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:
We should take 97% of warmists & make them into “Soylent Green”
‘From the University of British Columbia and the department of eco-nuttery..’
In Canada, the University of British Columbia IS the department of eco-nuttery.
@ur momisugly Duster – fully agreed. The real kicker is that so many companies that built factory trawlers or that reconfigured former military ships for industrial fishing relied on government grants during the 1946-1980 period. This was true in Canada, the US, the Soviet Union, Japan (US postwar reconstruction funding), Iceland etc. I wish there was some way to get government subsidies out of the fisheries and to legislate the use of less invasive, less efficient technology. Sadly, that goes against modern efficiency ideals.
We’re safe until all the social dictators (dieticians, greens, etc.) get on the same page.
After that…
K-Mart must have had another blue light special on degrees in biology.
“george e. conant says:
all these restrictions and regulations serve the goal of turning our species into a pest requiring such management. I am glad that this is being discussed here as it is an elephant in the room. Hope I am not over the top….
No you ain’t, at least as far as I am concerned. I also appreciate the fact that this is (primarily ) a scientific site, that discusses CAGW with legitimate scientific methods/practices in always mind, and will also delve into important related topics like Godzilla and cow emissions. I am also heartened to see that something I basically came up with while reading/thinking about this in the last few years – i.e., that fraudulent movements like CAGW are nothing more than the bastard children of the loathsome Population Bomb movement – was also shared by a number of others, a number of whom realized this well before I did. A lot of this is nothing more than a deep-seated animosity against humanity itself and especially, w/r/t the suffering 3rd world, repugnant racism/eugenics disguised as environmentalism.
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And if the fish turn into oil, we can fish it out.
A renewable resource!
Simplistic question here. . .but isn’t it the plankton that are actually sequestering the CO2 — and the fish just eat the plankton. So — the more plankton, the more CO2 sequestration. To maximize the number of plankton, and therefore the sequestration of CO2, shouldn’t we get rid of the things that are eating the plankton — ie, the fish, so the plankton can multiply almost without limit? So shouldn’t overfishing help decrease CO2?
Green plants photosynthesize more than 200 billion tons of CO2 each year. Of that, around 90% is by marine plants–both fresh and saltwater.
Ask the pelicans how good the fishing is with Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant spewing 500 tons of amazingly radioactive water loaded with every kind of particle known to man into the Pacific Ocean and Jet Stream every day. Here’s what the pelicans think:
http://enenews.com/ap-drastic-plunge-in-baby-california-pelicans-zero-young-born-in-multiple-areas-that-were-studied-expert-went-from-thousands-to-10-or-less-the-bottom-dropped-out
The Pacific Ocean is dying and noone will admit why as it doesn’t feed their political agenda, university funding trough or agenda-based life.
http://enenews.com/strontium-reaches-500-billion-bqm3-in-basements-at-fukushima-record-levels-reported-at-5-locations-near-ocean-u-s-expert-we-see-strontium-becoming-more-of-concern-food-chain-will-have-to
This climate nonsense means nothing to the dead Earth….
Fukushima is not affecting pelicans, or anything else, in California.
nc says:
June 5, 2014 at 4:33 pm
Duster on then you have the Americans intercepting the Skeena and Fraser salmon runs transiting off Alaska.
Never having fished Alaskan waters, I’ve no idea how Alaskan commercial fishermen take salmon. If they use nets, then they are asking for what they receive – or don’t. BTW, I doubt the Fraser River run transits the Alaskan coast. Characteristic migration routes work counter-clockwise, so we and the Canadian trawlers were intercepting Fraser River runs, as well as the Columbia and the Klammath runs.
When I fished, your typical inshore boat carried two “out-riggers” – booms on pulleys – with two to three lines per out-rigger and hooks on two-fathom leaders at two-fathom intervals. That would mean anywhere from about 30 to 90 or more leaders and hooks to manage. At the “test” weight we used, the line in each “pull” weighed about 50 lbs by itself with another 20 lbs in a lead weight. Water displacement reduced the load a little, but hand cranking each line about four times an hour adds up to some real work over the day. We whined a lot about not having hydraulics. The boat I was on carried a crew of four and mostly worked a 12-hour day – high tide to high tide. Hook fishing is not “over-efficient”, but at the time it successfully supplied the demand for wild salmon in California. Lots of breeding salmon make it to the river mouth past the line-fishermen and head upstream. The trawlers swept up much of the local schools we were working. Since the salmon schools were migrating, we had to wait until new schools arrived – usually over night – before fishing would pick back up to a paying rate. Catch was sold at the dock and was partitioned so that first boat operations and repairs were paid for, then the skipper and the crew took their shares. Nobody was paid a wage in cash. You could sell your share or have it smoked – or smoke it yourself – alder wood smoke is my favorite. To this day I’m ruined for most store-bought fish.
Fish caught by humans eat other carbon-sinking life forms. If the population of fish typically eaten by humans declines, then the population of vegetarian ocean animals would probably increase. That could increase the production rate of feces that falls to the ocean floor, where its carbon would be largely sequestered.
Another thing about reducing supply of fish to eat: This would probably increase demand for meat from land animals, whose fats are less healthy, and whose farming results in more greenhouse gas emissions.
Something else: There is a matter of “sustainable harvest” of most wild species. If the wild species has its death rate increased by some external factor, then the remaining individuals have more food available, and/or fewer predators dependent on them being around, and get more vigorous. So, humans can harvest some percentage of the individuals of that species and that species can sustain a slightly reduced population.
Vegetarian ocean animals?
Ain’t very many of those.
(Krill ? Nope they are mini-animals/shrimp-like.) The veggies are at the very, very low bottom end. Even fresh water fish eat smaller animals and insects.
I think we all need to take a step back for a bit and accept that humans have no right to be a part of the natural biota, or to eat anything they normally do, nor to be on such a planet. We clearly did not evolve here as a part of the natural order and ecosystem, were did not develop to exist on and only on this surface, in parallel with this ecosystem, we have no right to inhabit to migrate and colonize the entire earth, and all of our technology and culture is entirely foreign to Earth and the entire universe and clearly did not arise from natural processes of evolutionary development and survival. So we obviously have no right and no say in things here, and our flagrant use of any natural laws, features and the natural logic of math and mechanism, to enhance our survival, is simply out of line and completely unacceptable.
And frankly, I find it objectionable and reprehensible that sneaky homing pigeons are navigating using iron in their brains to align with, and offset from the natural geomagnetic field lines! That’s simply cheating! And if these naughty pigeons don’t stop doing what comes entirely naturally to them I think we should eliminate the pigeons. And th Chimps must be watched, they are already sneaks using tools and we should demand they immediately desist and not use their brains at all, so we can all live in eco-nutter land together in peace, impoverishment and mass starvation.
Flagrant use of technology and natural laws or physical materials to enhance your own survival is bad … mmmkay?
The assertions by the department of Eco-nutery are nothing other than pseudo-scientific ECO-TROLLING … for a bite … no less.
Well said, Unmentionable. I am slowly coming to realize just how anti-human and naive some “environmentalists” really are. One wake-up for me was when I went hunting for the answer to how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels and found out the 80% give-or-take is the number. CAGW or not aside, we can’t halt CO2 emissions without pretty much returning to caves. I read somewhere else that a smart phone, after taking into account all of the supporting infrastructure, consumes as much energy as a refrigerator. Can anyone here confirm that?
Thank you Anthony and all posters for the work you do.