Chief of NOAA should have done more
Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will be attending the last court hearing before a ruling on how to run hydroelectric dams in the Columbia Basin without driving wild salmon to extinction [“Judge praises Obama fish plan,” NWTuesday, Nov. 24].
NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center has reported that salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest are correlated with changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycles, and that salmon runs declined steadily during the warm Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycle from 1977 to 1998. The listing of several salmon stocks as threatened or endangered coincided with a prolonged period of warm ocean conditions beginning in the early 1990s.
The center also reported a dramatic increase in salmon runs from 2000 to 2004 that coincided with the return to a cool cycle in late 1998, and that cold offshore ocean conditions have now become well established, boding well for good salmon runs over the next few years.
NOAA chief Lubchenco, trained as a marine ecologist, has the responsibility to testify at this court hearing that changes in Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycles, not Columbia Basin hydroelectric dam operations, have been the primary factor influencing Pacific Northwest salmon runs in recent decades.
— Ken Schlichte, Tumwater