news/editorial

21 June 2015 News/Editorial

I venture into science this week, dangerous territory, you might say, for one who failed to trouble the scorers in O level Physics, and scraped a miserably pathetic pass at the lowest grade, a whisker above “F” for “Fail”, in Chemistry.

I am told we should all know about the AMO, mercifully not even distantly related to that other appalling acronym we Scottish salmon fishers have become used to of late, the dreaded FMO.

No, AMO stands for “Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation”, of a different order of excitement and importance to those drearily prosaic and undefined FMO things we are told are going to rule the fishing roost in the heretofore.

For, and at last we get to the point of this (so far) rambling drivel, the AMO has shifted into a cooling phase, the nub of it that the North Atlantic, where our salmon go to feed before returning, is getting colder (so says the University of Southampton).

Global warming doom mongers, eat your hearts out!

Of course the North Atlantic is getting colder, any fool can see that, just look at what this June has brought so far, dry but it has been cold, that’s the AMO for you, proof, if it were needed, that Southampton University knows a cooling ocean when it sees it.

AMO experts and theorists tell us that every 20 or 30 years the North Atlantic’s natural rhythm swings from cooler to warmer and back again.

The pattern was seen in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when because of warming (more moisture) there were some shockingly wet summers, the apogee perhaps being 12th August 1948 when over 6 inches of rain fell in, and almost swept away, the eastern Borders.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it switched back to cooling, with drier summers, of which 1976 was most remarkable. I recall, rather exotically for those days, flying in August 1976 to Nice in the South of France, where it was distinctly cooler on landing than it had been before take-off from Heathrow. As we banked for France, I had a view of Southern England I will never forget…..almost no green, except the occasional cricket square and some golf course greens, comforting to see the Brits, in extremis, still had their priorities right.

In the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s our friendly AMO reverted to warming with the abysmally wet summers we can all recall so well.

What, I hear you cry, has any of this to do with salmon?

Quite possibly nothing, but one of the many variables in the North Atlantic, warming sea surface temperatures, has been implicated, if I recall correctly the many lectures I have attended from learned scientists, in the decline in sea survival of our smolts in recent decades.

Those “in the know” tell me that survival has declined of late to well under 10%, whereas in those golden days of yore as many as 30% of those we sent out to sea would return as salmon or grilse…..maybe because back then the sea was cooler?

There is a conceit current in the salmon world both (a) that we humans are to blame for the decline in smolt sea survival and (b) that we can do something to put it right.

I suspect neither is true.

With salmon management in Scottish rivers by a distance better than it has ever been, with netting of all sorts reduced to a level unknown for the last 250 years, and with anglers returning over 80% of what they catch, most would argue that our Atlantic salmon now have a better chance of surviving to spawn than they have had for at least 250 years.

Some are all doom and gloom after the poor salmon runs of 2014. I am not one of them, being longer in the tooth, one of the few advantages of which is having seen it all before.

Our rivers are in excellent shape….now it just could be that the AMO thing moving towards a cooler North Atlantic is going to help some more of our smolts survive?

Perhaps…..but a cooler North Atlantic means drier summers, so less water to catch them in?!

We fishermen are never happy.