwelling of the deep, cold, low-oxygen waters off the Northwest coast are known to result in the creation of low-oxygen “dead zones”. But an absence of northerly winds with no upwelling of the deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters off the Northwest coast is known to reduce food sources for sea birds, salmon and marine mammals.
Shifts in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are primarily responsible for the wide range of Northwest offshore ocean temperatures since 1925, and 2008 was the most negative (coolest) year since 1956, in effect refuting the comments by the scientists in the two recent newspaper articles above about warming and climate change.
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation Cool Regime Increases Salmon Runs
by Ken Schlichte, Washington Contract Loggers Association website, Jan, 2005 [here]
Note: Ken Schlichte is an expert forest soil scientist in western Washington
Over recent decades, warm ocean temperature periods have coincided with relatively poor ocean conditions for many Pacific Northwest salmon stocks, while cool ocean temperature periods coincided with relatively good ocean conditions for Northwest salmon. Fisheries scientist Steven Hare first used the term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in 1996 while describing the connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and changes in the Pacific climate. The PDO is now known to be a long-lived El-Nina-like pattern of Pacific climate variability. 20th century PDO cycles have lasted for 20 to 30 years and have primarily affected the North Pacific, while El Nina cycles have lasted from 6 to 18 months with the greatest effects in the tropics. Cool PDO regimes are now known to have occurred from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while warm PDO regimes occurred from 1925-1946 and from 1977-1998. A cool PDO regime has been in place since 1999.
Shifts from one PDO regime to another are known to correspond with dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the Pacific Northwest. Cool PDO regimes are characterized by the upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich coastal ocean waters which increases the abundance of plankton and krill, an important salmon food resource. Warm PDO regimes have significantly fewer salmon food resources. Salmon predators are also a factor, and changes between warm and cool water regimes may affect the distribution and abundance of predators. The movement of warm water mackerel northward during warm PDO regimes may significantly decrease the survival of young West Coast salmon.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program has indicated that salmon catches in the Northwest dropped sharply when the PDO shifted from cool to warm in 1977. The graphs on Page 64 of Our Changing Nature - Natural Resource Trends in Washington State, published in 1998 by the Department of Natural Resources, show salmon harvest peaks around 1976 followed by salmon harvest declines from around 1977 on through 1997. However, the following page of Our Changing Nature goes on to suggest that resource management activities were responsible for these “restricted fishing opportunities”, with no mention of the negative effects of the warm PDO regime. The salmon declines of the 1980’s and 1990’s have led to significant increases in the government regulation of resource management activities, even though these salmon declines, as the U.S. Global Change Program indicated, were primarily of the result of the negative effects of the warm PDO regime.
The significant increases in salmon runs that have been occurring across the Pacific Northwest since the PDO shifted to a cool regime in 1999 are illustrated in Figure 2 above. Note that this was a shift to a cool PDO regime, in spite of the environmentalist warnings of recent global warming trends. Figure 2 graphs the adult salmon and steelhead counts at Bonneville Dam from 1938, just after the dam was completed, until 2003 and is from Twenty Years of Progress - Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, published in 2003 by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. The counts in Figure 2 have increased from around 600,000 fish up to around 2.4 million fish over this period, with most of these increases occurring since the shift to a cool PDO regime in 1999. These recent increases indicate that dam removal is not required for significant salmon run increases in the Columbia Basin.
Previous PDO regimes typically have lasted from 20-30 years and we can expect that the present cool PDO regime will continue to produce relatively large Northwest salmon runs for a similar period of time. When the shift occurs, and the new warm PDO regime starts to reduce salmon runs by naturally reducing salmon food resources and by naturally increasing salmon predators, it may be necessary to remind the government regulators that these salmon declines are natural, not due to resource management activities such as irrigation withdrawals, dams, agriculture, or timber harvesting.
Huge Coho Salmon Run Swamps Oregon Fish Hatcheries
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife announced last week that, “This year’s coho run is on track to be one of the largest salmon returns in the Columbia Basin over the past decade.”
As of October 23rd, an estimated 703,000 coho were forecast to enter the Columbia River at Astoria. Last year’s run size was 472,000 coho.
ODFW noted in their news release: “This year’s run was large enough that fishery managers increased the bag limit to three fish a day and extended the season in many areas. Despite these measures, several ODFW hatcheries have been inundated with fish.”
The news release (below) is interesting for a couple of other reasons. First, ODFW makes no conjecture or supposition as to why this year’s run is double the ten-year average. In their 2007 Oregon Coast Coho Conservation Plan For the State of Oregon [here], ODFW asserts:
Several limiting factors are identified for individual independent coho populations in this ESU (Table 4), including stream complexity (high quality habitat), water quality, water quantity, hatchery impacts, spawning gravel and exotic species. Stream complexity is the predominant limiting factor for populations in the Oregon Coast coho ESU.
Did “stream complexity” change radically in the last five years? No, no significant changes have occurred, at least according to ODFW which needs ever more tax dollars to spend on grinding their teeth about stream habitat.
So what happened? Why has the coho run doubled?
Record Salmon Run in Idaho
More salmon have returned to Idaho’s Salmon River in 2008 and 2009 than in any summers in over 30 years. Reported in the Idaho Mountain Express:
Hundreds of sockeye return home: 452 ‘red fish’ have arrived in Sawtooth Valley this summer
By Jason Kauffman, Idaho Mountain Express, August 19, 2009 [here]
For the second summer in a row, hundreds of sockeye salmon are pouring into the upper reaches of the Salmon River near Stanley. Their final destination is the Redfish Lake area, in the eastern shadow of the ragged crest of the Sawtooth Mountains.
Altogether, 452 of the “red fish” have arrived at either of two fish traps located on the Salmon River at the Sawtooth Fish Hatchery or near the mouth of Redfish Lake Creek.
The back-to-back positive returns of the iconic fish of the Sawtooth Valley is largely the result of increased smolt production at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s captive rearing program. Positive river flows and good ocean conditions have also given the fish a boost in recent years. Last summer, 636 of the fish—sporting the classic green head and red-bodied look of spawning sockeye—arrived home to the high-elevation valley.
The cause-and-effect conclusion of the reporter is not verifiable. Sawtooth Fish Hatchery was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1984. It is capable of collecting and incubating about four million steelhead eggs for later transport and rearing at the Hagerman National Fish Hatchery and Magic Valley Fish Hatchery. Smolt production has been ample for many years (over 150,000 smolts per year) but returning adult salmon have averaged less than one per ~1,000 smolts released.
The successful returns of 2008 and 2009 probably have more to do with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a pattern of Pacific Ocean temperatures that shifts phases on an inter-decadal time scale, usually about 20 to 30 years. The PDO shifted to negative in 2008, meaning that waters off the coast of northern North American became colder, similar to the cool regime from 1947-1976.
Colder waters are nutrient-rich and provide a more abundant food chain for oceanic salmon. The improved ocean conditions propbably are most responsible for the increase in Idaho salmon retuens.
The first two sockeye of the 2009 season arrived in the Sawtooth Valley in late July.
The two runs more than surpass the recent high of 257 sockeye that came back in 2000, which was the next highest return since 1985. And it’s far more than the four sockeye that came back in 2007. Between 1991 and 1998, a total of just 16 sockeye returned to Redfish Lake.
The historic declines in the fish are tied to over-fishing, mining, poisoning in the early days and, perhaps most significantly, a dam-building boom on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers between 1937 and 1975.
Those contributing factors have been significant, but salmon spend most of their lives in the ocean. Ocean conditions since 1975 have been poor for salmon due to the 32-year-long positive (warmer) PDO from 1976 to 2008.
On Tuesday, Dan Baker, hatchery manager at the Eagle Fish Hatchery, headquarters for the state’s captive breeding program for Redfish Lake sockeye, predicted that as many as 650 to 700 sockeye will have arrived in the Stanley area by the end of summer. Baker said the last fish will likely arrive sometime around the beginning of September.
During the past few springs, Idaho’s hatchery program has released between 150,000 and 175,000 sockeye smolts. The young fish are kept in captivity as long as possible to give them a better chance of surviving the long voyage down the Salmon, Snake and Columbia rivers to the ocean.
“They’re released directly to Redfish Lake Creek or the Salmon River,” Baker said.
Redfish Lake sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka) were listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act in November 1991. Historically, up to 30,000 sockeye spawned in the Sawtooth Valley’s Alturas, Pettit, Yellowbelly, Redfish and Stanley lakes.
The fish were the first Idaho salmon to be listed under the ESA. Redfish Lake sockeye are unequaled in that they travel to the highest elevation, over 6,500 feet, run the longest distance, about 900 miles, and travel the farthest south of any North American sockeye population.
Idaho fisheries biologists hope that eventually, as many as 2,000 sockeye born from fish allowed to spawn naturally in Redfish Lake will migrate back to the Sawtooth Valley each summer. So far this summer, 69 sockeye born from natural spawners have returned.
Recovery, it seems, is still a long way off.
But that doesn’t mean that fisheries biologists aren’t excited by the successes they’ve seen two years running. Baker said future expansions to the state’s captive breeding program should allow even more sockeye to come home each year.
“It’s very rewarding to see this fish come back,” he said.
How Government Destroyed Science in Columbia River Dam Decisionmaking
News from the Front #95
Remarks at the First Annual Northwest Water Law Symposium, Lewis & Clark Law School, January 31, 2009 (edited)
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
Before I begin discussing the use of science in Columbia River decisionmaking, I think it is important to have a definition of what science is, and I am going to choose a definition that will make it clear that science is not really used at all any more.
What is science? Since this is a law school, I will cite the Supreme Court’s Daubert case, which determined how federal courts should decide whether to accept scientific expert testimony. In that case, the Court actually managed at one point to stumble right on it:
Scientific methodology today is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they can be falsified; indeed, this methodology is what distinguishes science from other fields of human inquiry.
I will argue that the essence of science is that there are things that are out there that are true, and while we can all speculate about the truth is, we can test our speculation against the truth. This is usually done by taking measurements in an experiment. And when our hypothesis is falsified, that is, contrary to the truth as revealed by the evidence we gather, we have to discard or refine that hypothesis.
I would also argue that measurement or quantification is another very important aspect of science. As a famous physicist, Lord Kelvin once observed,
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
What Lord Kelvin did not say is that if you really have a scientific understanding of something, you can also use that scientific knowledge to predict what will happen under a certain set of initial conditions (at least outside the quantum context).
Federal Courts Ensure Junk Science Governs Salmon Harvest Decisions
News from the Front #94:
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved. John 3:20.
Sportfishing interests, more precisely the Salmon Spawning &; Recovery Alliance, Wild Fish Conservancy, the Native Fish Society, and Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, recently lost a big one when Judge Lasnik in Seattle rejected their challenge to National Marine Fisheries Service decisions sanctioning continuing overfishing on threatened Puget Sound chinook salmon. The Alliance sued under two federal statutes that require NMFS to use the best available science in decision making. It has been years since the Service did that, and it is increasingly clear that the Federal courts are the most powerful force making sure that NMFS can deem any particular science it wants as the best science—at least when it comes to harvest science.
Back in 2001, NMFS invited a blue-ribbon panel of outside academics to review its harvest policies. Called the Recovery Science Review Panel, they issued a blistering report (.pdf, 2.3 Mb) concluding that “NMFS should develop a rational [harvest] policy that does not demean scientific common sense” (p. 13). Commercial harvest interests (more precisely, their state and tribal mouthpieces), demanded that NMFS repudiate the Panel report. NMFS bureaucrats scurried about like bugs after their rock was overturned, ultimately commissioning a thirty-eight page review of the Panel’s wide-ranging critiques from the elite science wing of NMFS at its Northwest Fishery Science Center facility (.pdf, 1.5 Mb (redacted version)).
NMFS bureaucrat Frank Lockhart testified that the Science Center’s review “affected NMFS’ adoption of recovery plans and biological opinions pertaining to the listed salmonids” throughout the Northwest. Presumably these included the very decisions Judge Lasnik approved. But NMFS made sure Judge Lasnik never saw the thirty-eight page Science Center report, or the Panel’s “common sense” report that triggered Science Center’s involvement.
Federal judges taught NMFS long ago that it need fear no discovery in litigation with mere citizens. When citizens complain about government decisions, federal judges declare that citizens don’t get to put on evidence. Only the federal agencies do. They go into their files, and bring out a set of documents and present them to the Court as the “administrative record” against which the decisions must be judged. Congress required the Courts to consider the “whole record” in the Administrative Procedure Act, including all documents considered by the agency, but most of the time, no one can ever tell if the agencies have presented the “whole record” or not.
Looters Limit Out on BPA Salmon Dollars
News from the Front #93:
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
Now more than ever, as we sink in a cesspool of public and private debt brought on by a corrupted federal government, and we all tighten our belts, we can ill afford wasteful public spending. BPA’s recent announcements of “Memoranda of Agreement” (MOAs) with Pacific Northwest States and Tribes promise just that, with substantial hikes in electricity rates to fund another billion in salmon spending, and no real public benefits at all. And the MOAs only set a floor for wasteful fish and wildlife spending, not a ceiling.
he general design of the MOAs is a wholesale subversion of the decisionmaking processes crafted by elected officials in favor of agency decisionmaking by contract with special interests. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has been charged by Congress to develop the Region’s fish and wildlife plan, and BPA is by law supposed to follow that plan, funding programs the Council and its independent scientists identify as appropriate. The Tribal MOA gives lip service to the Council’s program, but warns that it contains “specific and binding funding commitments” irrespective of Council decisions. Thus big new programs will be established to promote salmon parasites (lamprey), irrespective of the lack of public or Council support for such programs.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is supposed to review actions concerning endangered and threatened fish, but through the MOAs, many of the choices NMFS would dictate are now to be specified by agreement with the special interest groups. The dam operators will now be bound by contract to take the fish out of transport barges, irrespective of scientific evidence proving higher survival. They will be bound to spill water at dams, irrespective of scientific evidence proving massive outbreaks of gas bubble disease. The Tribal MOA even attempts to bind NMFS to approve the wholesale gillnetting of endangered salmon, declaring that “tribal treaty fishing rights were present effects of past federal actions that must be included in the environmental baseline” and that the MOA is based on the “assumption that NOAA Fisheries will give ESA coverage” to future harvests. Ordinarily, scientifically-based natural resource management decisions might be expected to evolve based on better science, but the MOAs even attempt to prevent such scientific evolution.
Sportsfishing Interests Face Ten More Years in the Wilderness
News from the Front #92:
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
The Feds have been centralizing all natural resource decisionmaking and putting it under wraps ever since Nixon sent Judge Boldt out here. So the action in salmon decisionmaking, at least for Columbia River harvest issues, is in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon. Public observers learned at a December 12, 2007 status conference before Judge Redden that the Federal government and the Northwest States and Tribes had privately advised the Court of a new ten-year secret harvest deal back in September. The deal will become final when and if NOAA Fisheries issues a biological opinion approving the deal in the next couple of months.
Judge Redden is overseeing the new biological opinion on dam operations, not harvest, but at the December 12th status conference, the attorney representing the State of Washington explained that the two opinions were “intertwined”. More specifically, he told Judge Redden: “. . . we need to get that [dam biological opinion] done in order to prop up what needs to be done in United States v. Oregon in the associated harvest [biological opinion]”.
What did he mean by “prop up”? Most people think Judge Redden’s opinions are about offsetting harm from dam operations, but when NOAA Fisheries models only the effects of dam operations on salmon populations, it can’t find that they threaten to wipe out salmon. So NOAA Fisheries is going to hide future harvest rate increases in the biological opinion on dam operations, even though it knows this is not how the Endangered Species Act is supposed to work. The Regional Administrator of NOAA Fisheries even admitted in testimony before the Northwest Power & Conservation Council in November that “if you scrupulously used the rules for writing a biological opinion [on dam operations], you wouldn’t include future biological opinions [on salmon harvest that are yet to be written]”.
For all practical purposes, the process of tweaking dam operations was finished years ago, and now the whole game is to raise electric rates to fund program spending for Northwest States and Tribes that can serve as alleged “mitigation” for overfishing listed stocks. NOAA Fisheries is supposed to assess whether harvest increases themselves jeopardize salmon in harvest biological opinions, but it hasn’t really done so for years. Back in 2001, an outside, blue-ribbon panel even told NOAA Fisheries that the harvest biological opinions it was issuing “demean scientific common sense”.
The problem for sportsmen is that they get nothing out of all this crookedness. The dam-funded habitat programs that NOAA Fisheries bribes the States and Tribes with don’t really do much for fish, and deflect attention from what is going on in United States v. Oregon. Details of the new deal have been leaking out piece by piece. First, the Nez Perce Tribe suddenly declared that they are entitled to half of the Snake River hatchery steelhead, a move that Idaho sportsfishing interests described as “devastating”. Next, details were released to the “Columbia River Salmon Fisheries Visioning Process” (which ostensibly includes numerous sportfishing representatives, but is heavily tilted to commercial harvest interests) and then published in the Vancouver Columbian. Non-Tribal interests are going to get fewer spring chinook unless runs exceed 271,000 fish. The fall chinook harvest deal appears to be a sliding scale rising from 20% Tribal and 1.5% non-Tribal shares of the smallest runs to 30% Tribal and 15% non-Tribal at run sizes likely never to be achieved.
A New Cloud Over the Klamath Basin
News from the Front #91:
By James Buchal, author The Great Salmon Hoax [here]
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the listing of “endangered” suckerfish, beginning the invasion of the Klamath Basin by “swarms of officers” “sent hither”, in the words of the Founders, “to harass our people and eat out their substance”. On January 15, 2008, the swarms released a draft “Klamath River Basin Restoration Agreement for the Sustainability of Public and Trust Resources and Affected Communities”. The title is ironic, if not Orwellian, as the true purpose and effect of the Agreement is to destroy the sustainability of a growing agricultural economy, part and parcel of a larger hollowing-out of America that becomes more and more apparent.
Dam Removal and Other Economic Losses
One overarching purpose is the destruction of productive capital in the form of dam removal, though PacifiCorp is not yet on board. Presumably one reason the draft Agreement was released, rather than being consummated in secret like so many other vital natural resource decisions, was the need to pressure PacifiCorp. Destroying clean, renewable hydropower in favor of forcing citizens to fund their foreign enemies with energy payments will someday be regarded as a great crime. For now, the answer is always the same: Uncle Sam will print up more dollars to paper over the problem, but those days will soon come to an end.
Specifically, there is to be a $41.7 million (143) program “to provide power costs security” at a level of three cents (2007) per kilowatt-hour (141). But “actual realization of the specific power cost target depends on several factors and variables and is not guaranteed by the Agreement” (141). To get the benefits, if any, participants must “enroll to support this Agreement and the Hydropower Agreement” (142), adopting the time-honored tactic of using borrowed fiat dollars to buy off political opponents of the Agreement.
Counties losing tax revenue from dam removal or suffering other adverse impacts (147) will be bought off by the “Counties Program” for economic development, though no level of funding is specified yet (148). Local losses may be even worse as more land is converted into into Tribal trust property; a “Mazama Forest Project” (138), rumored to involve converting 80-90,000 acres, appears to show a proposed funding level of $21 million (175). A related Klamath Tribe document even suggests that the Tribe expects to “[s]ecure assurances that the Tribes and Tribal members will be given preference on contracting, employment and business opportunities generated on the Tribes’ ancestral homelands by the Settlement Agreement”.
