(from "ISANA" No. 11, 1994)

S. Fred Singer
Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

On October 4, 1993, President Clinton explained that U.S. opposition was due to "the absence of a credible, agreed management and monitoring regime that would ensure that commercial whaling is kept within a science-based limit." But this argument is no longer true; science is no longer a barrier. After six years of work, the Scientific Committee of the IWC has produced such a regime, the "Revised Management Procedure" (RMP) for whales, which was grudgingly accepted by the IWC. A blue-ribbon panel appointed by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) concluded that the RMP was so robust and conservative that, under it, commercial whaling of non-endangered species, like the minke whale, could be conducted safely for a period of same 20 years.

In anticipation of this development, opponents of whaling had already begun to shift their ground. In a December 1991 letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission stated that its opposition to sustainable commercial whaling was based not on "science alone", but on "moral and ethical grounds".

The agreement that eating whales is morally different than eating other animals is based on the popular myth of cetacean intelligence. In fact, cetacean brains are structurally more primitive than those of hedgehogs, and they score lower than ferrets in learning ability. The moral argument therefore loses its force.

In desperation, opponents shifted to a third excuse: politics. The U.S. State Department admitted in a May 1993 statement to Iceland that "scientific analysis now show that some populations of minke whales are likely to be able to sustain a limited harvest," but that "there is presently no support ... among the American public for commercial whaling". Yet this statement too is false. A 1992 Gallup poll, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, shows that over 30% of Americans would support a limited harvest of a non-endangered species of whales, while less than 10% would be opposed.

Now it seems opponents have latched on to stratospheric ozone depletion in a last-ditch attempt to prevent a sustainable food harvest of abundant, non-endangered animals. At last May's IWC meeting in Mexico, anti-whaling interests such as Greenpeace pushed through a "southern oceans sanctuary" where any commercial whaling would be prohibited, even if the IWC granted quotas for whale harvests elsewhere.

In support of that proposal, NMFS produced a paper alleging that the so-called "ozone hole" over the Antarctic (putatively caused by chlorofluorocarbons) could unleash higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, destroying the Antarctic plankton which comprises much of the diet of whales.

Not mentioned in the NMFS paper is the well-known work of Scripps Oceanographic Institute scientist Osmond Holm-Hansen, who finds that the enhancement of UV radiation during the brief annual thinning of Antarctic ozone produces a negligible effect on plankton. NMFS does quote Texas A&M oceanographer El-Sayed's dire predictions, however, without revealing his admission to the journal Science that his calculations about the collapse of the Antarctic food chain were wrong.

The NMFS paper even speculates that direct effects of UV on whales are causing "pox-like" skin lesions. This claim is on par with past hoaxes, since discredited, claiming that the temporary UV increase due to the ozone hole has produced blindness in Patagonian sheep, melanoma in Chilean babies, etc., etc. Earlier this year there were claims, now withdrawn, that ozone depletion and upward trends of UV (reported in November 1993 and later found to be spurious) were causing a worldwide decline of many species of frogs and toads.

We need to keep in mind here that atmospheric ozone content is quite variable, both geographically and on many times scales. For example, the average intensity of UV radiation increased by 5000 percent between pole and equator; plankton drifting only 30 miles north or south would experience a five percent change. Day-to-day variations can be several hundred percent; seasonal variations several tens of percent. Even when these are averaged out, there still remains an 11-year sunspot cycle variation of ozone of the order of 3 to 5 percent, that should give rise to UV variations as large as those considered in the NMFS paper.

In fact, the well-known existence of a strong correlation between sunspot number and ozone suggests that ozone content during the past two centuries (when sunspot numbers were generally low) was less than it is today - and UV fluxes should have been at least 10 to 20 percent greater than present values. Yet there is no reported evidence of ecological damage of collapse.

The bias of the NMFS report is readily apparent. Using a highly dubious theory, it projects a future ozone depletion as if the production and release of CFCs were to continue as was planned a decade ago; it completely ignores the phase-out of halocarbons already underway as a result of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which is intended to prevent just such an alleged ozone depletion. It seems to me that the environmental zealots driving government policy are trying to have it both ways.

NMFS's position paper can only be termed pseudo-scientific; it clearly grasps at straws in presenting a brief against whaling, but is so poorly founded that it must be causing great embarrassment to many NMFS and NOAA scientists who know better.

In addition to the mishandling of the ozone issue, an important ecological principle is being overlooked here. If the ostensible purpose of the sanctuary is to permit the recovery of the blue whale and other great whales that have been over-hunted in the past, then account must be taken of the likelihood that their ecological niche has now been filled by other marine life, including the faster-reproducing smaller whales. We have observed a corresponding phenomenon in many other ecosystems, for example in the North Atlantic where the over-fished cod has been replaced by the dogfish. Restoration of the great whales may therefore be impossible in a true "sanctuary" for all whales; on the contrary, it may require culling the competing species.

In this October 1993 statement, President Clinton asserted that the U.S. has "a strong commitment to science-based international solutions to global conservation problems." If that is true, we should support scientifically regulated, sustainable harvests of abundant animals. Minke whaling is environmentally a "low-impact" means of obtaining food relative to the alternatives. If they cannot articulate their "moral and ethical" objections to whaling, then anti-whaling nations may be mistaking cultural imperialism for moral superiority.

There are important lessons to be learned here, It is always disturbing -- and not just to scientists -- to witness science buckling under to ideology. It is even more disturbing to see special interest driving U.S. policy, as if they truly represented the popular view.

[ENDNOTES] The NMFS position paper "Ozone Depletion in the Southern Hemisphere" was submitted by the U.S. delegation to the IWC at the International Meeting of the Working Group on a Sanctuary in the Southern Ocean, at Norfolk Island, February 1994. Its references include many press releases and an incomplete reference (and therefore hard to verify) to a paper by Rowntree et al. on "pox-like marks..."

Among missing references: O. Holm-Hansen et al., Photochem. Photobiol. 58, No. 4. 1993. They show that UV-A radiation (> 320 nm) is more important in inhibiting phytoplankton production than UV-B (280 - 320 nm). Since UV-A is not absorbed by ozone, they calculate negligible inhibition (< 0.2%) of primary production as a result of the Antarctic ozone hole, in marked contrast to the results claimed by Raymond Smith et al. (When Smith was questioned at the AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco, Febr. 1994, he was unaware of the results of his UC Santa Barbara colleagues A.T. Banaszak and R.K. Trench, who reported at the same meeting on finding protection mechanism against UV in algae; cf, page 129 of meetings program.)

The controversy about the retraction of the alarming predictions of Sayed El-Sayed is discussed fully in Leslie Robert's article "Does the Ozone Hole Threaten Antarctic Life?" Science (Research News); April 21,1989.

The good correlation between ozone content and sunspot number is demonstrated in many publications. See, e.g. J.K. Angell, "On the Relation Between Atmospheric Ozone and Sunspot Number," J. Climate, Vol. 2, pp. 1404-1416 (1989); or S.F. Singer, "What Could Be Causing Global Ozone Depletion? (in Climate Impact of Solar Variability)" (K.H. Schatten and A. Arking, eds.) NASA Publication 3086, 1990.

S. Fred Singer, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (on leave), directs the Washington-based Science & Environmental Policy Project. The issues here were discussed at the Project's recent conference (4/12/1994) on the scientific management of fisheries and marine mammals, to be published in an upcoming issue of Environmental Conservation.

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