AOC's chief of staff shares debunked 13-year-old article to promote a declaration of a climate emergency

Greg P. | 9:05 AM on May 06, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff shared this alarming article that predicted the extinction of salt-water fish by 2048:

The US should declare a climate emergency.https://t.co/id9slVRTVb

— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) May 3, 2019

This article, however, is from 2006. . .

. . .and it has been debunked time and time again over the past 13 years every time it pops up, including by the very authors of the study in the 2006:

The Forbes.com article in question cites (multiple times) the now infamous “The oceans may run out of fish by 2048” statement – a statement based on a study published in 2006 by Boris Worm and others, which despite its staying power in the media, has been largely rejected within the fishery science community, and, indeed, overturned by Worm et al. themselves in 2009.

Cancel the alarm:

The most recent global assessment, led by UC Santa Barbara economist Christopher Costello, projected that at worst 10-20% of fish stocks will be sustainably managed by 2050, and that a majority of stocks could be sustainable by 2050 if recent management successes in places like New Zealand, Iceland, and the western U.S. are replicated elsewhere.

And here’s the NY Times write-up on the UC Santa Barbara research noted above. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them”:

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

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