Climate Change in the Northwest Atlantic

2007-11-02T09:53:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the conference blog for Climate Change in the Northwest Atlantic, April 26-27, 2007. This blog will follow the forum over its two days of multidisciplinary discussion. Our blogger, Scheherazade Fowler, will deliver as much of the presentations, questions, and discussion as she can capture. Participants can add comments, questions, or additional notes during or after the conference.

This meeting is intended to connect people who research the science and economics of climate change, people who write about science, and people who create policies that govern how humans interact with the ocean. Our goals are to explore how humans can adapt to changes in the ocean. Because our group is professionally diverse and this conversation is a new one, we hope to uncover provocative questions and thereby improve our own research and outreach efforts. This meeting is also the first collaborative project between the University of Maine School of Law, the Aquatic Systems group at the University of Southern Maine, and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. We hope this meeting sparks future collaborative research and public education projects.

The meeting is divided into four substantive discussions: Science, Economics, Policy, and Journalism. A wrap-up will conclude the meeting and help us decide what this group should do next. We invite you to participate by following this blog, organized by discussion theme, and by adding your thoughts and comments along the way. Welcome!

Famous Last Words: Everyone In The Room Says What We've Learned

2007-04-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

At Alan's request, we go around the room and say what we took away from these two days of talk. (I got MOST of them -- tell me if I didn't get you):

Science is important.
Economics is important.
Don't be cynical about the media -- you have more opportunities to change minds than you might think.
It's important to communicate science to policymakers.
The school of law is rethinking its role and wants input, so talk to Rita.
We need to think more about adaptability, thinks that don't break with unexpected outcomes.
We need to amplify the voice of science and economics in the policy arena.
Scientists need to learn to get comfortable with the media.
Resist the instinct to attribute every change to climate change.
The story is the fundamental way we make sense of information.
Management process needs to look more broadly than we have in the past -- beyond next year's quota.
The only way we can deal with scientific uncertainty is through active public discussion.
If we wait for scientific certainty it will be too late to implement useful policies.
The challenge of climate change creates the opportunity for new alliances.
Increased outreach is needed.
Keep working on the relationship between economic, scientific research and values.
Don't be afraid of the press.
When you're trying to communicate your science, you've got to know your audience.
I'd like to convene a group like this respond to a practical scenario.
We still don't know how to move forward to improve our government structures.
Our focus in discussion quickly shifted to commercial species, but we need to look at all species and the whole ecosystem.
Interdisciplinary groups are important.
Even if the climate were totally static, these approaches would be important anyway.
Maine is a great place.
Scenario planning is great.
You Mainers need to figure out your lobster situation fast -- we didn't in Southern New England.
Great conference. Thanks to Rita, Nicole, Kathryn, and the Law School.

Alan Lishness: A Raconteur Wraps It Up

2007-04-27T10:57:00.000-05:00

Starting with some logistics: Lunch is coming right up after my talk, and after that you're on your own -- can stay and talk later if you like. Alan is taking on the job of being a raconteur -- a word he had to look up.

"A raconteur tells anecdotes in a skillful and meaningful way"

Alan says -- thanks for the blog: I didn't need to take notes and I got to listen better. I've also taken comfort from the fact that the people in the room have been such fervent participants. The people in the room know a lot more than me.

Alan has distilled what we heard, and has a few words about each of the conference speakers.

If you're a speaker, listen up for his summary. Did you say that? Did you mean that? Is that the most important thing that you said? And furthermore, think about what's next.

Lew Incze said that scientists operate on a premise of certainty, and that we may need to rethink that. He also said that the global models are not as well refined as the models of ocean in the coast of Maine.

Andy Pershing said that ocean data in the Arctic may give us in the Gulf of Maine a year or two preview of what's to come. And that long-term monitoring stations and their data are crucially important.

Kevin Friedland said that the NAO is a dominant force, and that its hard to predict what will happen to fish when we don't know the mechanics of how fish migrate and reproduce.

Dan Holland said that our fisheries regulation have made more specialized fishermen,

Rob Johnston said that we can deal with risky outcomes, but it's harder to deal with uncertain ones, and that the language of economics can help.

Jon Sutinen said that market prices don't tell the ecological truth and that markets, governments, and civil society are the three things that drive human behavior.

Bill Brennan said that communication is the fundamental place where science, economics, and policy must conserve.

Linda Mercer said that we need more flexible and adaptive management practices -- ecosystem based, not single species.

Meinhard Doelle said that we need to engage society in the required value choices, and scientists need to speak up before they get to the 95% confidence threshhold.

Justin Kenney said that scientists are very credible with the public, and that if we pose problems we need to link it to a solution.

Peter Lord said that editors want action, local relevance, and human interest, and that the political climate has made the environment go mainstream.

Jerry Fraser said there has to be comity (not "comedy!") in this debate, and that we need to let people figure things out for themselves on their own timeline. The people will get it right if you give it time.

Jeff Tollefson said that Al Gore didn't make the wave of climate change, it happened a long time ago and is just cresting now. He predicted a reversal of the debate -- business driving environmental regulation.

Alan synthesizes these points with some key terms: complexity, uncertainty, the concept of "sound science" (95% certainty before we speak), science vs. advocacy, the linkage of problems and solutions, and "whose news" (where do people today get their news or learn the truth about the world? 80% of Americans neither bought nor read a book in 2006).

He asks speakers to chime in: did I correctly characterize what you said? And what happens next?

Lew: I wasn't suggesting we move from the 95% certainty state for the purposes of science, but that we acknowledge we need to speak publicly and bring policy to the table before we've arrived at that state.

John Annala: most policymakers don't rely on a 95% certainty or confidence when evaluating solutions.

Barbara Vickery: The important thing is to identify monitoring systems for the experiment of public policy, to gauge whether policies we implement are working while we're doing it. We need more "sound science" in policy.

Bill Brennan: As a policymaker, a framework for making those decisions is something risk averse politicians would like, but you are forced often to make decisions based on gut instinct.

Jon Sutinen: Where there is controversy and competing interest, uncertainty kills action: progess is stalled because in a controversial uncertain situation, people tend to wait for certainty rather than risk being wrong.

Bill B.: That's the nature of our deliberative process.

Lew I.: I agree -- sometimes debates are thwarted, even by nonsense, where we acknowledge

Where we do make progress in uncertainty where we have a prior history and a background of conversation on the topic, we do better. We often cast these problems in terms of a single decision point, but what we need to look at is the larger process of bringing the public into environmental debate. The seawall article is the product of a larger series, about 10 years, triangulating and talking about seawall policy. We don't want to be immobilized by uncertainty.

Dan Holland: It's clear that we're not going to get rid of uncertainty anytime soon. We need to set up systems that will perform pretty well and robustly regardless of which way things move. Rather than fixating on outcome, we should put our energies into designing institutions that adapt well to changing circumstances. We need to design adaptable systems, that don't end up having to have decisions forced on inflexible institutions, and have that drive policy.

Rita: Is that a new governance regime?

Jon Anala: This more flexible system is being implemented in the southern hemisphere. Adaptive institutions aren't new governance systems, but rather a different approach to risk -- you can't wait to be certain; you have to take risks and learn from the outcomes.

Bill Brennan: New governance approach should change the scale of decision-making, to a more local level where the better information resides. Messy town-meeting style governance works -- zone councils put people together who have different incentives, rather than leaving it to a dispassionate government entities who aren't as connected to the resource. (The scribe wonders: But doesn't that miss the interconnections with other fisheries and other populations? I thought the thrust of yesterday was that international cooperation and larger scale ecosystem management was a better way of managing resources.)

Q: (I missed it) about the Magnuson Act. Didn't get it.

Q: Rita -- is the level of management required for fisheries translateable to a local government entity?
A: Bill Brennan: this is a personal responsibility issue. We need to reduce emissions on vessels. Power companies don't emit just because they have nothing else to do. They're emitting because they're producing something that the market wants, and nobody is requesting that they stop.

Patten: new boats can't buy used engines, now. You're not regulating existing boats, but you're putting new regulations on fisherman.

Andy Pershing: regulations are based on a hypothesis, but nobody's testing those hypotheses. You need to test the policy decisions you make to see whether the hypotheses you based those decisions on are valid.

Don Perkins: What's the most effective approach? -- focusing on outcomes, or on more narrow solutions (inputs). I'm not sure the policy world thinks like this. If there were more focus on outcomes, and about setting up systems that can respond and be more flexible, that will probably put us in a better and more resilient situation to adapt to the uncertain changes. I don't see a lot of research-driven debate about these two approaches. Example: no fishing on spawning herring is an outcome based approach, rather than closing a particular geographic region from May 15th and June 15th. Let people figure out how to get to the outcome, don't regulate based on an input.

Q: but that's hard to regulate -- you can only regulate behavior -- you need regulations you can enforce!
Comment: Charles N___: policy goals are preferred outcomes, but policymakers have to figure out what kind of regulated behavior will achieve those outcomes. That's what good policymakers have to do.

Rita: Would a scenario planning exercise be helpful to policymakers?
A: Linda Mercer: yes! Most of our actions are reactive. We should engage in scenario planning, but it always needs to be locally relevant. You need to make it more real to the people who are going to be impacted.

Don Perkins: The lobster community has been worrying about a crash for about 10 years. A scenario planning exercise, if structured and publicized right, could be welcomed by that community. Pat, what do you think about that -- how would the lobster community respond to a scenario planning exercise?

Pat: Lobster and herring are both crucial to the economy of the state of Maine. I'm trying to engage the lobstering community now, while there's not a crash, in how you reduce mortality. We're not crashing, but we're in decline -- landings are down everywhere except in way downeast Maine, and it would be good for us to reinvest our money now before we're in the situation they're in in Long Island. I'd love to engage these folks, and the herring community. The groundfish people are gradually cutting each of their fingers off. If we'd taken appropriate action back then, the groundfish situation wouldn't have gotten so bad. The parallels to the lobster industry are scary. I think what's kept us alive is that we've done some scenario planning.

Dan Holland: how do you set up scenario planning? You can't wait for a crash. You need to set up a signal, and identify that right, so you'll know when a decline or a crash is on its way and you can then engage the right social response.

Lew: Yes -- you need scenario planning on a couple of different timescales, and you need to identify the right signals for that.

Comment: You need a local mechanism to get lobstermen to the table. Conversations are remarkably rational when they take place around a kitchen table or in a church basement. You really have to start locally, in order for people to fully engage. Maybe I'm naiive, but when those safe places are established, I think the process works really well.

Peter Lord: There's a 5 year time lag between a collapse and the congressional response of appropriating money to study it and propose solutions. Maine had better pay attention.

Rita: Is it a responsible or good idea as a policy measure to "blame the climate" -- fishermen are so eager to tell the policymakers that it's not our fault, will adding an additional uncertain but possible cause of fisheries decline be irresponsible?

Lew: It's not responsible to blame climate change if we don't know that it is a cause. These kitchen table conversations by fisherman are great, but we need to move things more formal. It's not fair in public debate to reframe fisheries decline as a climate change issue when we know there are other causes, and other management solutions.

Pat: Even if the management decisions won't change (e.g. restrict fishing) or the cause (climate change vs. overfishing) can't be addressed by regulation, knowing what climate change may do to fish populations, water temperatures, migratory patterns, egg production, that's important scenario planning that will inform decision making.

Lew: our warnings are couched in a lot of disclaimers: science is being asked to predict a lot of things that haven't been modelled before.

Pat: The reason we don't throw the scientists overboard for their dire warnings is that they've built a bunch of credibility. And we understand the need for them to get better data: that's why I was on my hands and my knees on the boat counting lobsters -- we need to be able to see what's happening, and so do they. The groundfish industry doesn't have such a good relationship to the scientists.

John Anala; (missed it)

Bill Brennan: management in a remote area, if local fishermen don't understand and agree with the regulations, it is very hard to enforce. Participants need to understand the basis for the regulation, even if they are not necessarily the cause of a decline.

Rita: What kinds of research suggesting more flexible management systems would be heard by policymakers? What are the steps toward making our regulatory bodies more

The Magnusson Act came from academics. But it's like the tax code -- you keep trying to fix it by adding crap to it.

Geoff Smith from the Nature Conservancy: the law does have some flexibility in it -- it provides for science and research to

Kevin Friedland: innovations in management come at the development team level?

Jeff Tollefson: Think tanks are driving some of the new schemes: the cap and trade approach came from think tanks. Ideas can come from almost anywhere, but it's a long and normal process. Policymakers don't come up with solutions themselves. Ideas perk for a long time, and crystallize, and gain a constituency, and that's what moves through the policy arena and gets chosen by politicians.

Jon Sutinen: How do we reach Congress?
Brian: How much does it crystallize at the state legislature level? Is the state legislature a parallel process, or is it a feeder to Congress?

Jeff Tollefson: American government was designed not to work. That's a deliberate structure. You have to have a certain amount of consensus before something can get through Congress. States are the laboratories. You need to get a certain amount of crystallization before an idea will take place.

Jon S: yes, but the groups you named as impacting Congress are in DC, having drinks with staffers. We researchers are far from the Hill. Do we have a chance of getting our ideas?

Jeff: There are a few key people who carry ideas forward. You need to figure out who those people are. Where business and environmental groups come together, that's a signal to reporters and politicians that you've resolved some complex and important issues at a fundamental level. That gets the attention of staffers and Congressmen.

Bill Brennan: Amen. If someone comes into your office and says, "We've taken this complex issue and have arrived at important compromises, and distilled it to its essence, and here it is," that makes a Congressional staffer's job easier, and they'll listen.

Jeff: And even then it's still going to be messy.

Alan: What next?

This group wants to do some scenario planning. We should engage some managers. Who's missing? Managers (invited but didn't come to this meeting). Industry types should be here.

Pat: my goal to come here was to listen and bring back what's going on here to the Atlantic states. I'm just a juror. This will influence my future decisions, although not necessarily a huge amount. Your efforts here aren't lost. But if you invite lobsterman and it's a sunny day after three days of rain, you're not going to get more than 50%. I don't get paid to go to meetings like this, but the people who care will try to show up.

Linda Mercer: there's a lot of energy around ecosystem-based management. There are a lot of meetings. Practically, how do you put effort into things, when you're inundated by meetings?

Jon S.: I suggest that an effort be made to guide the scientific research community to communicate to the public. I don't know how to write well. A lot of us hunker down in our offices and labs and do our work. I see a need to reach out, write op-ed pieces, do a responsible job getting good science out there to counter the bad science and the irresponsible journalism out there.

Geoff Smith (Nature Conservancy): If we want to do scenario planning and we can't get the lobstermen to come to us, can we bring ourselves to them? Bring this information to a lobster zone council meeting to impart information and collect it from them?

Pat: No way. It's got to be filtered or gel, first. They're not ready for it.

Break

2007-04-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

This is a noisy break. People are talking with their hands and lingering in the room -- how do you get an op-ed into the New York Times? Can scientists play a role in translating other science to reporters? What do you make of the Al Gore documentary -- what's the lesson to scientists from An Inconvenient Truth? Are those panelists out of touch -- is the mainstream print media still a governing force? It's fun to overhear snippets of conversation with punchlines like, "I promise, I'll stay out of domestic fisheries!" producing knowing laughs. "My carbon footprint has dropped by 77% because I'm not travelling so much anymore."

Journalism Q&A -- A Wide Ranging Conversation

2007-04-27T09:05:00.000-05:00

What started as a panel discussion has turned into a dynamic conversation that involves the whole room. I'm doing my best to capture it -- I'll add links a little later, and if I miss a question or a name, please leave a comment to clarify or fill us in. People are really engaged, and again and again people are building on, linking to, and drawing in the comments of other people and the contents of yesterday's sessions.

Q: Rita Heimes: Scientists are the most credible spokespeople, but they get to be that credible partly by waiting for a level of 95% certainty. But you guys have said, "it's never too early to start thinking about communications" -- when is it too early to start talking to the public? When do you lose the credibility of the scientists?

A: Justin: You need to think about this early -- not necessarily start speaking early. But you need to have an eye on your communications plan from the very beginning.

A: Jon Sutinen: I'm very uncomfortable being an advocate, as a scientist. I think it's dangerous to ask scientists to be advocates.

A: Justin Kenney: Reporters who hear scientists crossing the line into advocacy hang up, or find another scientist. I work for an advocacy group, so I don't have quite as tough a role.

Peter Lord: it's messy for scientists to get involved in politics. But if scientists don't get in the conversation, the anti-science people win. They're writing op-eds, misquoting literature, and creating stories, while the scientists are doing science. It's not advocacy if you write an op-ed piece talking about how the IPCC came about.

Q: What about balance? Are reporters still asked by editors to go hunt down the few remaining scientists who are saying there is no climate change?

A: Peter Lord -- finally, no. There's lots of debate about how much, and how, and what the impacts will be. But it's no longer a controversial story, finally, that climate change is happening.

Jerry: there's an economic component to all of this, and when you make regulations they almost always have a financial toll. From my eyes, we're always watching the possible burden that will go on the shoulders of fishermen, in an attempt to get to the elusive goal of some kind of climate stability. It's easier to put things on the fishermen -- we're not well-funded, there's no "center of influence" for commercial fishermen. I ask environmental groups why they're chasing the fishermen, and they tell me: because we can't stop pollution, and we can't stop coastal development. Those people have a lot more power. This is all falling on the fishermen, and that's not fair. And climate change is such a rage right now. Maybe you think it's great that it's now on Sports Illustrated or Ms. Magazine, but that tells me the tipping point of credibility has come and gone. It's a frenzy now. Regulations that dump all the burden onto fishermen with more expensive equipment or that restrict our range, etc.

Meinhard: It seems to me, Jerry, that you should be one of the biggest advocates and allies for global greenhouse gas emissions reductions. To the extent we can mitigate and reduce the possible impact, we can reduce the kind of adaptation that's going to fall hardest on your industry.

I also want to say that I disagree with the proposition that problems should always be linked to solutions, or people will disconnect or feel hopeless or overwhelmed. If you want to educate people on this issue, I'm not sure you always have to link it to offering solutions. Solutions are complex, and when you offer solutions you open yourself up to attack -- people start debating the solutions, whether this one is better than that one or whether they will work.

Compare where we are with the Europeans. The average citizen in Europe is fully engaged in this issue. They don't have all the answers, but they recognize what is at stake. You need to motivate people to expect change, and to start to think about reasons to mitigate.

Q: How do you make this a local story? A: Maybe it's not always local -- put the ocean stuff in the travel section, the energy section.

Jeff: It can't all be locally done, although you do need to engage local citizens. Someone, at the national level, has to move the ball forward. I do think that groups like Pew can be leaders, especially if they retain their credibility. Anytime you see environmental groups and businesses partnering, well, something's happening there. As a reporter, a flag goes up -- I want to find out what's going on there. But I also agree that scientists do have to watch yourself when you become advocates. Another flag goes up.

But scientists DO have a role. They provide the science behind a problem. Then other people bring forward a policy solution, and scientists can have a role in evaluating the efficacy of those proposed solutions.

Andy Pershing: I think there's an issue in how science is reported. Scientists don't create problems. Science is the process by which you go about figuring out how the world works. I think you guys are covering scientists as if we're in the business of finding problems. That's not what we do.

Brian: but isn't there a middle ground -- can't you explain your study and it's implications, and at least suggest or point a reporter towards places to find solutions?

Jon: But you have to be really careful. You can be misrepresented by a journalist -- you can suggest that there are solutions out there, and

Comment (no nametag-- Charlie Colgan?): Science IS advocacy: the topic you choose to go after is because you see a problem out there, and you suggest that there's a value in finding the answer. There are millions of things to study -- there's a value judgment embedded in the very act of choosing what to study.

Priscilla: This is really interesting. Scientists have to believe in what they are doing -- that their research has implications to the world. I don't think a passion for what you're doing, and a deep and abiding belief that your research has meaning and value and implications in the world beyond peer-review, that shouldn't be considered advocacy. And to those of us who are advocates, it's fundamentally important that scientists' information is out there.

Dan Holland: The information that often gets out is an oversimplified version of what is necessarily very complex and very uncertain. One reason scientists are reluctant to get information out there is because the complexity, subtlety, and nuance is often lost. I've been really successful in not getting quoted by reporters because what I have to say is too complex.

Justin: Is that success? I understood that the conversation from yesterday had an element of a sense of failure -- we haven't done a good enough job in communicating to the public and policymakers.

Peter Lord: you don't have to, as a scientist, pay attention to who you talk to, who you can trust, and how to explain things. You need a knowledgeable public relations person and public affairs person who can help you out, tell you how the media works, and make sure your scientists aren't always nervous and hesitant to talk to the media. Too often, it's a person in their twenties who's got a drab background from a second-rate newspaper. Unlike Justin at the Pew Oceans Commission. You need high-level, policy-level public relations specialists at institutions who can help the scientists establish real working relations with the media.

William Brennan: I agree this is really interesting. I'm not sure the public is well-informed about the difference between established science and newly emerging, breakthrough science.

Jeff Tollefson: A public relations person can't handle this for you. If a PR person is talking to the media, you're not going to get the kind of coverage you want. In media, we don't have weeks, we have days, and we don't have pages, we have hundreds of words. You already know how to do this. We call it the elevator pitch. In the terms of your research, think about it as the dinner pitch. You go home, and talk to your family, your kids, and tell them what you're doing. This is what we've found. This is what we don't know. This is what we have to do next.

Don Perkins: That's not fair. The media will only do the first third. You cover "this is what we've found". Then you go looking for strong advocates and controversial details or statements. That's how your business works. Example: individually transferable quotas (for fishing) have good points and bad points -- there are winners and losers. Dan Holland did a good job articulating the subtlety and the implications of the whole question. We spent a day with a capable local reporter, but that's not what came out in the resulting story. What we got was one side of the implications, and quotes from people with strong advocacy positions on that one side..... The foundations have managed to pay and train scientists to speak, and that has been wildly successful at making oceans a public interest story. It's controversial, but it has been effective at bringing oceans to the mainstream. How do we train policymakers to anticipate and acknowledge the unintended consequences (of science research? of climate change? of media running away with the implications of science? missed it).

Brian: is more publicity for research always better?

Q: What is the role of investigative journalism on environmental reporting? I don't mean watching someone dumping toxins down a drain in the middle of the night. Example: the impact of a big local storm on two communities: one with a seawall and one without a seawall, and the decisions about permitting and environmental impacts of seawalls.

A: Peter Lord: I give out awards, Grantham, $75,000 for environmental reporting: there's still some great writing out there. But newspapers are under great pressure right now that we don't talk about. Everytime someone leaves they're not replaced. Advertising is moving to the internet.

Q: What's the future of media? If you guys can't even get your message out, what's the key media five years from now?
A: Jerry -- it's still print or subscription electronic media. But there's too much free information -- people still need and trust the editorial role in sorting and sifting information; that gives credibility. People pay for something, and that's implicit in value.
Q: Is that only true for people over 30?
A: Maybe. That's a fair point. We're on a voyage into the internet. We're a repository of information.
A: Brian -- the generation under 30 are far more influenced by one another than by the media, and by conversations. They clearly care about things, but there's chatter that starts to get amplified. But it still originates with mainstream media coverage: a MySpace page article will point to Slate or Salon or a Times article. Even if they're reading it on a MySpace page, their source is somewhere else.
A: Peter Lord: Slate broke the Walter Reed story and got no traction until the Washington Post covered it. There's tons of change, but no form of mainstream media has ever disappeared. Radio didn't go away when television came.
A: Jeff Tollefson: 5 years is still too soon. Ask us about 25 years and you'll stump all of us. Print media currently still has the best system for gathering news. How it's distributed may change, but how it's gathered and paid for is pretty effective.

Q: Rita: how does the way a story is told/advocated in the mainstream press impact how funding decisions are made?

A: Article by Ray Hilborn: Faith Based Fisheries about funding and publications. When dangerous research gets out there, (flawed methodology, advocacy, overreaching conclusions, etc), it harms good research. But a lot of times it gets out there and gets covered and refutations don't get the same coverage that the original research did.

Q: Is it good or bad for science to have its dirty laundry out there, to have arguments of

Q: Do journalists give too much deference to peer review?
A: Peter: I don't give too much credence to that stuff -- it's not local. Jerry: I think mainstream media falls all over themselves when they see that something is peer reviewed.

Q: Sean Mahoney: I'm interested in tying in the scientists' interest in getting their work considered in policy and law, with the problems attached to credibility that comes with being perceived as an advocate.

A: Jon S.: I think the answer is what Jeff suggested: wait to play a role in evaluating solutions

Q: Sean: but isn't that too late -- Priscilla pointed out that economists aren't often invited to think about solutions until the Environmental Impact Statement stage -- and so science doesn't get to play a part in determining which solutions should be on the table to be considered?

A: Robert: There is often an implied advocacy that comes in my work: I evaluate non-market values, and sometimes I find myself saying there's a big source of value that's not being addressed here, or I say, here's how the analysis changes if you do this or that or change a variable. But the next stage in the conversation with reporters, policymakers, etc., is for people to say, well, what will work best, who should do it well, what's the big message, how do we fix the system? I want to pull back and limit what I'm saying to my research, but the media are asking you to take the next step, and they want to pull you into advocacy. It's really hard.

Q: How do scientists who are called to testify act?
A: Scientists are called on the Hill to testify all the time. When I'm reporting on the Hill, I talk to a scientist, and I push them, too. I always ask, "What next"? You can't just tell me "what" -- that's not enough of a story. You can't answer that, and keep your credibility, but you'll always get pushed into the "what next", so you have to be prepared for that.

Scientists who talk on the Hill have to be able to carry the ball forward. You have to speak English, and you have to be clear, and you have to expect to be pushed by people without any scientific background into providing simplified solutions, and know how to sidestep that. But you can't just do your science and leave it on the table. The cat will get it.

Q: How qualified are reporters to do science writing -- not many journalists have degrees from MIT?
A: Peter Lord: There are programs all over the country trying to teach journalists science. Although not a lot of institutions can pay for the training. But most journalists are generalists: Example -- a fellow from Bangor Daily News who was here yesterday morning, then had to drive 2 hours to go cover a hearing, before his day was done.
Q: Do the places that journalists get trained do a good job?
A: We have to write interesting stories that compete with the Patriots! We can't go on and on about we don't know this, we don't know that. The editor is asking, is the bay clean or not? Can you eat the fish or not?
A: Jerry: nuance is a tough sell in the mainstream media. There may be an upper echelon that cares a lot about all the uncertainties, but you have to write for most people. So your job is to translate the false positives and false negatives and the uncertainties into language the reporter can easily make and fit into a compelling story.
A: Peter: example: meningitis went up in RI, but it wasn't a huge amount -- from 12 people to 20. So the legislature were trying to figure out what to tell people to do, given that they weren't sure about what caused the bump. So they held a hearing and they told people that if they had insurance they should take their kids to get screened -- not urgent, but a good precaution. But a reporter asked one of the doctors, who was also a mother, at the hearing, "What would you do if one of your children had a fever." And answering as a mother, she said, "I'd lie awake beside my daughter and take her temperature every hour." And the reporter printed that and it caused a panic in the state -- everyone flocked to the state to be vaccinated and by the time it was done it cost the state millions of dollars, all for a miniscule increase in risk. But when you make something human like that, people respond in a different way.

Q: Article: Altered Oceans. It did a great job taking complexity and making it good -- go check it out.

Comment: Patten: The oceans aren't a local issue. Every town is an ocean town. We're missing the boat as a society here. Every time I've written an Op Ed piece, it's gotten published. If we're going to get Congress to do things, we need to take action. But you need to establish local credibility. You have to do the work so that when a senator or congressman is trying to figure out what to do, they'll call you up and ask for your opinion. Everyone wants to hear about backgrounds, but not take local action if it will cost them something.

Jeff Tollefson: The Washington DC Spin

2007-04-27T08:35:00.001-05:00

Jeff Tollefson tells us how much life has changed in the last 6 months. Covering Congress in a new administration is crazy different. Same issues. Many of the same players. And many of the same players are advocating the same positions. But the momentum is different, the balance of power is different, and every passing week makes him realize how different this climate change issue is being discussed, acted on, and covered by the new administration.

He tells us about the political process. Republicans weren't giving climate change much attention until business interests began to anticipate a Democratic regime -- and worrying about it. Business actors starting pushing for Congress to pass climate change regulations while there were still

Al Gore did not make this wave. He is riding this wave. When the Democrats arrived in Washington people started knocking at the door -- automotive companies saying they wanted to talk about climate change. Business needs to be able to plan; they know change and regulations are coming, so they want to be at the table to discuss it.

Jeff predicts a sudden reversal in the debate in a year or two. He thinks industry will be pushing for climate legislation and the environmentalists will say no. The key number is 60, he says. (He is immersed in DC lingo and the mechanics of political action -- for those of us who aren't in the habit of thinking about balance of power, open seats, and personalities, who is vulnerable and who is not, the code he is speaking takes a minute to sink in.) You mean the environmentalists will want to hold out for even stronger legislation, asks Brian? Bingo. Dems and environmentalists will think that they'll have an even more supportive regime in a couple of years.

Brian: Legislation is slow to develop, and legislators are slow to act. But businesses need an environment of certainty, they need to plan, and they need to act on shorter timescales. So what's the role of the private sector at the table here? Justin, what do you see as the role of big business?
Justin: Big biz is definitely a player. Pew is a partner with 10 CEOs in this emerging project. www.us-cap.org . These partnerships may appear unusual, but we are coming together. We can't wait for the legislators. Every week you hear of more partnerships -- McDonald's is with Greenpeace in the Amazon. Maybe there's some self-interest involved (end-running legislation, "greenwashing") but I also think these are legitimate efforts. People want to improve the environment.

Jerry Fraser: The Fisherman's Perspective

2007-04-27T08:27:00.000-05:00

Jerry Fraser was a fisherman for 7+years, and now works at National Fisherman magazine, an industry trade magazine. The magazine covers a lot of science, but is primarily focused on the viability of the fisheries -- and that includes both fish and people, policy and science.

Jerry's role on this panel is to be a contrarian. He's telling us about regular folks -- what the fishermen think, and what he thinks.

He is skeptical about climate change. It's happening, he acknowledges, but he doesn't know whether it's a fluctuation or a trend. I don't know whether it's been resolved as fact, even though it seems like it's been resolved in the minds of a lot of people in this room. We're always going to live in a changing, fluctuating climate; I'm not convinced we know what it is, where on a bumpy line we fall.

He says that science loses its credibility when it moves toward advocacy. The fishing industry will respect you more if you play the data straight: don't venture too far from fact. (So how does that square with the idea of offering solutions when you offer problems, like Justin Kenney just suggested?)

Be wary of the media. It's not easy for guys to get stories straight. You need to make sure we get it -- we may run away with what you're trying to say.

Jerry chides Peter for calling Senator Inhofe stupid. If you come off as opinionated and dismissive, people aren't going to listen to you.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them change. People act in their own self-interest, but sometimes they can't even be bothered to go to a meeting that will affect them next year. Forget about them taking action for something that might or might not happen for 200 years. I know you guys think there's a sense of urgency here, but be patient. People change slowly.

Peter Lord: Politics and Science

2007-04-27T08:19:00.000-05:00

Peter Lord is talking now. He tells us how smart governor John Chafee was about getting climate change on the agenda of local reporters. The governor would hold hearings, because reporters don't have anything to report on (e.g. general story about climate change) if there's not a hearing. He knew how to keep climate change in the news. He contrasts that with the regime that followed: Inhofe climate change speech -- required reading for all scientists.

I'm laughing right now, and it's interfering with my typing. Peter pulls no punches: Senator Inhofe is stupid. He wants us to read the climate change speech that Inhofe gave not too long ago. What a long fall from governor Chafee to Senator Inhofe!

New administrations and new regimes who take action give reporters something to write about. Reporters need to respond to editors, who want ACTION and local angles. They need something human. They need anecdotal stories -- the local guy who convinces Wal-Mart to install and promote fluorescent lights. You need to hold conferences, hearings or have events in order for long term trends in science to become "news" -- this is what drives editors.

Sports Illustrated, Ms. Magazine, Verdant Magazine -- covering climate change, 400+ stories about Earth Day on the AP -- now a lot of people are writing about the environment, particularly climate change. It's gone mainstream. This is because the political environment has changed.

Peter is a fast-talking firebrand, but his talk is over quickly.

Justin Kenney: Oceans and the Public Eye

2007-04-27T08:07:00.001-05:00

Justin Kenney works for the Pew Charitable Trust: his job is to guide Pew's work where it touches the oceans and climate change. (There is a fact sheet on the conference table -- pick one up.)

He tells us a little bit about the Pew Oceans Commission -- a blue ribbon panel of 18 commissioners (each with staff and help) convened to look at the ocean a few years ago. Climate change wasn't a primary focus of that group (fishing, pollution & development were). If the panel were convened today, climate change would be at the top of the list.

When the Oceans Commission convened, the oceans weren't high on anyone's list -- even environmental groups were generally thinking about land habitats, not ocean ones. So getting attention and public interest focused on the oceans was their first challenge. The second challenge was establishing credibility: fishermen and scientists said, "who the heck are you guys" to Pew at first. And the third was developing a report and spreading their findings to important audiences. He says each stage took a lot longer than they planned or expected.

He tells us about the challenge of building awareness and establishing credibility. It's hard. You have to work almost one person at a time. We'd talk to anyone, we'd go to any group. Publishing reports helps -- it gives you news events and reasons to convene. But you also have to build relationships. If you're in town, just go talk to a reporter. You aren't looking for an article the next day, you're trying to establish a relationship that will pay dividends and give you long term credibility.

Step 2: building credibility. The name "Pew" carries some baggage -- not just $$ but also advocacy. People wanted to know whether the Oceans Commission was neutral, science-based, and what side of the policy question they came down on.

Step 3: Closing the deal. Once you have credibility and trust, you can then deliver a report. Here's what we learned. As a Commission, we had to speak with one voice. A lot of the people who are listening will want to use your science for their own ends and take bits and pieces to supplement their own agendas. We had to stay on message.

Scientists are the most credible spokespeople. We had scientists on the panel, and we took advantage of that.

You need to link problems with solutions. If you are putting a problem out there, you need to add a solution right behind it, or people will get overwhelmed.

You need to plan your communications strategy right from the very beginning. It's everyone's job, but you need to dedicate the resources to have one person who has the primary responsibility. You need to open up, and invite the press and the world into your work -- the earlier, the better. Explain why you're doing the work you do, what's going to matter, where you think it's going. You're not aiming for an article the next day you talk to a reporter. You're looking for a long term relationship. And you need to be local -- find a local angle so a reporter has a tie in to their audience.

Brian Bergstein: moderator of journalist panel

2007-04-27T08:05:00.000-05:00

Brian starts out with a compliment to the blog (yay!) and tells us that he's very interested in the topic and excited to moderate. He reminds us that the intention of the panel is to be a conversation -- jump in with questions and remarks if you have them.

Here We Go

2007-04-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

It's morning, and the milling around is beginning to die down. There are more suits in the front of the room today than yesterday: the journalists are here, and are going to talk to us about how to communicate complex issues to the public. To my right, two economists are talking about plagiarism in their field. I can hear a fragment of a conversation on my left ... "twelve dollars a pound off the boat...." There's a convivial hum in the room, and stragglers are arriving and shaking out their raincoats to hang on the back of their chairs. It's dreary outside, but there's coffee and chocolate fish in this room....

See You Tomorrow.

2007-04-26T15:18:00.000-05:00

Tonight I'll be uploading powerpoint presentations, and correcting spelling. If you see omissions, misstatements, or inaccuracies, please email or leave a comment. Please also use the comments to extend the conversation, note your own reactions to a speech or a question, or to store thoughts for inclusion in our wrap-up tomorrow. This blog is a group archive: help make it as good and rich as it can be.

Tour of the Facility & Dinner

2007-04-26T15:17:00.000-05:00

Alan Lishness is leading the group on a tour of the new GMRI facility at 5PM, convening at the cocktail site on the second floor.

Dinner is at 6 PM.

Meinhard Doelle: Law & Policy in the Face of Uncertainty

2007-04-26T14:31:00.000-05:00

Meinhard Doelle starts off by telling us he has more questions than answers. He continues his disclaimer by confessing that his own perspective is the mitigation perspective. One of the biggest uncertainties we have is what we will or can do in terms of mitigation. If we are going to adapt, we need to understand or answer that question.

The German strategy of adapting to climate change by guard rails has some embedded assumptions -- that climate change will be within two degrees, and within one meter of current sea level. Is this the right set of assumptions? He's not sure it is -- it is perhaps too conservative. (Correct me if I got this wrong).

When do we start to mitigate and allocate resources toward mitigation and adaptation? Do we wait for that scientific 95% certainty threshold?

He's still disclaiming. He's Canadian -- so he can snipe at "government" and we aren't to take offense or assume he's talking about the US government. And his final disclaimer -- he's crossing disciplines here and, although many lawyers cross disciplines, we're not necessarily any good at it. So keep me honest.

And now he's off, asking his questions. Is there such a thing as objective science, apart from politics and values? A familiar question: how do we make marine policy decisions in the face of major uncertainty?

Meinhard wants us to think about how values impact science: in the identification of research needs, in funding decisions, in the proposals and implementation, in the findings and the peer review, and in the way science is incorporated into policy. He also asks us who should get to play a role in the development of science -- scientists, government officials, resource users, community groups, NGOs, and others (future generations?)?

But his main question is this: how should we deal with uncertainty? Science hates uncertainty and wants a 95% confidence threshold before it will conclude something. Science is predominantly concerned with preventing false positives. It is less concerned about false negatives (e.g. a failure to draw a conclusion). Science can wait for certainty.

Does that approach to uncertainty work for policymaking? A false positive would mean: an impact has been predicted and acted upon, and it doesn't in fact materialize. A false negative would mean a possible impact is not identified and acted upon, and it DOES materialize.

From a policy point of view, we are concerned about these "false negatives". And science isn't helping us manage those sides of marine ecosystem results. Which is worse? What are the implications of being wrong? What have we done elsewhere?

An analogy is criminal law, with an embedded value: it is better to let 10 guilty people go free than to falsely convict one innocent person. That has made for a legal system with a great number of protections ("technicalities") to prevent the conviction of innocent persons. Can we apply that here?

What is the more harmful mistake? To unnecessarily interrupt business as usual to require a change in anticipation of a possible future scenario that doesn't materialize? Or to carry on without taking action and have the harmful scenario occur? This is a philosophical decision, not a science or economic decision. But of course it depends on the underlying probabilities and economic ("market" and "non-market") values.

Like economics, law brings a language to conversations about science and policy decisions. Meinhard identifies four approaches:

"Sound science" and its threshold of confidence (the requirement that peer review and 95% certainty in conclusions before a hypothesis is accepted as the basis for action)
the risk assessment approach. We can deal with "risk" but have a hard time dealing with uncertainty. This approach has a hard time dealing with the continuum between false negatives and false positives. There are some inherent limitations in this approach, but there are values embedded and hidden in risk assessment models: sometimes these values are not disclosed or made explicit.

how do you deal with intergenerational issues and the distribution of risk?
how do you deal with uncertainty?
how do we quantify risk?

Cost-benefit analysis:

crucial value choice about what to include (
bringing in full cost (e.g. "non-market" values and costs) is critical
intergenerational distribution of costs and benefits is important.
doesn't deal well with uncertainty.

Precautionary approach:

this tool tries to deal with uncertainty
embedded assumption is that we should plan for risky situations and avoid them if we can.
the value doesn't discount future generations

Meinhard believes that need to engage science and turn it into policy before we get to that 95% certainty. We need to engage society in the value choices we make about the PROCESS by which we make decisions, not only the decisions themselves. Without a process, we won't have principled decisions: they'll be made more in response to particular situations.

Q: Fisheries management seems to take the precautionary approach. "Use the best science available" is the standard -- it needn't all be peer reviewed. Preserving the resource is the highest value and the standard by which decisions are made.
A: a 10% chance of something catastrophic happening is enough to engage it in serious conversation about adaptation and mitigation. To what extent do we want nature as altered by climate change to manage our resources, and to what extent do we want to try to take control of this?
A: Dan Holland: I may be muddying this in my mind, but I think when you talk about the "sound science" approach, you're not making a clear distinction. A 95% confidence rate in scientific conclusions about the mechanics of something or even the interpretation of data trends is not equivalent to a 95% probability that an outcome will come about -- it's really important not to conflate these two concepts. Assigning probabilities to outcomes is a different process than drawing conclusions about data at the scientific threshold

Q: check out policyscience.org. This is a set of tools that help policymakers arrive at conclusions for the public interest. And what would you say if you had the ear of a Washington policymaker?

A: we need to have an international consensus on what would be an acceptable result. The consensus seems to be that climate increase should be limited to two degrees. Then we need to agree on the principles that will govern how we allocate resources, then we need to determine the actions we need to take and assign those actions across nations. We need to have discussions as communities that make decisions, and those communities have values that should be embedded in the actions we take and the framework by which we make decisions.

Q: but aren't those values already embedded in the statutes we've enacted, via our democratically elected representatives?

A: If the public doesn't know and debate those embedded values, I don't think we can conclude that. If you want to develop good policy based on science, you have to bring everyone along to participate in that discussion.

Q: Robert Johnston: this conversation mirrors the conversation of economists when talking about non-market values. Do you want the values to be driven by the non-informed public, or do you want to inform them? And if so, what's the line between informing the public and giving them a spin job?

A: Meinhard: Great question. I lean toward an informed public making the decision. But who is going to stand in for unborn generations?
A: William Brennan: the question of how you inform the public is critical. My son came back from seeing "The Day After Tomorrow" really dejected -- that movie turned climate change into a cartoon. Did it set back the cause and the public debate about climate change? That can have the opposite effect.

Q: Andy Pershing -- is there a positive role for the legal profession in pushing for large scale structural changes? Our system is so constrained -- how do you break out of those constraints?
A: William Brennan: don't forget that within public policy, environmental issues in a representative democracy rank lower than other issues. So we also have to raise the priority of environmental issues in the public eye.

Linda Mercer: Local Fisheries Management

2007-04-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

Linda is the director of the research and monitoring programs at the department of marine resources fisheries management for the state of Maine. She views climate change as adding a layer of uncertainty to what she does. We're just starting to discuss climate change in our policymaking and our science programs, but that has not been our practice and we don't have a firm foundation that is guiding our work.

Fisheries are fully exploited or overexploited right now. The strain on populations will be exacerbated by climate change. Various user groups (e.g. recreational vs. commercial fishermen, or different fishery users) have conflicting incentives.

Linda's work happens at different levels: municipal level for softshell clam management, state level (e.g. quahogs), interstate and international level for migratory fish species. And there are interjurisdiction levels, where Linda's department is not the only one making or enforcing regulations that impact a fishery. Some species are regulated internally, while others (like sea urchins) are regulated by the legislature -- a substantially less flexible and responsive regulatory process. The layered nature of the work makes it complex. We don't have a social scientist in the department or an economist -- that's an area unfortunately that we give short shrift to.

Some questions Linda is thinking about now: Boreal Shrimp -- what will happen to the shrimp fishery? What will be the impact of climate change on migratory species like Atlantic Salmon -- we're dumping a lot of money into restoring habitat from the salmon -- will those efforts pay if climate change hurts the salmon population? Will climate change make lobsters more susceptible to disease? The lobster population in Long Island Sound was recently decimated by disease: if the Gulf of Maine warms substantially will our most What about summer flounder -- we don't have a share of the fishery quota, but if the species migrates north, should we have more of the quota? What species can act as indicators -- the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the Gulf of Maine? What will happen with algal blooms and red tide as precipitation patterns change? How do we make decisions in a regulatory structure that is not very flexible?

We're locked into regulatory regimes that do not adapt. How can we unhook from these so we can respond more quickly and flexibly to change that is coming? We rely on single-species models to make decisions; how can we change our models to make them multi-species and robust, ecosystem based approaches, so we can manage better? We need to identify key vulnerabilities (e.g. if sea level rises, what happens to our eelgrass habitats and our shellfish flats)? How can we deal with these things proactively?

I think we can do some scenario planning. We can do better synthesizing data from multiple sources. There is a lot of data; pulling it all together is a huge task. Maintaining GoMOOS and other long term monitoring systems is critical. Convening interdisciplinary work groups more will help. We need to move closer to ecosystem level management -- not just at a single-species level, and not just within particular political boundaries.

Q: is there a systematic approach within your department to move toward ecosystem management?
A: at the state level, no. We haven't jumped into that arena yet. The feds have, a little bit. The Canadians have, a bit. The state planning office has looked a little at small bay-scale ecosystem management level. This is an arena for more research and grant work.

Q: You brought up species migration and the possible scenario of a northern state benefiting from a species migrating north. In such a case, there's not an equal exchange of benefits (the northern state gains but the southern state that loses the resource does not!). Will there be resistance to regulation or shifting fisheries rights like that?
A: It'll be a difficult discussion. Boats migrate north and follow the species, but of course some states won't want to give up to other states. I can't think of an example where one state agreed to willingly give up its rights to a resource. But if the resource swims away, they might not have a choice....

Q: to both Linda Mercer and William Brennan: What's it like to sit in the position as stewards of a resource and the gatekeeper of conservation of that resource? How do you balance the human impacts of conserving a resource when it conflicts with economically using or exploiting that resource -- when some human beings will be seriously impacted by your decisions.
A: It's really hard to do. Our offices have an "economic development" mandate as well as a wildlife conservation mandate. It's no different than any other public policy endeavor where you have competing public policy interests. Different stakeholders with conflicting interests have a seat at the table with us. That doesn't make it easy.

Q: by Sean Mahoney of the Conservation Law Foundation: How do "market" and "non-market value" factor into your balancing act when weighing your decision about the use or conservation of a resource.
A: Most of the time we don't have good economic information when we have to make a decision. We base things on biological science data that we have, tempered by social policy that we have -- do 5 people or 500 people come to the public hearing we have on a topic. And what do they have to say? That's our social impact data. Without economic data, we mostly get biased opinions (and short-term perspectives) from locally impacted people.
A: William Brennan -- the short term perspective is pervasive, even covering the statutes that protect our resources.

William Brennan

2007-04-26T13:23:00.000-05:00

William works for the US Climate Change Science Program, but he's deeply rooted to Maine (his niece works at a bar down the street). He's worked with NOAA, until last May when he was tapped to be the acting head of the Climate Change Science Program (annual budget $1.6 billion?), which works at the interface of science and policy.

What do we know and not know about climate change?
What happens at the interface of science and policy?
What is going on in the international and national policy arenas in this area?
Personal observations about the public debate surrounding climate change?

What we know: human activity has significantly increased CO2 (fossil fuel), nitrous, and methane (agriculture). Most of the observed increase in temperature is very likely the result of human activity. Bottom line: general scientific agreement that human activity is a driver of climate change. But increased resolution and study is needed to know about the sensitivity of particular ecosystems on a regional scale; this is the scale where impacts occur. The signal to noise ratio is still really high on these smaller scales.

At the interface of science and policy: we've restructured the way we organize science and technology and use research to make policy. In 2002 there was a new committee formed, at a cabinet level, intended to facilitate interagency cooperation (e.g. between Dept. of Agriculture, Transportation, EPA, etc.). William goes into detail about the structure and aims of the program, as well as its budget and its composition. Much of that information is available on the CCSP website. (I'm having trouble capturing the details). The gist of it is that the group seems to be a convener and sponsor of a wide range of science and research all over; and it seems to have connections and oversight from (and therefore, at least in theory, to facilitate open communication between) with a number of organizations.

The CCSP is policy-neutral: a tough place to be. Policymakers are risk-averse and yet they must act on a short timescale. They want certainty in their information, but the science isn't always able to deliver. He discusses the difficulty of things like the Kyoto protocol, and US's position to it. The US has entered into bilateral climate agreements with at least 14 partner countries; more cooperative international efforts are in the works.

At the national level, the US has committed to drop emissions by 18% by year 2012; additional alternative fuels and petroleum import reductions are also on the table. A suite of tools will be necessary to reduce climate change.

William has a tough job here: he's brought a speech and is reading it briskly, right after lunch. His coverage, like is organization is broad: he's telling us about US efforts, commitments, and achievements in an international scope, a national scope, and then highlights of state and local work (e.g. the efforts passed by California, and by groups of mayors).

Through with his prepared speech, he concludes with some personal observations: notably, communication is the most essential of the many complex things (science, economics, policy, and communication) that go into effective action on climate change.

Policymaking is a negotiation between different parties. It's a lot harder when the parties who come to the table to negotiate don't have access to the same information. Communication and access to data is key.

Climate change has become the top environmental issue, now and in the foreseeable future. But environmental issues are still low in the minds of many individuals.

Politicians and bureaucrats are both risk-averse -- we need to shift the frame of reference for discussing environmental issues, like Muskie did, from "air pollution" to "public health".

Q: Rita Heimes: when you are allocating resources, how do you weigh proposals that include technical gadgetry or other components -- tell us how grants are awarded.
A: Technology is really important in what we look at, as is how the data will be used, and what we can do or what the potential impact of that information would be.

Q: How do we reframe the environmental debate around climate change? With "air pollution" vs. "public health" there was a selfish motivation for people to act -- if I don't do something, I or my children will get sick. With climate change, the impacts are less well known and less immediate.
A: Humans are selfish, although I'd never say that out loud as a public official. :) That's going to be one of our hardest problems -- telling that story in a compelling way, and motivating people to bring personal responsibility into their decisions.

Q: Is there a difference between how social scientists present and impact policy and hard scientists present information and how it impacts policymakers? Since fish can't talk, sometimes I think policymakers listen to biologists and take their conclusions about impacts of change on fish at face value. But social scientists are talking about economic impacts on people, and people can testify for themselves, are the conclusions of social scientists somehow discounted? Is there a way we (social scientists) can change our approach so we gain more traction with you insiders?
A: I agree that the socioeconomic factors of fisheries management haven't been given the prominence that the physical science factors have, although I'm not really able to pinpoint why. I'm not sure that's the same thing happening in climate science. Four or five years ago the conversation was dominated by meteorologists. But now, mitigation and adaptation are being discussed and are acknowledged as essential -- that's where the global community is making the linkages between human systems and hard science outcomes.

Powerpoint Presentations Now Online

2007-04-26T13:18:00.000-05:00

I've uploaded several of this morning's powerpoint presentations, and will be incorporating them into the proceedings shortly.

If you are a speaker, or a participant, and have suggestions or material you'd like to share, please email it to me: sherry.fowler@gmail.com.

Lunch Break

2007-04-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

There are a few people pecking away at their laptops or listening to voicemail in the corners of the little conference room, but most everyone is in the hallway, engaged in conversation. I see a Conservation Law Foundation person talking to an economist, with lots of arm gestures. In a sunny atrium some fisheries managers are sitting in sofas, eating potato chips and talking about declining fish stocks. On a sunny patio I saw a law student from the University of Maine talking with a fellow from Harvard's Kennedy School and a Dalhousie Law School professor. A small conference room I passed a moment ago had laughter and enthusiastic discussion by a mixed group, and two senators' aides just arrived and are settling in.

We reconvene at 2:15, but I have a feeling some of the best moments of the conference are happening right now, in these hallway and lunchtime exchanges.

What did you talk about over lunch? Tell us in the comments if you made a connection, started a project or a partnership, or extended a point made in this morning's sessions.

Jon Sutinen

2007-04-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

Jon Sutinen tells us that how society will prepare for and respond to climate change will depend on the system that governs how we interact with marine ecosystems. This governance system has not performed well to date. In fact, those governing systems are all changing right now.

What are the trends of marine ecosystems? Marine environmental degradation has not only continued, but intensified DESPITE international action to regulate and help. How come? Jon asks: why do we find ourselves with degraded ecosystems? How do we mitigate the degradation and improve the status of these ecosystems? What are the governance challenges unique to climate change? What is needed to adapt to changes?

Governance is a framework for explaining outcomes. There are 3 basic mechanisms that drive human behavior: markets (economic drivers), government (legal and political drivers), and civil society (social drivers -- norms, trends, preferences). Each driver has features and major weaknesses, discussed below.

Markets are the principal drivers of extraction of resources, disposal of pollutants, and habitat alteration. Market prices don't tell the ecological truth: they don't reflect the full consequences of use of resources (e.g. spills and discharges, wastewater discharge, nutrient runoff). That's not necessarily because participants are "bad" or amoral people -- just rational actors maximizing their returns.

Governments: often have jurisdictions that don't map well to the ecosystem boundaries. They are fragmented and disjointed (e.g. a separation between Dept of Transportation and Dept. of Fisheries), sometimes even counter-productive. There is a lack of "political will" and the difficulty of politicians balancing short-term results against long-term consequences. There are multiple regulatory bodies working in same arena.

Social Drivers/ Civil Society. Social norms and networks influence public policy and societal behavior patterns. Incompatible social norms and conflicts among interest groups (e.g. jetski recreational enthusiasts vs. conservationists?) impede ecosystem protection efforts. Civil organizations -- Atlantic Coastal Action Program, World Wildlife Foundation, Conservation Law Foundation, The Ocean Conservancy.

What can economists do to influence these drivers? We can correct and mitigate market failures -- design or reform markets to tell the ecological truth. Calculate ecological costs of pollution, habitat destruction, overexploitation. Incorporate (as tariffs/taxes/subsidies) into market prices. Cap and trade rights to do particular activities.

We can correct and mitigate government weaknesses: harmonize policies and regulations. Combat shortsighted effects, and avoid decoupled costs and benefits (this isn't happening in the USA). And we can build and strengthen social capital. In the USA (and particularly in Maine) nonprofits and interest groups are very strong actors. That's not true in every country or region. We can help facilitate cooperation, and we can help delegate some monitoring and other functions to non-government actors.

Jon asks: How will climate change differ from the challenges like pollution, over harvesting to marine ecosystem (e.g. where there is an identifiable "bad guy" doing a particular action that hurts the environment)? The external forcing of changes will trigger disruptions in all three of the drivers of behavior. Given their inherent weaknesses, will markets, government, and civil society react well? He doesn't know the answer (but he sounds pessimistic).

See A Handbook on Governance and Socioeconomics of Large Marine Ecosystems for more discussion.

Jon's presentation slides are also available online.

Q: do you have any success stories?
A: We're looking! But we see shifts from one driver to the other -- e.g. civil society discovered that polluted rivers were causing typhoid: their actions created behavior by government that regulated pollution in rivers. We have a crisis-driven reaction time: things have to get really bad for all three of the social actors to take action.

Q: Andy Pershing asks: ecologists think that climate change and variability will favor the generalist species and hurt the specialists. Do you think that's true for society, too?
A: Yes. In the market sector, firms that are agile will do way better as the market changes; firms that are very specialized have a lot more risk.

Q: Lew Incze: the "protect and conserve" mentality in the public assumes that if you can "put a fence" around a resource, it won't change. As a scientist, I understand that a better definition is to protect and conserve the capacity of the ecosystem to respond to change, or to adapt to change. You can't be sure it will stay the same -- it's going to change. What you need to preserve is the ability to respond. It's related to what Dan said about putting fishermen into boxes that restricts their ability to diversify across fisheries.
A: you definitely see this. We need to use proper regulatory methods to control or help resources, and so terminology or approach matter a lot.

Q: I work for a fisheries manager. We've never in 7 years had any non-economic measures available to us in order to talk about non-market values of conserving fish habitat; we have to frame everything in terms of preventing bad economic impacts of losing the habitat. We're also missing cumulative effect assessment (adding a dock here, re-sanding a beach there) of many small projects on fish habitat. We want more data and information.
A: (includes Jon's answer and questioner's follow up comments) I worked for a long time for organizations collecting this kind of information, and would have been happy to share social and economic information -- but often that information doesn't seem to be used, seriously, by policymakers in making decisions. I'm not sure scientists and social scientists and policymakers are all that good at talking to one another. And we work on very different time scales -- policymakers and nonprofits need to write a report today; scientists want to study something and get back to you in two years.
A: Robert: we social scientists need to get better about communicating our work to people who can use it. And although we do operate on different timescales and with different thresholds of certainty, we can provide policymakers with "ballpark" estimates that might be useful. We're also looking into how transferable non-market values are from one region to another, so that when studies are done we are adding to a knowledge base that can be used by people in similar, but not identical situations.
A: Dan Holland -- we need to learn, too, about the accuracy and usefulness of our models, and how we can share or transfer what we learn from modeling.

Q: Timescale question -- how long after we collect data does it get implemented into federal policy? Scientific data has a time lag, and sometimes that's dangerous, because the resulting policy is based on old science. How about in economic data?
A: It depends. Sometimes you can turn around a study very quickly. It depends on the specificity of the result you need. It also depends on the extent to which similar research has already been done. But as you're doing your ecological study and start your economic study at the same time, and it won't take longer than the environmental study. Where the delay comes in is that the economics is thrown in as an afterthought: the ecological conclusions come out and they say, hey, you've got a month, will you do an economic study?
A: Priscilla Brooks: economics comes in at the end, in an Environmental Impact Statement analysis, when the alternatives have already been identified. Can't we bring the economics in earlier, so it can be involved in selecting and identifying what the options and conclusions should be?
A: Jon: yes, and I blame us, the economists. We haven't done a good job explaining the value of what we do.

Dan Holland: Economics and the Allocation of Fishery Resources

2007-04-26T11:12:00.000-05:00

We know there's a high degree of uncertainty about how specific fisheries will be affected by climate change. We're pretty sure some will decline while others increase. Fisherman have a limited ability to respond to change -- slow to setup and develop ability to fish for a different species. Slow changes can be responded to, but quick and dramatic changes in productivity will hurt people, because our human structures and regulations don't permit rapid change.

Our fisheries have become more specific, because of excess fishing capacity. Regulation to limit fisheries has created specialized fishermen, less diversified.

Dan Holland runs us through the history of groundfish fishery access (driven by litigation by the Conservation Law Foundation). There is a system of A, B, and C days -- only active fishermen got A days, which are really the most usable days. B days are for special access programs. C days can't be used for the foreseeable future -- it's almost the effect of removing someone's permit. Further access restrictions are being contemplated in the Gulf of Maine.

Lobster management followed a different course: restrictions on the lobster fishing was geographically based, to allow for more local management. People can only fish within a little box; if the lobster fishery goes down in a geographic zone, a fisherman is screwed -- limited ability to switch zones. Scallop, red crab, and herring fisheries have been limited, too. This means that people who make a living by fishing have had to specialize in one particular species.

Although lobster landings in Maine have been going up since the late 1980s, it is flat or going down in MA and RI, and it's unlikely to go up forever.

How do we protect people who depend on marine resources for their living when they are not diversified and are therefore highly susceptible to the fluctuations of a particular species? The risk is coming -- how do we mitigate that risk?

individual transferable quotas?
fishing cooperatives that have access rights to multiple fisheries?

Both alternatives represent a major cultural change, and wouldn't be popular. Human culture change won't necessarily follow the same timeline of fishery population change or climate change.

Dan ends with a discussion of the international context. Fish don't recognize international borders, and populations cross borders. Optimal management requires cooperation. Game theory done by economists can help inform these sort of multilateral agreements. But changing conditions for herring stock are going to put agreements on cooperation under strain (especially because as Lew and Kevin pointed out, the science doesn't make it easy to distinguish long term trends versus shorter term fluctuations). The US and Canada have only recently developed agreement on how to share stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder on the Georges Bank. Herring is jointly assessed but not formally shared. We need economists to work together with politicians to look at the economic forces that might drive such sharing agreements.

Conclusion: New England fishermen are tightly constrained and locked in to single fisheries. But fisheries are connected -- changes in regulation or environment at one fishery will have an impact on the others. There will be cultural resistance to changing one fishery unless there's a corresponding change in diversification of the people who rely on single fisheries for their living. We need to look at regulatory models that will encourage diversification in the face of great uncertainty and risk. We also need robust international cooperation: fisheries regulation has to be international in scope. Economic game theory will be important in hammering out solutions.

Dan's PowerPoint presentation is also available online.

Robert Johnston: Managing Ecological Resources in a Changing Climate

2007-04-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

Robert Johnston promises to tell us about the methods that economists use to assess economic values in an uncertain world. We need to make policy even when we don't fully know what kinds of changes are coming. These policy changes will be local, regional, national.

What can economics contribute to policy guidance? Economists are used to talking about tradeoffs. You can't have everything: how do you choose from among competing alternatives? How can you get public support for the decisions you make? This framework will be important in explaining how the linkages the scientists are discovering can be formed into policy and regulations that enjoy public support.

Economic valuation informs environmental policy. Features of natural systems represent ecological goods and services (e.g. clean air, sunshine, a beach that people like, the availability of fish) that impact human well being. Not everything has a commercial or direct economic value (e.g. the entertainment value of watching a fish run, or the health value of having clean air). Economists assign a value to these components and help policymakers maximize long term social well being. They also help policymakers weigh the benefits versus the costs.

Note: economic values are not the same as "economic impact". Well being means more than money in people's pocket or flows of cash from one person to another. These "non-market values" are harder to calculate and articulate: they impact people's well-being but aren't bought or sold. These are "use values" (e.g. the ability to go fishing, go to the beach, breathe air, see a fish jump, etc.) and "non-use values" (e.g. the existence of a viable fish run that will be there for our children, even if you're not using it -- this is a "bequest" value -- or the conservation of land or wildlife species -- there's value just in the existence of a resource, separate from its use).

How do you measure non-market values? Well, you can see the impacts of pollution on market prices on houses in the area. You can see the impact of a healthy environment by seeing how far people are willing to travel to visit or experience that place. You can design surveys that mimic bond issues -- how much would you pay in order to conserve/create a particular resource. There are other methods of measuring non-market values. Remember, it's not the same as "economic impact" -- that's where money directly changes hands around a particular resource.

Tricky things: uncertainty makes measuring and modeling economic values really tricky. Risk and uncertainty are different concepts. Risky outcomes are those that are unlikely but have a probability we can assess. Uncertain outcomes don't have an assessed probability. Economists can deal with risky outcomes, but less well with uncertain outcomes. So the task is to work with scientists who are measuring and assessing uncertain changes, and try to assign risk instead.

Climate change is an example of decision making under risk and uncertainty. If scientists and economists can translate uncertainty to risk, we can plug various scenarios into economic models.

Responses to ecosystem service threatened by global warming:
1) Protect/conserve -- but which to preserve?
2) Mitigate, offset, or replace -- but you can't replace everything!
3) Triage: preserve or replace the most valuable -- but what's the most valuable?

The language and tools of economics is useful to help people make these decisions.

Example: Fish runs in Rhode Island have been disappearing since the arrival of humans. River herring habitat can be rebuilt with fish ladders, dam notching, and dam removal. Diadromous fish populations have been growing or stable until very recently. That's good news. But in 2000 and 2001, there were major declines in fish populations -- 95-99% drop in population on herring runs. (From 631,000 fish in 1985 to 21 fish in 2006. Yikes!) Why? The consensus: it has nothing to do with the fish passage habitat -- it must be something at the estuary or ocean level. Possibilities: by-catch in sea herring fishery? Resurgence of predators like bass? Climate change? And what do you do when you are providing costly fish ladder restoration methods and the population is declining for unrelated reasons? Do you reallocate the resources to something else?

What is the optimal response to uncertain impacts? The methodology of economics moves you through the analysis. Like Kenny Rogers says: you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em? How do you know? What is the probability you will win if you stay in the game?

You can make probability models that balance the function of $$ resources allocated into one arena (e.g. building good fish ladders, taking out dams in rivers) and exogenous events beyond the control of managers (e.g. climate change). You can also assess the social value -- the larger the social value of the "pot" in your poker game, the more it's worth to risk for a win.

It's easy to find the market value. It's harder, but not impossible, to find the non-market value of environmental resources. It's very hard to assign values to the uncertainty, but physical scientists are working on this, and it's important for scientists and economists to work together so the economic modeling is based on the best science. If the economic models are optimal, we'll make better policy decisions about allocating resources.

The frameworks exist. What we mostly need is the empirical estimates of probabilities and values, so we see the implications of putting money in one place or another.

Robert's slide presentation is also available online.

Q: Patten White: what is the mitigation for replacing shorefront land? Replacing a sea marsh with a farm pond 5 miles inland really reduces productivity.
A: Mitigation like that is really a misuse of economic modeling. If mitigation is to work, your benefits have to replace the benefits of what is lost -- right now mitigation really seems to focus on the cost side, not the benefit trade. Mitigation isn't a viable option unless what you're replacing is equivalent to what you're taking away.

Q: You focused on responding to climate change. What about preventing it?
A: Same economic analysis, lingo, and process for making policy decisions that might prevent climate change. I was focusing on more local responses, but the framework is the same. I think we're starting to do that work now, but I don't think we were doing a very good job 5 years ago. (and this isn't my line of work, so I'm a little out of my league).

Q: Non-use values -- how do you value or compare the audience or population for non-use values. Is there a global audience for it?
A: It depends on the resource. Preserving local farmland has a really high use and non-use value to the people in the local community; as you get further away, the non-use value of that system diminishes. But in Connecticut, as a state, there's about a penny per acre per person of conserved land. Some ecosystems can have high non-use values, because they're

Q: Priscilla from the Conservation Law Foundation: in my experience, the non-market values are rarely incorporated into policy-making. That's understandable, because they're hard to collect and measure. But what do you do to make that easier to do -- e.g. a "bank" of non-market values that you can incorporate into reports and analyses?
A: there are more of these. EPA currently incorporates non-market values into its reports, and the Office of Management and Budget insists that they strip those out. (And the EPA just got sued, and lost, and was ordered to re-visit an analysis that had its non-market values stripped out by the OMB.) Also, there is a growing interest in banks and databases that incorporate non-market values and make them easier to measure and specify.

Dan Holland: The Role of Economics in Marine Environment

2007-04-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Dan Holland introduces us to the next panel, and suggests that there are three roles for economics (and economists) in a coping with the uncertain future of the marine environment in the face of climate change:

1) they evaluate the costs and benefits and economic impacts of specific potential outcomes (eg. decline or extinction of a particular fish stock)

2) They understand how economic incentives influence human behavior, and how that behavior impacts economic and ecological outcomes

3) They understand how human organizations (government, companies, institutions) behave and how regulation works

He shows us the human connections of the various marine biological populations: markets, technology, and regulations affect the productivity of one species (e.g. herring) which changes the availability of bait and therefore impacts the lobster harvest. So groundfish, herring, and lobster are connected not only ecologically and environmentally, but also economically and via human systems (markets, technology, and regulation).

Kevin Friedland: Expected Changes in Ocean Dynamics

2007-04-26T09:02:00.000-05:00

Kevin begins by acknowledging that his colleague Mike Fogarty was originally supposed to attend. A link to some of their work is here.

What ocean changes do we expect to see in an increasing climate?

Increased water temperature
increased melting ice
changes in salinity due to runoff and evaporation/precipitation patterns
changes in major current systems
increased stratification of ocean column
changes in position and intensity of frontal zones
changes in upwelling.

He shows us a complex chart of the interactions between these things. Upshot: this is tough to model.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a varying state: a positive phase or a negative phase. Lots of pressure lines in the positive phase; not so many in the negative phase. When there's lots of pressure, there's lots of wind. We're going to see temperature patterns and wind pattern changes; these will impact our precipitation.

The NAO affects recruitment and therefore fishery yields of cod. Cod stocks show a relationship to the NAO that is regional and localized -- large scale forcing factors affect stocks in measurable ways. Kevin shows us a "hideous graph" of plankton and cod recruitment (actually all gadoids -- cod is a gadoid). In one set of years, plankton acted one way; in another set of years, plankton acted another way in the Northeast Atlantic (near Europe). Gadoid productivity corresponded to the plankton health. It appears that the NAO is also connected to lobster productivity in the Gulf of Maine.

Kevin then shows us a series of sea surface temperature measurements from the 1880s to present day in a variety of regions in the North Atlantic. We see the intense warming in the 1950s that Lew showed us across all regions; current temperature is not the highest it's ever been. But over recent decades we are experiencing a greater range in temperatures than we have ever seen: there's a major increase in the difference between summer and winter temperatures that is seen in recent years that has never been true in the rest of the existing record.

Over the past, when things got warm, both summer and winter got warm together. Today, as things get warm, summers are getting MUCH warmer and winters aren't. This is the difference.

Kevin asks us to consider: are we waiting for climate change to occur here in the Gulf of Maine, or has it occurred and we've missed it? Spring warming rates have dramatically increased, and he notes some other metrics (that I missed -- please help fill in) suggesting we may already have seen major changes. These changes will impact biological populations that cannot tolerate high temperatures: look for distribution and range changes to be appearing. Will there be cod in the Gulf of Maine anymore? Will spanish mackerel become the top species?

We see a chart of the distribution of hake across the North Atlantic. The hake are moving north! This is early empirical evidence that populations are moving in response to climate change. Kevin tells us the story of the eel: they seem to correspond to the NAO, but the eel are on their way out. He suggests that this is related to the health of the Sargasso Sea (the "ocean desert" in the tropics), where the eels go to spawn (eel larvae are dramatically interesting fish -- check them out). There's been a diminishment of winds in the Sargasso Sea, which may impact the transport mechanism of the eel larvae. We look at haddock recruitment data connected to the NAO. The upshot: it's hard to predict changes in fisheries when we don't fully understand the mechanism of feeding, lifecycle, and mobility of specific species.

The message: economic species (like eel in the North Atlantic) are impacted by the health of ecosystems very far away.

Conclusions: decadal scale variation in the ocean climate are visible. The NAO is a dominant feature in the region, and impacts cod recruitment and fish distribution. Migratory species may be impacted by factors in distant locations. We expect complex interactions between exploitation and harvesting.

Kevin and Mike's slides are also available online.

Q: for Kevin and Andy: tell us about the salinity anomaly and the NAO (and right whales? didn't catch).
A: Andy: the salinity signal may be masking the NAO variability in calanus. If you remove the herring signal from calanus, the NAO pattern pops right out. Kevin: the systems are much too complex to bring everything down to one or two patterns -- you can't always look at the NAO to explain everything.

Q: as the ice sheet melts in the North Atlantic, what happens to sea surface temperature (warmer, or colder?).
A: Kevin: warmer, I hope. The increase in temperature seems to be a continental effect (and we're seeing an increase in storms that seems to correspond). Melting icewater from Arctic ice sheets is a geographic feature that's unique to us -- might mean that the sea surface temperature INCREASES that are happening globally and here, connecting with land surface temperatures, will be tempered by this influx of cold, fresher water. But it is extremely complex and hard to predict.
A: Lew Incze: these models are so geographically variable, and global modeling is so crude, it's extremely hard to predict. The difference in buoyancy from salinity differences (and, slightly, from temperature differences) are a more major impact on population biology that just the temperature difference alone. The buoyancy changes the way water mixes and the absence of convexity mixing changes the temperature measurements (maybe explains the divergence we're seeing in summer and winter surface temperature -- less mixing in the water column to make summer water colder and winter water warmer).

Q: Calanus question about mixing -- asked by Dan Holland?
A: Andy Pershing: Calanus relies on strong winter mixing to set up the productivity in the spring season. In the late 1990s, we had the best of both worlds: enough mixing to keep them productive, but this burst of freshness that kept the less dense water and the phytoplankton

A: Lew Incze -- we may see a shift in food production of primary producers to smaller, and more mobile species.

Q: Patten White asks -- what is the correlation between cod and temperature -- is that data based on population measurements or commercial landings? (A: landings) Landings data can be heavily impacted by regulatory climate and economics on shore. On the west coast, they are showing the opposite pattern that we are (temperature dropping, increase in large fin fish? please chime in -- I missed just how the patterns differ).
A: Kevin -- really depends which populations on the west coast you are measuring: major differences between species.

Q: NAO positive and negatives related to cod production, regionally around North Atlantic. Are cod moving to chase prey that are moving?
A: Lew Incze -- we don't have the data. We just don't know.

Q: Any impact of wind patterns on fish populations?
A: We think we're seeing that in haddock populations -- we hypothesize the wind has a connection to egg/larval distribution. We're starting to look at this but can't predict yet.
A: Lew Incze: Gulf of Maine isn't predicted to get a lot of wind increase change. Just intensity of storms, not average windspeed.

Andy Pershing: How is Gulf of Maine Connected to North Atlantic?

2007-04-26T08:37:00.000-05:00

Andy Pershing speaks about the way the Gulf of Maine is connected to the waters upstream in the North Atlantic/Arctic (which is a hotspot for climate change).

Temperature gets the most attention in climate change. The global average sea level is increasing since the beginning of the last century. As you warm seawater, it expands. That's most of it. The loss of ice packs in Greenland and Antarctica over the very most recent term have also had an impact. Since 1970/1980 we've seen a major change in the amount of snow we receive in the northern hemisphere. We still get precipitation, just not as much snow.

As we warm up, in the tropics, we will be evaporating more water in the tropics. Water vapor moving up from the water into the atmosphere has two impacts: the remaining sea water will have increased salinity. And the water vapor that evaporates has to go somewhere: we expect to see increased precipitation at the higher latitudes -- and that, in turn will make the seawater fresher.

Climate change by anecdote: we see freshening (less salinity) in the 1990s at higher latitudes. We don't really have a long enough record of data (only back to the 60s) to make great conclusions, but we can start to see patterns and form conclusions.

We are definitely seeing connections between changes in the North Atlantic to changes in the Gulf of Maine. There's about a two year time lag between salinity anomalies in the Arctic and the corresponding changes in the Gulf of Maine -- noticing this tells us something about the flow and may help us make predictions.

Salinity patterns and freshening impacts the ecosystem: phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton, which are eaten by herring, which are eaten by right whales. Q: what's the impact of salinity on the ecosystem? The scope of the changes are about 1 part per 1000: you can't taste the difference. But salinity (and temperature) has a big impact on the density of seawater. Having slightly fresher water means we have light water sitting on top of dense water: that impacts the mixing of the water. It also keeps the phytoplankton higher up in the water column, where there's light. Fresher water = phytoplankton booms, until early 2000s when the salinity goes back to normal. When there's more phytoplankton there's an increase in their predators (copepods) and then a lot more herring.

But: Calanus -- the "big copepod" (size of a grain of rice) and a big link between phytoplankton and fish does NOT increase during the freshening in the 1990s. In fact it decreases. Why? Probably because the juvenile and adult herring are eating them up. And right whales eat Calanus. Right whale reproduction gets much more variable: boom and bust periods following the low Calanus spell.

We don't have enough data to know whether gradual salinity changes due to climate change will have the same kind of impact that a "slug" of freshwater like that in the 1990s did. We need to keep collecting historical data while recognizing its limitations.

We learn about quahogs (clams) and their growth rings. Think of those on a tree. Quahog growth changed and corresponded to the calanus and copepod changes. And, luckily, we have fossil clams, so we can look at a much longer record. If we believe the correspondence of clam growth rings and the productivity of the larger Gulf of Maine ecosystem, we can start to see longer term patterns and build more dynamic models.

What we still need to know: why are the species connected?

Andy's slides are also available online.

Q: from Patten White: Is there a difference in the nature of water runoff and salinity as the climate increases? How is snowmelt runoff different from rain runoff, if the nature of the precipitation continues to change?

A: we don't really know, but the question is very interesting. Going from a period where you no longer have an intense "spring freshet" of melting snow, to a more constant precipitation, is likely to have a

Q: from James Wilson, University of Maine. The 1990s salinity change and copepod boom wasn't connected to the productivity of the inshore fishery? Why?

A: That's a good question. What happened to the inshore herring in the late 1990s? We don't know. Are they different populations with different feeding patterns, or are the herring going where the food is and the food isn't near the coast? We need to learn more.

Q: from Priscilla Brooks, Conservation Law Foundation: there was a haddock boom in the 1990s -- how is that related?

A: We think there's a relationship between the copepod boom and haddock recruitment. It's not as strong as the relationship between copepods and herring, but we think it's there.

Q: What about cod?
A: There's a Canadian/Maine debate. Is it top down (no cod in Canada, therefore an impact on the lower feeding)? Or is it bottom up (health of the lower food chain critters impacts health of cod)? That's the $10,000 question, and there are a lot of factors. (let's supplement these notes with others in the room -- feel free to add a comment).

Q: is there any corollary with red tide events?
A: We don't know -- haven't studied that.

(Data comes from a continuous phytoplankton measurer, towed monthly beneath a ferry from Boston, MA to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.)

Lew Incze: A Review of Temperature Change Data in the North Atlantic

2007-04-26T08:19:00.000-05:00

Lew Incze starts us out with an art history lesson, and a lesson about ice skating. It appears that in the period before 1550 there are very few landscape scenes of cold weather; 1550-1580 was a "little ice age" -- glaciers moved out of valleys in Norway and covered farms -- and you can see more landscape scenes showing people skating (an awkward hobby that was made far more viable with the invention of the double-edged steel blade, which let people dispense with clumsy poles and made the sport more popular). He moves us on with some graphs showing historical variations of temperature in the range of 1 degree C and their corresponding fluctuations in the economic price of commodities.

Current predictions of temperature increases are not limited to one degree C. We have to go very far back in the geologic time scale.

In the Ordovician age, CO2 was much higher than today with equivalent temperatures. But the composition of the planet -- where the land masses and the oceans were spread on the globe -- was very different. The conclusion: it's complicated. You can't make a straight line model.

What impacts temperature? Many things: The eccentricity of the earth's elliptical orbit. Variations in solar output. Hemispheric differences in the ratio of land/ocean. Distribution of land/ocean (continental drift). Emissions and uptakes of greenhouse gases. (two more -- missed the slide -- go back to add these later).

Some of these are well-known (e.g. solar output) and/or act over long periods of time (e.g. continental drift). Few are within the range of human activity.

We don't have highly resolved models of global ocean temperatures -- scale of the system is too big (even though we have very highly resolved models of smaller areas, like the Gulf of Maine). It's hard to link our highly resolved models of smaller systems to the global climate change modeling systems that exist.

Boothbay Harbor, Maine: a well developed record of water temperatures: 1924-present day. You see fluctuations in temperatures, but generally a 2 degree temperature increase from the 1920s until the present. There's a big spike in the graph, though. In the 1950s there was a 5 degree temperature increase; this dropped off in the 60s. The whole northeast was dominated by a warm, moist climate pattern with warmer-than-average winters (which means less mixing in the water, a change in moisture and nutrient mixing, and a far more stratified ocean from top to bottom -- all of which impact plankton development and distribution). These "bobbles" or shorter-term variations in temperature make it hard to discuss slow and permanent increases: comparing present temperature to the 1950s data would show a water temperature decrease.

Temperature is not the only thing that is important in a marine ecosystem. There's also stratification and vertical mixing, the length of the stratified season, and the salinity and nutrients of the source waters. The impacts of climate change: temperature of water will affect the north/south range of domains and species. Increased uncertainty and perhaps lower production during faunal transitions. Lots of uncertainty from a food web perspective, stemming from changes in plankton and other primary food sources.

What are we pretty sure about?

1) Precipitation is going to go up.
2) The frequency of "severe events" (e.g. rainfall of more than 2 inches in 48 hours) will increase.
3) Streamflows will go down (less precipitation stored as snow).
4) Increasing temperature will mean less mixing in the ocean waters in the Gulf of Maine. Milder winters really impact the ocean state for the spring and summer: less mixing will impact density and temperature of zones.

Look at the report at www.climatechoices.org, and the report by the German Advisory Council on Climate Change -- both very good, readable summaries.

Lew's slides are presented below, and are available online.

Q: What about the Gulf Stream -- what's the expected impact on the Gulf Stream?
A: the global models don't do a very good job with the Gulf Stream, especially where it touches the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Maine.

Q: What do you mean by a higher level of uncertainty?
A: As you shift the geography of communities, you don't really know what to look for. And these new higher temperatures depart from the data we have, so it's hard to know how future data will be connected to the data we've already studied.
A: Andy Pershing: the data we've seen emphasizes the value of a long time series of data. There are starting to be more systems and continuing monitoring systems -- a lot of time those are focused tightly on physics and on new whiz-bang technologies. But there's a lot of value in the old monitoring systems that have been going since the 1930s, just to keep an unbroken series of data collection.
A: Lew Incze -- the Gulf of Maine is on the forefront of combining many types of data. Although we don't have a climate change scientist here in the crowd.

As with all the talks, please feel free to chime in with comments, questions, helpful links to resources elsewhere, and clarifications.

Introductory Remarks

2007-04-26T08:11:00.000-05:00

We are welcomed by the Dean of the Law School, Peter Pitigoff, who notes that Maine is a "green state" with a significant economic and geographic interest in the health of the Gulf of Maine.

Lew Incze asks the participants in the room to introduce themselves. It is a diverse audience, mirroring the range of experience of the presenters (e.g. journalists, conservation policy makers, scientists, lawyers, economists). He then notes that we want this conference to be a conversation and a participants' meeting: panelists will present necessary background so that everyone here will have the groundwork to enter into deep discussions.

Our theme: uncertainty. How do we develop intelligent and flexible approaches to public policy, in the face of uncertainty? Scientists require a high threshold of certainty (>95%) before drawing conclusions. Is this the right approach to public policy and mainstream communications in risky areas?

We'll look for common threads across all presentations and will encourage active participation.

Jeff Tollefson

2007-04-06T07:28:00.000-05:00

Jeff Tollefson covers environmental policy for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C. Previously he was a Knight Fellow in Science & Technology Journalism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a science reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, where he won 11 awards for his coverage of Los Alamos National Laboratory and other energy, science and environment stories.

Jon Sutinen

2007-04-06T07:27:00.000-05:00

Jon Sutinen is a professor at the University of Rhode Island Department of Environmental & Natural Resource Economics. His primary research interests are fisheries management and regulation with an emphasis on compliance and enforcement. He has extensive experience in international fisheries, including Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Most of this experience involved conducting research and supplying advice on fisheries policy. His current research focuses on several bioeconomic aspects of New England marine fisheries and the Northeast Large Marine Ecosystem. Dr. Sutinen was the founding editor of the journal Marine Resource Economics and served in that role for over a decade. He is a member of the NRC's Ocean Studies Board. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1973 from the University of Washington.

Andy Pershing

2007-04-06T07:26:00.000-05:00

Andrew Pershing is an Assistant Research Professor of Oceanography in the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences, and also has an appointment with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute as an ecosystem modeler with an emphasis on Gulf of Maine fisheries issues. Dr. Pershing is a leader in the use of computing technology to model and visualize how the ocean environment influences fish and mammal populations over time and to predict potential future population changes. With funding from NOAA and NASA, Pershing is currently leading a project to use plankton abundance models to forecast possible feeding areas of the endangered right whale. He is working with the Cornell Theory Center to develop the computational tools to synthesize multiple data sources and deliver information in a timely manner to right whale researchers and managers. Dr. Pershing has Ph.D. in ecology from Cornell University.

Linda Mercer

2007-04-06T07:25:00.000-05:00

Linda Mercer is Director of the Bureau of Resource Management for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, a position she has held since 1995. Prior to this, she was a Senior Biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries in Morehead City, NC. She has a MA and PhD in Marine Science from the College of William & Mary, Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Peter Lord

2007-04-06T07:24:00.000-05:00

Peter Lord joined the Providence Journal in 1979 and began covering environmental issues two years later. He has traveled to northern Alaska to write about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to the Shetland Islands to cover an oil spill, and to Belize, Guatemala and Costa Rica to write about development pressures on their forests. In 2002 the U.S. State Department invited Lord to take part in a two-week tour of Brazil, lecturing to journalists and journalism students about environmental journalism. Lord teaches journalism at the University of Rhode Island and serves as a co-director of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Journalism at U.R.I. He also is working on a masters degree in Marine Affairs at U.R.I.

Alan Lishness

2007-04-06T07:23:00.000-05:00

Alan Lishness serves as Chief Innovation Officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), where he has been employed since 1988. His responsibilities include the design, funding and implementation of innovative programs that utilize computing and communications technologies to teach students and the public about aquatic environments. Since 1993, he has served as a Principal Investigator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, managing a series of projects that translate NASA Earth Science missions for public audiences on the Web. He currently manages operations for the Cohen Center for Interactive Learning, an immersive science-engagement program that welcomes every fifth or sixth-grader in Maine to GMRI. Prior to joining GMRI, Mr. Lishness held marketing and senior management positions in technology-based start-ups and not-for-profit organizations in Maine. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine and the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Maine Space Grant Consortium, and presently serves on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Waterfront Alliance and the Board of Directors of the Center for Law and Innovation.

Justin Kenney

2007-04-06T07:22:00.000-05:00

Justin Kenney has been active in environmental communications for the past 15 years. He is currently the senior officer for public affairs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, working with Pew's environment program on climate change, ocean conservation and wilderness protection. Beginning in 1992, he was the communications director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Sanctuary Program. Later he served as senior policy advisor to commerce secretaries William Daley and Norman Mineta, and as deputy director of communications at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In 2001 he became director of communications for the Pew Oceans Commission.

Robert Johnston

2007-04-06T07:21:00.000-05:00

Dr. Robert J. Johnston is Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Associate Director of the Sea Grant College Program, University of Connecticut. He holds a BA in economics from Williams College and a Ph.D. in environmental and natural resource economics from the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Johnston serves on the Board of Directors of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association and the Marine Resource Economics Foundation. He has published widely on the valuation of non-market resources, the economics of land use, and the economics of coastal and marine resources. He was recently presented with the Research Excellence Award at College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Connecticut, as well as the Faculty Award of Merit in Agriculture. His recent works include an edited book on the economics of land use policy, published by RFF press.

Lew Incze

2007-04-06T07:20:00.000-05:00

Lewis Incze is director of the Aquatic Systems Group at the University of Southern Maine. His research focuses on the effects of physical processes on biological distributions and rates. Processes of interest extend from the turbulence-scale (cm or smaller) to large-scale current systems that impact feeding and survival of planktonic stages and resulting population recruitment patterns. Dr. Incze is a contributor (with over 40 other scientists) to a Northeast U.S. Climate Change Impact Assessment sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and is co-leader of the marine impact section. The report will be issued in June 2007. Dr. Incze received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Cornell University, a MS in Oceanography from the University of Maine, and a Ph.D. in Fisheries from the University of Washington.

Dan Holland

2007-04-06T07:19:00.000-05:00

Dr. Daniel S. Holland is a resource economist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI). He received his Ph.D. in environmental and natural resource economics from the University of Rhode Island in 1998. Dr. Holland joined GMRI in 2005 after spending the prior three years as the senior economist for the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council. Previously Dr. Holland was on the faculty of School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was an industry economist for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Dan’s research interests include fishery management, design of fishery access privileges and bioeconomic modeling. He is an associate editor of the journal Marine Resource Economics.

Rita Heimes

2007-04-06T07:18:00.000-05:00

Rita Heimes is Director of the Center for Law & Innovation at the University of Maine School of Law. Founded in 2000, the Center is home to the Maine Patent Program and the Marine Law Institute. Ms. Heimes teaches courses in intellectual property law and oversees the service, education and outreach missions of the Center’s programs. Prior to joining the School of Law, Ms. Heimes practiced corporate law and litigation, specializing in intellectual property and environmental law matters, at firms in Seattle, Boulder, and Portland. She received her BA in Journalism from the University of Iowa and her JD from Drake University Law School.

Kevin Friedland

2007-04-06T07:16:00.000-05:00

Kevin Friedland is a researcher with the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Narragansett Laboratory in Rhode Island. He holds a bachelors degree in ecology from Rutgers College in New Jersey and a doctorate from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. His dissertation research was on the distribution and feeding ecology of Atlantic menhaden. During his professional career he has done research on menhaden, bluefish, sea herring, sturgeon, eel, haddock, and salmon. His publications cover a range of topics including: estuarine ecology of fishes, functional morphology, feeding ecology, recruitment processes, fisheries oceanography, and stock identification. His current research is on the effects of growth on the early maturation and survival of Atlantic salmon and the factors controlling the recruitment of haddock. Dr. Friedland has served as chair of several ICES committees including the North Atlantic Salmon Working Group, the Study Group on Stock Identification, and the ICES standing committee on Anadromous and Catadromous Fishes.

Jerry Fraser

2007-04-06T07:15:00.000-05:00

Jerry Fraser worked as a commercial fisherman, running draggers off Maine for eight years before taking a full-time newspaper job in 1987. He has been an editor or a reporter at the York County Coast Star in Kennebunk, Maine, the Portsmouth (N.H) Herald, Florida Today and The Boston Globe. He became senior editor of National Fisherman in 1997, editor-in-chief in 1999 and assumed the title of publisher in 2005. He lives in Wells, Maine.

Meinhard Doelle

2007-04-06T07:12:00.000-05:00

Meinhard Doelle, BSc (Chemistry), LLB (Dalhousie), LLM (Osgoode Hall), JSD (Dalhousie), is a full time faculty member at Dalhousie Law School, specializing in environmental law. From 1996 to 2001, he was the Executive Director of Clean Nova Scotia, with a mandate to pursue an environmentally healthy and sustainable society in Nova Scotia. From 1990 to 1996 he practiced environmental law in Nova Scotia and was involved in drafting the NS Environment Act. He currently serves as environmental counsel to the Atlantic Canada law firm of Stewart McKelvey. From 2000 to 2006, Prof. Doelle was a non-governmental member of the Canadian delegation to the UN climate change negotiations. Prof. Doelle has written on a variety of environmental law topics, including climate change, invasive species, environmental assessments, and public participation in environmental decision making. His most recent books are entitled “From Hot Air to Action: Climate Change, Compliance and the Future of International Environmental Law,” and “The Canadian Environmental Protection Act & Commentary.

Bill Brennan

2007-04-06T07:11:00.000-05:00

Bill Brennan is Deputy Assistant for International Affairs with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, leading NOAA’s international efforts associated with the global oceans, atmosphere, and space. His position involves understanding and predicting changes in the Earth’s environment, conserving and managing coastal resources, protecting life and property, and providing decision makers with reliable scientific information. Dr. Brennan was also recently designated to serve as the Acting Director of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, an interagency program that coordinates and integrates scientific research on changes in climate and related systems. Early in his 26-year career in marine and environmental policy matters, Dr. Brennan served in a senior staff position with the U.S. House of Representatives working on issues before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. For eight years, he was the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Dr. Brennan has been appointed to the boards of the New England Fishery Management Council, the Aquaculture and Marine Technology Board, and the Maine Oil Spill Advisory committee. Dr. Brennan holds a BS in Marine Biology from the University of Maine, an MA in Marine Affairs from the University of Rhode Island, and a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Sciences from the University of Maine.

Brian Bergstein

2007-04-06T07:06:00.000-05:00

Brian Bergstein is a national technology correspondent for Associated Press, based in Boston. His work focuses on the social, political and business implications of technology. Mr. Bergstein spent two years as AP's Silicon Valley correspondent, and in 2004-2005 was a Knight Fellow for Science and Technology Journalism at MIT. He has also taught feature writing in the journalism school at Boston University.

Scheherazade Fowler

2007-04-06T06:13:00.000-05:00

Scheherazade Fowler is a freelance writer with a strong background in social networking and new media. She has been blogging for four years, and has worked at Pop!Tech, LexThink, and other conferences to facilitate the exchange of ideas between audience members and speakers.

Scheherazade has a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law and is a past advisory board member of the Center for Law & Innovation. She is also a lifelong sailor with strong ties to the Gulf of Maine. She currently coaches the Bowdoin College Sailing Team. She got her undergraduate degree in Geology from Yale University.