Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome. An official at the U.S. State Department
says his agency is doing everything it can to protect endangered sea turtles from shrimp
fishing. But San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute disagrees it's falling a suit to get
compliance with protection laws. Also this time, global warming could produce global cooling
and an ice age. Dr. Gifford Miller says we can measure rapid temperature changes leading
up to the last ice age. Some of the stories coming your way on this edition of the Environment
Show we hope you'll stay tuned. The Environment Show is a national production made possible
by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York and this is Bruce Robertson.
Marine scientists believe only 500 nesting females of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles are left
in the world. As recently as 1947, there were 50,000. The species is the most endangered
of all sea turtles. And yet the United States federal government allows shrimp fishing
practices that further threaten this and six other species of turtles. Accordingly, the
San Francisco-based Advocacy Group Earth Island Institute to halt this system has filed
a lawsuit against two federal agencies. Todd Steiner, director of the Institute's Sea
Turtle Restoration Project, speaking to us from a noisy project headquarters on the day
of the announcement, says the suit is based on a little-known law referred to as simply
public law 101-162. And specifically what this law does is it directs the state department
to encourage all nations who wish to import shrimp into the United States to develop sea
turtle conservation measures if they wish to continue to import their shrimp into the
United States. If they do not, their shrimp is required to be embargoed from import.
The law passed in November of 1989 calls for an embargo if the offending nations have
not developed and enforced sea turtle protection laws of their own by May of 1991. However,
says Steiner. Unfortunately, the departments of state and commerce in our opinion, we
believe, have recklessly failed to enforce this new law. They've reinterpreted the law
to give it basically no power. Specifically, the law says that all nations who catch
shrimp and in areas where their sea turtles have to have a comparable sea turtle protection
program in place. What the state department did was they decided that they were only going
to enforce this law as it relates to 14 countries, although their own documents show that
more than 80 countries are involved in this type of shrimp fishing. These 14 countries
represent less than 10 percent of all the shrimp that's entering this country. So basically
some close to 90 percent of all the shrimp that enters this country is not having to meet
the requirements of this law under the enforce, under the interpretation that's being made
by the state department.
Steiner says the state department gutted the regulations by exempting all but the 14
of the more than 80 shrimp fishing nations. Action, he says, based on a misreading by
the state department of just what the law says.
They've interpreted the law such that those turtles that are caught in U.S. fishing vessels
are caught along the Atlantic Caribbean coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast.
So they said, oh, this law only applies to the other nations that fish in that same general
vicinity of the Caribbean Atlantic. So that the populations of sea turtles are the same.
So the same, so the turtles that are caught in U.S. shrimp boats are the same as that are
caught in these 14 nations that they've applied the law to. But the law is clear. The law
doesn't talk about populations of sea turtles. The law talks about species of sea turtles.
And the species, and these five species or four of the five species of sea turtles are
circum Globally located. They occur in basically all the warm oceans of the world. And so
the law is clear that it's the protection of the species of sea turtles, not the specific
populations that are impacted by U.S. fishermen.
The heart of the issue is this, says Steiner. Fishing technology has killed thousands of
sea turtles. Sea turtles get caught in shrimp nets. Basically a shrimp net or a shrimp
trowel is a giant funnel shaped net that's pulled behind a shrimp boat. And it basically goes
along the bottom and scoops up everything in its path. And so what's happening is sea turtles
are getting caught in with the shrimp. Sea turtles are air breathing reptiles where air breathing.
They breathe air like humans. So they drown. They basically drown in these nets. They're able to
stay underwater for 40 to 60 minutes. But these vessels pull their nets underwater for five or
six hours at a time. So by the time they pull up their nets, the sea turtles have drowned.
The suit is directed at both domestic and foreign shrimpers responsible for killing turtles. Up
to 14,000 turtles are killed each year by domestic fishing. Extrapolating Steiner estimates
the kill by foreign practices. The number of turtles that may be being killed by the foreign shrimp fishing fleet is close to 150,000 turtles.
This assumes, this is assuming that the foreign fleet captures as many turtles per metric ton of shrimp as the U.S. fleet.
Basically we have no good number of how many are dying in foreign vessels. If you take, basically the U.S. fleet catches
0.12 turtles per metric ton of shrimp. If you multiply 0.12 times the amount of shrimp entering the U.S. from foreign fleets,
more than 150,000 turtles could be dying in the nets of shrimp nets.
Steiner says this is all the more unacceptable given that technology exists to prevent it. Steiner describes what are called
teds or turtle excluter devices.
Turtle excluter devices are a simple, highly effective trap door that's placed in the net of a shrimp boat that allows the turtles to escape unharmed.
The U.S. government has spent more than $10 million in the last 10 years developing this technology.
And it's a crime that now that we have this incredible technology that saves the turtles, doesn't have a major impact on the amount of shrimp that the shrimpers catch.
That they're not enforcing the law in making all shrimp boats use it. These trap doors are inexpensive. They cost between 50 and $400 per net.
Which is minuscule to the amount of money it costs to go out and operate one of these shrimp boats.
Says Steiner, the teds are useful as well in saving more than just the endangered species of sea turtles.
One thing that's going on here with shrimping in general is that for every pound of shrimp that's captured 10 pounds of other fish are captured killed and discarded.
The turtle is part of that bycatch, part of that other 10 pounds.
Shrimp fishing is actually really destroying a lot of other fisheries in the process.
The turtle excluter device not only excludes turtles, but will exclude other large fish as well which hit this trap door and get popped out.
And so there's a real interest in actually moving forward with this. We can't understand why the State Department is so resistant to enforcing this law.
We at the Environment Show have pursued various officials within the State Department attempting to get reaction to this and other questions.
An official who otherwise spoke off the record said, because the department is named in the case, it is unable to speak specifically.
Nevertheless, he believes that his agency is doing everything it can to comply with the law. This is not Steiner's view.
To their credit, the National Marine Fisheries Service wrote and drafted regulations which would require all U.S. fisheries shrimp boats to have teds on them.
But the Bush administration has squelched those. They've disappeared into the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, back in July of 1991.
And they've disappeared. And so the second part of our lawsuit is to force these regulations into existence so that all U.S. vessels have shrimp turtle excluter devices on their boats.
Earth Island is the organization that successfully brought pressure on federal agencies and the leading industries over killing Dolphin in the process of fishing on tuna.
The first Dolphin Safe Tuner appeared in the spring of 1990. Todd Steiner is director of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project at the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute.
He says the suit is in two parts, an immediate suit against the state and commerce departments, to force negotiations with foreign shrimpers, and a notice of intent to sue over domestic shrimpers turtle kill.
This time delay is necessary, he says, under the Endangered Species Act, which requires a 60-day notification period.
Finally says Steiner, beyond the issue to save an endangered species, the bigger challenge here is whether the international community of nations can work together to preserve the planet.
This is Bruce Robertson.
A Nevada rancher who graces cattle on federal lands says new conditions imposed on his grazing permits by the forest service are forcing him out of business.
After the forest service removed rancher Wayne Hages' cattle from certain forest service lands and sold them at auction, he filed suit for $28.5 million.
In a case that could have long-term implications for future use of public lands, Hages charges his private water rights were violated, and Dixon reports.
In 1990 the Toyabi Forest Service in Nevada established new grazing regulations to prevent further natural resource damage on riparian land, areas adjacent to rivers and streams.
Nevada rancher Wayne Hages says he was doing his best to comply with regulations, but according to the Forest Service, Hages ignored repeated demands to remove his livestock from an overgraced area on his allotment.
In the summer of 1991, the Forest Service went into this area, confiscated Hages' livestock and sold them at auction.
H maintains the impoundment is just one of the many tactics the Forest Service is using to try to take away private property rights on federal lands.
They made the forced removal of the livestock a resource issue, something that could be expressed in terms of protecting the environment for the public good.
Instead of saying what it really was, which was a taking of the rancher's water rights.
Hages' lawsuit is part of an all-out effort to protect not only his own private property rights, but also those of other federal land users, such as mining and timber companies.
The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a non-profit organization which defends private property rights, is raising $1 million to fund Hages' lawsuit.
Ron Arnold, vice president of the Center, believes environmental laws sacrifice human needs.
We've got to start from the ground up, come back and build laws that are sensible so that man and nature can live together in productive harmony rather than saying that man has no right to use the earth.
The Forest Service and Environmentalists say humans have no right to abuse any land.
The state of Nevada and several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation, are attempting to intervene on behalf of the Forest Service.
They worry that if Hage wins, it will become increasingly difficult to enforce environmental regulations on federal lands.
Tom Lustig is a lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation.
You can imagine yourself being a Forest Service Ranger and having to write a check to Wayne Hage for $28.5 million, how likely are you then next week to go to another grazer and say,
Roe, you're abusing these lands.
Not so likely, says Charles Wilkinson, a university of Colorado Law Professor who specializes in federal lands policy.
It would be one of the most significant rulings ever handed down in the field. It would got the ability of federal land managers to protect public lands.
Certainly, if a rancher can't be regulated or can be regulated in only a minimal way, then that would have the major implications for miners, water users.
And then you move over to the timber area.
The Environmental Group's intervention effort has been an uphill battle because Hage chose to file suit in the U.S. Court of Claims,
according to the traditionally limits intervention to parties with an economic interest in the case.
The court will decide by the end of February whether to allow the environmental groups to intervene.
If it says no, the groups will appeal to the federal circuit, which reviews claims court rulings.
This case may go on for years, and with a stake so high, this case may end up in the Supreme Court.
For the High Plains News Service, I'm Ann Dixon.
The High Plains News Service is a production of the Western Organization of Resource Councils based in Billings, Montana.
The long-term effect of global warming could be global cooling and the onset of a new ice age.
This is the theory published in a paper by two international scientists, working with Dr. Ann Divernell at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Dr. Gifford Miller at the University of Colorado Boulder set out to develop new ways to determine the long-term effects of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.
There are several ways to do that, and in one way that many people have done this to modeling the atmospheric circulation.
One of the problems of the models is that although they do a very good job on temperature, they are far less accurate on precipitation.
One of the major variables, one of the things that can change in the Earth's system most rapidly and have a significant impact on human activity, is the polar ice sheets.
How much ice is stored because it has a very strong effect on the course sea level because the water comes out of the sea and is sequestered in the land on the ice sheets.
So what we did was to try to gain an understanding of how the combination of temperature and precipitation affects the amount of ice that's stored on the ice sheets.
Most people have thought in the past the general consensus has been that if greenhouse gas is increased, the atmosphere gets warmer and the ice sheets would melt in sea level would rise.
But when you start looking at the precipitation variable, which is what the models have a very difficult time predicting, you can make an equally strong argument that increased heat in the atmosphere leads to increased rates of evaporation, that's a straight physical connection.
And so you have more moisture in the atmosphere, more precipitation, and double increase at high latitudes.
And it's possible then to get a net increase in snowfall, which exceeds the amount of increased melt that will be accompanied by the increased air temperatures.
This is in fact what Miller has said happened at the onset of the last ice age, 120,000 years ago.
Surprisingly, the conditions at the beginning of the glaciation were warm. They were very much like the present day.
And the conditions at the maximum, of course, were much colder, but it's very different condition that starts a glaciation than that, which accompanies a folk-lacial period.
So what we then concluded was that the combination of increased precipitation, the fact that the earth's summer temperatures or the summer radiation is decreasing because of the way the earth moves around the sun, and the fact that the oceans are quite warm means that in some ways there's just as much of chance now, I think, that the greenhouse will be very warm.
And now warming might lead to ice sheet growth, as it were to ice sheet melting.
The question is, of course, how likely is this to happen? Is this scenario any more likely than that showing the ice caps melting and the sea level rising? Dr. Miller says this is the bottom line question.
The power of the short answer is that we don't know, and because we cannot predict with a reasonable degree of precision, the impact of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, all the other greenhouse gases methane.
And so on, the prudent choice would be not to do very much, because something's going to happen.
And the potential is that it may respond in even a non-linear way so that there could be very dramatic changes in the climate of the planet.
And so we cannot at this point, I don't think, make reasonable predictions as to exactly how that's going to impact, especially when you start talking about somebody who's in the high plains of...
South Dakota wants to know what's going to happen. You can't say, except that something's going to happen.
And so the prudent choice at this time is to not let those changes in greenhouse gases move too quickly, and in that way, hedge our bets has to limiting the impact on the basic climate system, which translates to an economic impact.
Between the ongoing United Nations debate over setting caps on carbon dioxide emissions to control global warming, and this study showing the possibility of another ice age caused by global warming, the Robert Frost poem, Fire and Ice, takes on a sort of eerie, technicality reality.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.
The start of the last glaciation was about 120,000 years ago. It looks like it takes about 10,000 years for the world to go from a fully interglacial to a pretty much fully glacial type of climate.
So we're looking at 10,000 year transition periods, but within those transitions, the one we know best is coming out of the last ice age.
The last ice age ended about 15,000 years ago. It started to melt back and it was pretty much complete by, say, 7,000 years ago.
And although during that time period as a general trend for there to be less and less ice in the world to warm up steadily, there are intervals when the climate changes just tremendously rapid, within any kind of resolution, which means we can get now a decadal resolution.
We can see the temperature changing one degree per decade over a period of five decades. So you're changing five or six degrees C, which is 10 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 or 12 degrees Fahrenheit, and one person's lifetime. That is an immense change.
Though the beginning of an ice age per se would not be something so quick and noticeable as to be reportable, say, on the evening news, there would be certain other signs that we would notice.
One of the things that would normally we would predict what happened is that you get a fairly thin but fairly continuous snow cover at the high, the high plains of the high latitudes effectively.
And once that's in place, even though it may be only a few meters, a few tens of feet thick, that impacts the climate system tremendously because it's like putting a white blanket over the high latitudes, and then you reflect back most of the solar radiation so that the effectiveness of the heat distribution is very good.
The distribution on the planet is altered. The basic circulation of the winds are quite altered. There's a pretty strong evidence now that as we move into racial periods, the basic transport, the westially transport of the atmosphere across the northern hemisphere here is significantly altered. It becomes much more zonal, and there's a stronger thermal gradient between the equator and the poles.
You would certainly feel that when we expect both in wind direction, wind intensity and average temperature, and at a fairly, over a fairly rapid time period, those things can change over a matter of decades, whereas the ice sheet itself is a much more stodgy creature, and you wouldn't, you could run away from it quite easily.
Another factor, not related to anything we humans are doing, nor is there anything we can do about it, is that the amount of solar radiation over the poles decreases and increases in cycles of about 20,000 years, the result of fluctuations in the orbit of Earth around the Sun.
Right now, we are in a period of decreasing solar radiation, meaning there is less energy at the poles to melt whatever precipitation falls. War motions, increased snowfall, and decreased melt are the same conditions that led to the last period of glaciation.
Miller, though ostensibly a rational objective scientist, nevertheless has his concerns.
As an individual, I'm concerned about, and as a scientist, I'm concerned about what we do to the balance of gases in the atmosphere, because one of the real lessons from the scientific investigation of climate change is that the system is strongly non-linear, and that it goes through very rapid changes.
When people talk about 30,000 year timescales, most people glaze over and say, well, so what, it doesn't affect me. But in that system, we can identify periods when the climate changed dramatically over human life scale.
And so the bottom line is that we cannot predict exactly what will happen as we change the composition of the gases in the atmosphere, but something is going to happen, and it may very well be in a very rapid and catastrophic manner.
And so I think the lesson is that people have to recognize that that's a possibility, and then you have to weigh the economic costs of decreasing greenhouse gases versus the potential consequences.
Dr. Miller, thank you very much for talking with us.
Okay.
Bye-bye now.
My pleasure. Bye-bye.
The Ice Age study was conducted by Doctors Anne DeVernal at the University of Quebec at Montreal, and Gifford Miller at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our report on the environment show this week.
Next week, be sure to tune in for a report on the closing of the nation's oldest nuclear power reactor, permanently, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency's ruling on a family of chemical pesticides.
That's next week on the environment show.
The environment show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
For a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-767-1929, and ask for the environment show number 113.
That's 1-800-767-1929, this week program number 113.
We'd help this week from Carolyn Dick.
The environment show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content.
Dr. Ellen Shartock, Executive Producer, and this is Bruce Robertson.
The environment show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
