From the University of British Columbia and the department of eco-nuttery, comes this statement sure to produce blowback. I suspect it is just a matter of time before recreational fishing is targeted too.
UBC’s Rashid Sumaila argues that the high seas should be closed to all fishing.
Fish and aquatic life living in the high seas are more valuable as a carbon sink than as food and should be better protected, according to research from the University of British Columbia.
The study found fish and aquatic life remove 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, a service valued at about $148 billion US. This dwarfs the $16 billion US paid for 10 million tonnes of fish caught on the high seas annually.
“Countries around the world are struggling to find cost effective ways to reduce their carbon emissions,” says Rashid Sumaila, director of the UBC Fisheries Economics Research Unit. “We’ve found that the high seas are a natural system that is doing a good job of it for free.”
Sumaila helped calculate the economic value of the carbon stored by life in the high seas by applying prices—which include the benefits of mitigating the costs of climate change–to the annual quantity of carbon absorbed.
The report argues that the high seas—defined as an area more than 200 nautical miles from any coast and outside of national jurisdiction–should be closed to all fishing as only one per cent of fish caught annually are exclusively found there.
“Keeping fish in the high seas gives us more value than catching them,” says Sumaila. “If we lose the life in the high seas, we’ll have to find another way to reduce emissions at a much higher cost.”
BACKGROUND
The study was commissioned by the Global Ocean Commission and was conducted independently by Sumaila and Alex Rogers of Somerville College, Oxford.
Carbon prices were derived from data provided by the U.S. Federal Government Interagency Working Group.
Source:
So how does that apply to terrestrial animals and plants? Are they also more valuable as carbon sinks? Or does dying animals and dropping leaves and grass not count.
Can’t find the reference now but there was a study done in Australia that the deserts in Australia actually absorb more CO2 than is produced that day in Australia. In other words the island continent is a net user of CO2, but that is ignored by the politicians.
If that is correct, then might it not be also true in other continents?
Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day.
Give him a fishing rod and he eat for a lifetime
Give him a climate model and he can take over the world and stop everyone else fishing
Sounds to me like the UBC Fisheries Economics Resource Unit is fishing for funding.
So if fish remove CO2 from the oceans and we remove fish from the oceans, then we are removing CO2 from the oceans. Removing CO2 from the oceans should help stop that awful ocean acidification.
/Sarc
rgbatduke says:
June 5, 2014 at 11:07 am
Or, we could plant a billion or so trees.
rgb
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They plant themselves, and considering the proliferation they are good at it.
Now just give them room to grow ?
By their own numbers, they lie. 1500 million tons of CO2 capture (ie, biomass) per year can’t be materially affected by 10 million tons per year of catch. They don’t give a damn about helping the environment, they just want to make humans suffer. The same bastards fight the use of ocean seeding with iron salts, despite the proven ability to make primary productivity (and thus CO2 capture) increase by factors of three or more.
albertalad says:
June 5, 2014 at 11:43 am
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I agree with you. I stopped eating Tuna years ago as it was clear from the reduction in size of the Tuna caught, that we slowly wiping them out. My wife made the BEST Tuna casserole, but we just couldn’t support the fishery by buying Tuna. Probably stupid but having watched the west coast fishery for 60 plus years, I think there is only one conclusion. Having watched some of my favourite fishing places get nearly cleaned out as we developed high speed fishing boats, and watched as the size of river and lake fish declined as fish finders and technology figured out how to catch the linkers, I now have my own fish pond that I can manage. Catch and release and limited seasons have resulted in good recovery of many fresh water fish stocks. But I do worry about the unfettered fishing in the oceans along with all the by-catch destruction. Things will get better, but first they will get worse. Problem is that when Tuna fetches 1.8 million dollars for a single fish, they will be fished to the edge of extinction (in both the Pacific and Atlantic) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-09/tuna-species-sold-at-record-price-faces-overfishing-study-says.html
Now, I suppose there are people out there that can show me that overfishing of the oceans is not a problem, and I hope there are. But in my mind, overfishing of the oceans is a bigger problem than “Global Warming”. Fish can move to areas of appropriate temperature. My trout next to my house experience temperatures from 2 degrees C to 23 degrees C. (I control the high temperature with 5 degree C degree well water injection when necessary). When the water goes to less than about 10 degrees C, the fish metabolism slows down and they stop taking feed.
My point is that most fish can stand a wide degree of temperatures. Global Warming is a non-issue from a fish perspective.
But over fishing is not.
My opinion is that the world is spending trillions of dollars on a non-issue as compared to other issues like health care, real industrial pollution, food, shelter, and living conditions of the poor. If that “stupid” money were redirected, we would have a better world.
Sadly, the politicians can trot out the Global Warming hysteria to garner votes, pay people to create models so they appear to be doing something, all the while passing regulations that make their campaign supporters rich.
Or maybe I am just cynical.
Well, time to go move animals to a new grazing area and enjoy a few minutes of sun between thundershowers.
Tell me how wrong I am and I’ll read it later.
The “carbon sink” argument is mere rhetoric. The argument is really a “keystone” approach where the writer posits that 1) we have a carbon problem, and 2) since fish are organic critters and thus carbon “sinks.” Over-fishing is therefore bad for the environment. The structure is like the “spotted owl” argument which was used to slow the harvest of old growth forest. The intent behind the argument is to protect the fisheries, not a “carbon sink.” The best way to protect fisheries is to ban “factory ships” and limit the size and range of trawlers and other fishing vessels. But, that would be “unduly” interfering in various national interests. Ice Land and Japan for instance would howl madly.
I’ve worked as a baiter on a salmon boat off the coast of California and the rules for us, which derived from the state and federal government were profoundly different from the “rules” that other nations operated under just a few miles farther out to sea. We used troll lines with hooks that had to be individually baited. If the boat was a bigger commercial boat, they had hydraulic winches that were used to operate the lines. Smaller boats, like the one I worked on, had hand-cranked winches with which we repeatedly hauled in the catch, usually 25 to 35 fathoms of steel line with a 19-lb weight at the end. We took King (Chinook) and Silver (Coho) salmon, King preferably, since the dock price was higher.
The CB chatter used to skyrocket when a Canadian trawler showed up in the horizon, since our inshore fishery was supplied, if you will, by salmon schools from farther out. The Canadians would, to our perception, use the inshore fleet to track where the salmon schools were. Once they dropped their nets, we only had a few hours of productive fishing left until the next day. If there is any place where US-Canadian hostility is endemic, it is between US inshore fishermen and Canadian trawlers. US boats would deliberately harass Canadian boats that were “too close” to the coast. The Coast Guard frequently had its hands full preventing a flash war (including weapons being fired – a large number of boats carried .22s to kill hooked sharks) at sea. And that was just trawlers, vessels that are relatively harmless.
To protect fisheries ban factory ships and drift nets. Make operating one a sinkable offense. Not only would that protect fisheries but it would bring back the inshore fisherman and create jobs.
Grant says: (June 5, 2014 at 12:48 pm) “It would give countries an insentive not to over fish their coastal waters.”
Some countries don’t HAVE coastal waters. (Whether they are also fishing is not known to me). Other countries have only a tiny sliver of coast. The Gambia seems to have about 28 miles of coast. The Baltics have the sea but not 200 miles from coast. Iraq has about 10 miles of coast.
And we should all live in caves and on subsistence farming. Yes, right. Perhaps people should just stop telling “us’ what “we” should do, while they bathe in luxury at global warming and UN eco conferences.
Truly astonishly the lengths that some academicians (I won’t dignify this innumerate chap with “scientist”) will go to to get onto the AGW grants gravy train even as it heads down the track to oblivion. Someone, somewhere will end up being the last to spout this nonsense — right after the grants are cut off. Imagine the embarrassment. Well, assuming that foklks like this are capable of being embarrassed.
Duster on then you have the Americans intercepting the Skeena and Fraser salmon runs transiting off Alaska.
Quite the contrary. Fishing should be increased tenfold, then, as fish are more valuable as a carbon sink than as food, they should be dumped into abandoned coal mines. A collateral benefit is smell, which effectively prevents reopening the mine ever.
It sounds like he thinks he has found an excuse to internationally outlaw factory ships that are efficiently reducing the total fish population. He must think that those small boats that hug coastlines are not efficient enough to over fish. I would like to see them do a similar study on the cold waters of the Arctic ocean and include the cold water as a CO2 sink along with phytoplankton blumes.Those rates are at least an order of magnitude greater than global anthropogenic emission rates. The problem is the sink is stoppered by ice in the winter and CO2 being delivered from the tropics in the upper atmosphere builds up in the winter. Also, the land based biosphere shuts down most of it’s uptake of CO2 at temperatures below freezing. In summer, all CO2 that reaches those surfaces will be absorbed so the rate of absorption is controlled by the rate of delivery.
We were told cow flatulence is ruining the earth and that we should eat more fish. Now we are told eating fish is bad too. I’m sure eating pigs are bad too. That is where I will draw the line. You will have to take my bacon and sausage away from my cold dead hands! And since I live in North Carolina, you will also have to take my pork bar-b-que away from my cold dead hands.
But these eco-loons from BC prove these peons won’t be happy until we are eating nothing but organic, non-genetically modified vegetables farmed with nothing but a garden hoe, because having a bull pull a plow might hurt the bull if the bull was not already euthanized to reduce the number of cow farts.
UBC was once a nice forest. Time to return it forest.
Just stop eating….
Wow… so the argument is that the fish are a carbon sink… slam the box lid closed, nothing more to figure… errr… we eat the fish, like the fish eat the smaller fish, to planktons, to algaes… WE Are a carbon sink that they seem to try and ignore in that equation. wow.
I thought of the nitrogen waste argument too as if the ocean biomass increases, more sink… that is what they are arguing, right? Oh yeah, higher nitrogen means all those starfish eat the Great Barrier Reef again…. oops.
In economics, we learn that if you try to fine tune the economy, all we really do is make the peaks and valleys increase in amplitude. I guess some folks were busy in graduate basket weaving and did not hear that.
Brant-don’t look at me. I hate seafood.
Good Grief! The shrieking ignorance of these characters! They are right up there with the “correlations” of the sepstrum of potato harvests in Mongolia in 1757, over a 20 second sample size at .001 the nyquist rate, with the ovulation period of an extinct frog thought to exist in Antarctica 130*10**6 years ago. (Is my FORTRAN showing?) Note: spell check (whatever the hell that is) doesn’t recognize “FORTRAN”. Or sepstrum. Or nyquist. WTH?
No wonder these characters are actually submitting this drivel. They have not been educated in the wonders of practical mathematics. Do they still teach math, anymore?
What are the odds that Rashid Sumaila is a vegan.
Fish is food. What is the suggestion to replace it?
Wait….ocean acidification!!!!!! No!!!! Let it in, the fish will take care of it! Wait!!! No!!!! Wait!!!
Settled science in full swing. Do not disturb.
That’s very simple. Just declare fish as either sacred or dirty. Oh, wait… that didn’t work for cows and pigs…
Look, it’s obvious. Homo Sapiens is the cause of all the CO2 emitted, so EVERYBODY STOP BREATHING IMMEDIATELY and there is a chance we might save Gaia.