Bureaucracy at work
UPDATE: Today, June 11th, NOAA issued a new updated press release, which you can read here:
NOAA Proposes Rule to Require Saltwater Angler Registration
They say the program will not charge you for the first two years, but after that $15-25, and that a state saltwalter license will exempt you from the fee, but that you still have to register. It would have been nice if they included these details in the Media Advisory sent out initially.
Still, a science organization issuing a personal federal fishing license? Bad idea. This is just a way to fund a program without congressional approval of a tax.
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This is a bit off topic for this blog, but I’m posting it because it shows the thoughtless heavy handedness that is permeating government organizations like NOAA. Last week is was bonfires on the beach in Seattle being considered for a ban due to “CO2 concerns”, this week it’s fishing on the open ocean. For me, this is a tipping point.
One by one our freedoms are being taken away by environmental concerns. Where’s the ACLU on this one?
Point to NOAA: There is no way I’m going to register for one of your fishing licenses. I already buy one from the state of California for salt water fishing. We have commercial offshore fishing that takes TONS of fish, crab, lobster, whatever, and you, as a science organization, want me to register (and likely pay fees in the process to support the program) for recreational catch and release fishing now?
My advice to NOAA: Go fish!
Write your congressman, senator, and anyone who will listen. Press release below explains all. An idea: Mail them every fish you catch. An office full of stink might make them think twice about this.
You can also participate in the call in (see details below) and give them an earful.
Here’s the address:
National Marine Fisheries Service, Fisheries Statistics Division,
1315 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910
NATIONAL OCEANIC & ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
WASHINGTON, DC
Contact: Monica Allen 301-713-2370
NOAA to Propose Requiring Saltwater Angler Registration
NOAA’s Fisheries Service will discuss a new proposed requirement that recreational anglers who fish in federal ocean waters be registered in a national saltwater angler registry before fishing in 2009 in a phone press availability on Wed., June 11. The rule also requires registration by those who may catch
certain species anywhere, including striped bass, salmon, and shad.
WHAT: Phone press availability
WHO: Jim Balsiger, NOAA acting assistant
administrator for NOAA’s Fisheries
Service Gordon Colvin, NOAA fisheries biologist
301-713-2367 x 175
WHEN: Wed., June 11, 1:30 – 2:00 p.m. ET
WHERE: Please contact Monica Allen at 301-713-2370 for call-in information.
BACKGROUND: The national saltwater angler registry is part of a larger state and federal initiative to improve the quality and accuracy of data on marine recreational fishing catches. This improved data will help scientists and policymakers make the best conservation decisions to ensure the sustainable management of valuable fish stocks for those who enjoy fishing today and for future generations. It will also help measure
the positive economic effects of recreational fishing on the national economy.
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I hear ya Pam. In Wahsington State you have to use barb-less hooks, which usually means getting the pliers out and pinching the barbs so the hook is smooth. Makes it a lot more difficult to bring the fish in. One twist in the wrong direction and they’re loose.
RonnieDay:
“..100’s of millions of fish that the recreational fishing industry..”
Serious? American recreational deep-water anglers DO NOT catch 100’s of millions of game fish every year.
Bill P:
“…But wrt CO2, haven’t we reached a turning point?”
Simply: No.
Hansen’s smoking gun of a large “heat bucket” that lay in a temporal pipeline as a latent reservoir of buffered heat in the seas has not only not been found, but the principal researcher Kevin Trenberth at NCAR thinks that the missing heat radiated back out into space.
Yes the seas have warmed, but not as much as was feared. If the heat has radiated back into space then the oft-cited heat budget imbalance must not be an accurate measure. The fact of the matter is that there could well be heat escaping back into space without our knowing it, perhaps via the ENSO phenomenon.
Likewise studies are showing a generally drier mid- and upper-atmosphere as well as a drier Antarctic, all demonstrating that without the humidity we will not experience a dangerous warming.
Some warming? Yes. Dangerous warming? There will be no “tipping point.”
The current temperature trend reveals this in the ongoing temperature plateau continues: That despite the increasing levels of CO2, temperatures have stayed about even since 1997 (excluding the ’98 el Nino outlier).
Meanwhile the warming-only scientists are predicting a near-exponential catch-up rise in temperatures by 2015. This is patently absurd … where’s the latent heat hiding if not in the seas? If it’s supposed to rise almost exponentially to catch up to the head-start from accelerated CO2 concentrations why aren’t we then warming now?
Sea temperatures, however, DO lag behind one large natural driver of temperatures on the Earth: The Sun. The seas heat content lags by about 6 years ( 2- 10 ), warming takes about 2 – 4 years and offloading the heat another 4 – 6.
Until the early 1990’s the sun had been at its most brilliant in nearly 10,000 years, and the hottest year we had was the 1998 el Nino!
Since then the sun has dimmed sufficiently to lend to a -0.1 degrC reduction in average solar irradiance, and we’re due for another -0.1 to -0.2 degrC decrease in solar influence. That’s a lot, a potential -0.3 degrC (nearly an entire watt per sq. meter) which was modeled as the requisite low-end temperature decrease that drove the onset of the Little Ice Age.
Considering we’re nearly 0.8 degrC above the temperatures of the early 1800’s, a modest -0.3 degrC net decrease by 2020 mightn’t bother people too much.
If natural variations are sufficient to mask the CO2 signal then the CO2 signal isn’t that strong, is it?
Yes, I have done my part to reduce the excess piscine population.
I got my own regulations: You gotta release anything you don’t eat unharmed (minus what you seine for bait) and you gotta clean what you keep. (I never went for anything that was limited.)
But it looks as if the times they are a-changing and my fond memories have (yet again) been adjudicated as thought-crimes . . . (your taxpayer dollars at work).
my gosh that fish has a big mouth!
That there is one regulation striped type bass. Looks to be a good ten-pounder.
Pamela, I hear you. I never hunted, but I fished quite a lot back in the day.
I wanted to “hunt”. My cousin from Texas asked me out to shoot some deer. I decided that I had a considerable desire to bruise and terrify, but not to kill. So I asked if I could haul along a paint gun and “mark” a deer or two. He said he’d check. He got back to me and said it was legal to shoot deer with a rifle or a crossbow. But to nail it with a paint gun was “inhumane”.
The end result was that I didn’t go–so I went back to hunting . . . people!
Serious? American recreational deep-water anglers DO NOT catch 100’s of millions of game fish every year.
Of course they do,10 years ago it was esimated that their were 14 million recreational fishing trips made in Fla alone each year,the population has increased by 60 percent in the last ten years.
Tamara,there are still states that don’t have a license requirement for salt water. The CCA’s director in Fla favorite saying is “economic rent” when a user group takes from a public resource.