rearing season began with more than 150,000 juvenile salmon in the
central basin of Osoyoos Lake. By mid-October, 95 percent had died.
“They were sealed into the central basin. This temperature/oxygen
squeeze occurred, and we measured the mortality at 5.9 percent lost
per week—just a straight-line loss,” says Hyatt.
So salmon, perhaps the most famous symbol of the Northwest,
face trouble every step of the way due to climate change—from migra-
tion delays that cause more salmon to die before they can spawn to the
reduced viability of their offspring. Salmon need cool water. And it is
just plain getting warmer. Compounding matters, rivers around the
Pacific Northwest only will warm further as farmers use more water to
irrigate thirsty farms and loggers and developers leave too-few stream-
side trees to help keep streams as cool as possible. There is a wide
range of possible ways to try to mitigate problems, involving water stor-
age, water regulations, and other measures, but, Hyatt says, “they’re all
difficult and most of them are going to be pretty expensive.”
Hyatt feels that the story of his Okanagan sockeye has broader
implications for dozens or scores of other sockeye stocks around the
Pacific Northwest, and the picture is not pretty. Recall that salmon are
the primary food for another Northwest icon, orcas. Bear in mind also
that salmon returning to Northwest forests bring back the nutrient
wealth of the Pacific; fewer salmon carcasses means less-lush forests.
And that is on top of British Columbia researcher Dave Spittlehouse’s
findings that in a warmer, drier world, timber yields of the Northwest’s
quintessential timber tree, the Douglas fir, will drop along with sum-
mer rain levels.
“We’re going to be faced with some substantial impacts in the next
25 to 50 years,” Hyatt says.
Those effects will reach far past the Great Outdoors and right into
Northwesterners’ pocketbooks. A big part of this is the double
whammy a warmer world will mean for the Northwest’s water system.
First, as more water runs off in the spring instead of remaining stored
in snowpack, operators of the region’s dams will have no choice to
avoid flooding but to release more water. But once that water flows past
a dam, it cannot be used to produce electricity. So, for example, the
Pacific Northwest 153