A recent report from the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida cited the recession as the reason for a decline in shark attacks last year.
“Shark attacks worldwide in 2008 dipped to their lowest level in five years, a sign that Americans may be forgoing vacation trips to the beach,” the report said.
It’s either that, or sharks have hunkered in the depths to weather the recession themselves. But people who are way smarter than me, namely George Burgess, an ichthyologist and director of the International Shark Attack File, thinks the drop in shark attack numbers is directly related to the economic downturn.
“I can’t help but think that contributing to that reduction may have been the reticence of some people to take holidays and go to the beach for economic reasons,” Burgess said. “We noticed similar declines during the recession that followed the events of 2001, despite the fact that human populations continued to rise.”
This may be so. After all, his logic is sound and his use of words such as reticence makes me want to believe him. But so far, the outlook for 2009 doesn’t look as rosy. Especially after numerous shark attacks on surfers around the world, including two fatal attacks in South Africa and an alarming number of incidents in Australia.
Couple this with the fact that the recession itself is freeing up a lot of time for people to go surfing when they would normally be working, it seems that this theory might not hold up in the long run.
The Obama administration announced Saturday that it had organized a series of meetings among representatives of 16 countries and the European Union to discuss energy and climate issues. The meetings, to be held in Washington in April and in La Maddalena, Italy, in July, will seek to resolve longstanding issues that have blocked the development of an international climate treaty.
The participants, who include Chinese and Indian representatives, will also try to create “concrete initiatives and joint ventures that increase the supply of clean energy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a White House news release.
The talks, called the Major Economies Meetings on Energy Security and Climate Change, echo in name and goals an initiative begun in the last two years of the Bush administration.
Those meetings gathered developing and developed countries that were the largest emitters of the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. The meetings were cast by the Bush administration as intended to set long-term goals for reducing emissions and to seek actions that could be taken in sectors of economies like power generation and manufacturing.
The talks organized by the Bush administration were criticized by some small developing countries, European officials and environmental groups as an effort to circumvent global climate negotiations led by the United Nations, although President George W. Bush said at the time that the meetings were intended to support the global talks.
The United States refused to ratify an earlier international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, objecting that developing countries like China and India were not bound by its restrictions on emissions of heat-trapping gases.
Negotiations for a new global treaty are under way and will culminate in talks in Copenhagen in December.
The president of the National Wildlife Federation, Larry Schweiger, said Saturday that any such meetings were useful as ways to seek common ground among the world’s biggest emitters of heat-trapping gases.
At the time, some environmentalists credited the Bush administration’s effort for initiating direct exchanges about climate with China and India.
But Mr. Schweiger said he expected the Obama administration’s initiative to be more productive.
“It’s a matter of intent,” he said. “I think the Bush administration never intended to come up with a big solution. I think this administration is truly committed to finding a solution for everybody.”
