Report says "continuous El Niño" is killing salmon

According to a report issued yesterday, salmon and other marine life are threatened by global warming, which is causing a "continuous El Niño."

The report, issued by marine biologist Elliott Norse and the World Wildlife Fund, flies in the face of other researchers' findings which says salmon stocks are on the decline because of the "Pacific decadal oscillation," a natural ocean cycle.

The World Wildlife Fund report resulted from a gathering of scientists from around the world last February. The report, according to Norse, is an attempt to combine a number of different recent research projects into a cohesive theory.

"Scientific evidence strongly suggests that global climate change already is affecting a broad spectrum of marine species and ecosystems, from tropical coral reefs to polar ice-edge communities," the report concludes.

The report argues that global warming - caused by carbon dioxide and other gases burning away ozone and gradually raising air and water temperatures - is already affecting the ocean in dramatic ways. These include rising sea levels and lowered salt content, declining zooplankton populations, shrinking coral reefs, development of harmful algae blooms and declining salmon stocks.

George Taylor, a climate researcher at Oregon State University, who argues on the side of decadal oscillation says the theory ignores the record salmon runs over the past 20 years in Alaska and the abundance of other marine life such as harbor seals and shellfish in the Pacific Northwest where salmon are scarce.

"The only thing anybody can say for sure is that the climate is changing," Taylor told the Seattle Times. "And inevitably, that change is going to have some effects that we like, and some that we don't."