January 15, 2014 — When we think about climate change, we tend to think of it in terms of future impact. The commonly accepted target among scientists and climate activists is that society must keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. The U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change and Clean Energy Cooperation issued in November 2014 hinges on our reducing emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, while China will level off its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Projections of sea-level rise as a result of climate change vary widely but are typically discussed in terms of 50- to 100-year outcomes.
As a result, the narrative of what to do about these changes is driven not by current observations but by future projections—an inconvenient truth for climate hawks but an entirely convenient one for those with an interest in maintaining our current reliance on fossil fuels. The resulting political conversation is shaped by entities, primarily those—such as the coal and oil lobbies—with a vested financial interest in the status quo, which are allowed to establish a strong case for doing nothing based on a few uncertainties and doom-and-gloom economic projections. They claim that limiting carbon pollution will put miners out of business from West Virginia to Wyoming. They claim that electricity costs will skyrocket and that service will be spottier to boot.
But for commercial fishermen,* climate change is not a future economic problem: It is a problem right now, and it is costing fisherman both income and jobs. While the fossil-fuel lobbies and their political allies craft predictions of certain economic doom if meaningful limitations on carbon pollution should someday find a firm foothold in public policy, those who make their living from the ocean are already bearing the cost of delaying such action.
The profession of fishing is often multigenerational, with knowledge typically passed down from parent to child to grandchild. The combination of constant exposure to all kinds of weather; the consistent logging of data in the form of catch totals and locations; and a seemingly imperceptible understanding of life over, on, and beneath the waves puts fishermen collectively in a unique position to assess the ecosystems that sustain their livelihoods and that, in turn, nourish the rest of us.
Spend time on the bridge of a boat from which people still hunt giant tuna with harpoons, and you’ll observe a captain who can sense a ripple on the surface of the ocean almost before he sees it, practically intuiting the telltale sign of a bluefin. Watch a lobsterman turn off her GPS and navigate to her buoys by memory of wind, waves, and currents alone. Sit in a waterfront diner and listen to the fish stories. They’re not all about the ones that got away; these days, they’re all too frequently about the ones that disappeared and never came back. These stories can help illuminate the challenges we all face as a result of runaway carbon pollution and global climate change.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress