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Longtime
Astoria-area scientist worries about how changing ocean
currents affect fishing industry
By Cassandra Profita
The Daily Astorian
December 27, 2006
Jon Graves
Jon Graves is a guidance counselor at Clatsop Community
College who lives in Astoria. He holds a master's degree in
marine resource management from Oregon State University and
bachelor's degrees in environmental science and geology from
Bowdoin College. Early in his career, he worked as a
commercial fisherman in Maine. Since moving to Astoria, he
has worked for the Columbia River Estuary Taskforce as a
coastal planner and director and at the Marine and
Environmental Research and Training Station as an instructor
for Portland State University, an outreach coordinator for
local schools and an ocean researcher for what is now Oregon
Health and Science University.
How serious is climate change?
"Climate change, global warming, increased carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere all are manifestations of humans
burning fossil fuels, and it is a huge issue. It's insidious
in that it is hard to point at and say, 'Look, there's
poison oak where there used to not be poison oak' or look,
there are dinoflagellates of some species that we didn't see
here 30 years ago.' Is it that we just have better detection
techniques today than we used to?
"What we can see is, looking historically at glaciers
and ice bubbles in glaciers, how much carbon dioxide has
been in the atmosphere. And historically there's been a very
close tie between the Earth's average temperature and the
amount of carbon dioxide. The more carbon dioxide, the
warmer it is. The less carbon dioxide, the cooler it is.
Right now we have about twice as much carbon dioxide in our
atmosphere as we've seen in the last 20,000 years. And we
just don't know what that could do.
"There are a lot of models that will show all kinds of
things, whether it be huge global warming, whether it could
stop the oceans' currents and possibly go the other way and
cause huge ice ages. I tend to guess it is going to get
hotter before it gets colder, and it's going to affect how
humans live."
How does it show itself in your region?
"What I see right here is strange things going on with
near-shore ocean currents, and that is very disturbing. Not
last summer but the summer before, upwelling didn't start
until the end of July where it really should be kicking in
April or May. That can really have a huge effect on our
coastal ecosystem. Upwelling is when the ocean current, the
deep nutrient-rich waters, come to the surface by the coast,
and it's the base of the food chain.
"Glaciers around the world are receding, and I've heard
glaciers even here in the Cascades are getting smaller. The
average temperatures in the 1990s were the warmest decade
since people started taking accurate measurements.
"What we should be very concerned about as a region is
as things warm up the ocean currents could change and that
would affect our fishing industry. As sea level starts to
rise, it will increase erosion and areas that are at or
below sea level right now will have more and more trouble.
There's already evidence of more and more different types of
animals that weren't native here that are able come up and
live here. Some of them humans could consider beneficial,
some of them harmful. From an ecosystem standpoint it's
sometimes hard to say whether something is beneficial or
harmful. ... We are seeing a lot more tropical and
subtropical fish off the Oregon-Washington Coast, but
whether that's connected to global warming, I just don't
know. That's the hard thing about global warming. I really
don't think that we do know what is going to happen."
What was the tipping point for you?
"For me personally it was more of a political tipping
point when the Kyoto Protocol was not ratified by the United
States, and I thought that was just an incredibly arrogant
and irresponsible thing for the United States to do. We burn
about 25 percent of the fossil fuels of the whole world and
we only have less than 10 percent of the population. We are
burning more fossil fuel, and a lot of it coal, creating a
lot of carbon dioxide. That for me was a tipping point
because I had seen the literature and felt that global
warming was real just by seeing how much carbon dioxide was
in the atmosphere.
"That tipped me from just wondering what to do about it
to just being irate and feeling that, why can't we as a
society do something about it?"
What do you do personally to prevent adding to the
problem?
"Not nearly enough, really ... I have in my personal
life been a proponent of riding a bike and making sure if
possible my kids can ride bikes to school ... When I vote at
elections from the local level to the national level that is
one of the key issues.
"My wife and I have two cars, and during the nicer
times of the year we'll try to ride our bikes to work as
much as we can. On the weekends, if possible, I try not to
drive. We do have compound fluorescent light bulbs in the
majority of our house. We've been looking for about six
months at getting solar hot water heaters put in. Hot water
is one of the highest uses of natural gas that we have in
our house. Also, although it doesn't seem like you would
need it in this region, having insulation helps. It can
reduce heating bills substantially."
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