Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 King crab dethroned
- 3 The rise and fall of the California sardine empire
- 4 El Niño and variability in the northeastern Pacific salmon fishery: implications for coping with climate change
- 5 The US Gulf shrimp fishery
- 6 The menhaden fishery: interactions of climate, industry, and society
- 7 Maine lobster industry
- 8 Human responses to weather-induced catastrophes in a west Mexican fishery
- 9 Irruption of sea lamprey in the upper Great Lakes: analogous events to those that may follow climate warming
- 10 North Sea herring fluctuations
- 11 Atlanto-Scandian herring: a case study
- 12 Global warming impacts on living marine resources: Anglo-Icelandic Cod Wars as an analogy
- 13 Adjustments of Polish fisheries to changes in the environment
- 14 Climate-dependent fluctuations in the Far Eastern sardine population and their impacts on fisheries and society
- 15 The Peru–Chile eastern Pacific fisheries and climatic oscillation
- 16 Climate change, the Indian Ocean tuna fishery, and empiricism
- 17 Climate variability, climate change, and fisheries: a summary
- Index
4 - El Niño and variability in the northeastern Pacific salmon fishery: implications for coping with climate change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 King crab dethroned
- 3 The rise and fall of the California sardine empire
- 4 El Niño and variability in the northeastern Pacific salmon fishery: implications for coping with climate change
- 5 The US Gulf shrimp fishery
- 6 The menhaden fishery: interactions of climate, industry, and society
- 7 Maine lobster industry
- 8 Human responses to weather-induced catastrophes in a west Mexican fishery
- 9 Irruption of sea lamprey in the upper Great Lakes: analogous events to those that may follow climate warming
- 10 North Sea herring fluctuations
- 11 Atlanto-Scandian herring: a case study
- 12 Global warming impacts on living marine resources: Anglo-Icelandic Cod Wars as an analogy
- 13 Adjustments of Polish fisheries to changes in the environment
- 14 Climate-dependent fluctuations in the Far Eastern sardine population and their impacts on fisheries and society
- 15 The Peru–Chile eastern Pacific fisheries and climatic oscillation
- 16 Climate change, the Indian Ocean tuna fishery, and empiricism
- 17 Climate variability, climate change, and fisheries: a summary
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1982 and 1983 an intense El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean spread warm water far northward along the west coast of North America. This event is believed to have been an important factor contributing to poor salmon harvests along the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts during the 1983 and 1984 seasons and has been largely blamed for the socioeconomic distress experienced by commercial salmon trailers during those seasons. At the time, newspaper headlines that appeared in the US Pacific Northwest followed the lead of distressed commercial harvesters and disappointed sports fishers in proclaiming the El Niño to be a natural disaster with significant impacts on the salmon fishery. To what extent was El Niño responsible for the poor runs of coho and chinook salmon along the US west coast in 1983 and 1984? How large were the actual socioeconomic impacts? To what extent was the reported socioeconomic distress among commercial harvesters a direct result of this event? These questions are complex, and no simple answers can be given. Nevertheless, an examination of the experience of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery during this El Niño event can further our understanding of the interactions between climate, biological processes, and the human activities dependent on those processes.
The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the impacts of climatic variability on a complex fishery system and, by analogy, the potential impacts on fisheries of climate change.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Climate Variability, Climate Change and Fisheries , pp. 49 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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