From The Climate Scepticism

By Mark Hodgson

What follows is an article in my mini-series about fake climate change stories from the Guardian and the BBC about sundry locations around the world. Earlier episodes in the series included The Gambia Gambit, Niger Negatives, Volte-Face , The Cancun Con, Japanese Bears and Malawian Mystery. This one was triggered by the headline (“South Korea’s fishermen keep dying. Is climate change to blame?”) to a recent article on the BBC website.

The gist of the article is that 75% more people in South Korea were killed or went missing in accidents in the surrounding seas in 2024 than in 2023. According to the BBC, most were fishermen whose boats were sunk or capsized. Happily, for the BBC’s narrative, it managed to find a couple of people to say what it wanted to hear. Mr Hong, who chairs the Jeju Fishing Boat Owners Association, duly obliged:

The weather has changed, it’s getting windier every year…Whirlwinds pop up suddenly. We fisherman are convinced it is down to climate change.

In addition:

…This year, the head of the taskforce [set up by the South Korean government to investigate the accidents] pinpointed climate change as one of the major causes…

However, he did (as, in fairness, the BBC reports) also highlight other problems — the country’s aging fishing workforce, a growing reliance on migrant workers, and poor safety training.

We are then told that the seas around South Korea have warmed between 1968 and 2024 at twice the global average, that warming waters contribute to extreme weather at sea as well as causing some fish species to migrate.

The BBC may have been mildly disappointed that while Professor Kim Baek-min, a climate scientist at South Korea’s Pukyong National University, said that climate change was creating the conditions to make strong, sudden wind gusts more likely, he qualified that statement by adding that a clear trend had not yet been established. For that, he said, more research and long-term data is needed.

Further undermining the BBC’s climate change narrative, the article also mentioned that increasingly, elderly captains must rely on help from migrant workers from Vietnam and Indonesia. Often these workers do not receive sufficient safety training, and language barriers mean they cannot communicate with the captains – further compounding the dangers.

The daughter of a fisherman who died when his trawler capsized in February this year says it has become too easy for boat owners to blame climate change for accidents. Even in cases where bad weather plays a role, she believes it is still the owners’ responsibility to assess the risks and keep their crew safe. “Ultimately it is their call when to go out,” she said.

Finally, as regards aspects of the BBC article undermining its climate change narrative, we are also told that the government’s taskforce is recommending that boats be fitted with safety ladders, fisherman be required to wear life jackets, and that safety training be mandatory for all foreign crew. It also wants to improve search and rescue operations, and for fisherman to have access to more localised and real-time weather updates.

So much for the BBC article. It’s worth noting that the data can be presented rather differently. For instance, we learn from the Baird Maritime website that while the number of casualties tragically increased by around 75% from 2023 to 2024, the number of incidents increased by only 5.3 per cent over the same time period. Moreover, of these cases, collisions accounted for more than 34 per cent, and other accidents that have been identified include safety-related cases (26.2 per cent) and fires and explosions (19.8 per cent). In other words, around 80% of the accidents don’t appear to be weather-related.

As reported by Reuters, one of the most tragic fishing boat accidents from 2024 had nothing to do with weather or climate. One of the rescued sailors told the Yonhap news agency that the boat capsized when they were hauling up fishing nets to transfer the catch to another vessel.

While the main thrust of the BBC article was to the effect that climate change was making the weather more dangerous for South Korean fisherman, the other strand of its case was to the effect that warming waters caused by climate change was causing fish stocks to relocate, with the result that South Korean fishermen are being forced to travel further from shore, and to more dangerous waters, in a desperate attempt to find fish:

…They [warming waters] are also causing some fish species around South Korea to migrate, according to the country’s National Institute of Fisheries Science, forcing fisherman to travel further and take greater risks to catch enough to make a living….

…A few years ago, Mr Kim began to notice that the popular silvery hairtail fish he relied on were disappearing from local waters, and his earnings plunged by half.

Now his crews have to journey into deeper, more perilous waters to find them, sometimes sailing as far south as Taiwan.

“Since we’re operating farther away, it’s not always possible to return quickly when there’s a storm warning,” he said. “If we stayed closer to shore it would be safer, but to make a living we have to go farther out.”…

…Because the problem will likely worsen. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation forecasts that total fish catches in South Korea will decline by almost a third by the end of this century, if carbon emissions and global warming continue on their current trajectories.

There you have it, in a nutshell. It’s all the fault of climate change, driving the fish stocks away and making the seas more dangerous. But could there be another explanation for the declining fish stocks?

One doesn’t have to look far to discover that the elephant in the room is over-fishing by the Chinese. Needless to say, the BBC doesn’t mention it. A serious article (perhaps one that involved BBC Verify, who never seem to mark the BBC’s homework) would have talked about over-fishing, but that would have undermined the opportunity for yet another headline implying more global horrors due to climate change.

The Global Fishing Watch website tells a different story. It notes that while squid provides a vital source of income for fishers in Japan and South Korea, since 2003, squid populations in the two countries had plummeted by around 80 percent. Both countries introduced measures to reduce fishing pressure, but the trend remained the same. Then they asked: what was taking place throughout the waters of neighboring North Korea? Large numbers of industrial vessels were seen heading towards North Korea from China, despite U.N. sanctions banning foreign fleets from fishing in the waters of the rogue state. And there was another tragic trend: hundreds of small fishing boats from North Korea were washing up along the coast of Russia—their crews missing, starving or dead.

…They found more than 900 large vessels of Chinese origin fishing in North Korean waters, in violation of U.N. sanctions. Estimates suggest they caught nearly half a billion dollar’s worth of Pacific flying squid from 2017-2018, measuring more than 160,000 metric tons, or as much as Japan and South Korea’s catch combined.

…The scale of the fleet involved in this illegal fishing is about one-third the size of China’s entire distant water fishing fleet. It is the largest known case of illegal fishing perpetrated by vessels originating from one country operating in another nation’s waters. By synthesizing data from multiple satellite sensors, we created an unprecedented, robust picture of fishing activity in a notoriously opaque region.…

The Oceana website made the point equally as forcefully as recently as June this year. In an article discussing the waters of the Yellow Sea, shared between South Korea and China, it observed that China is disregarding, on a massive scale, the bilateral fisheries agreement signed by the two countries in 2001. This established a co-managed area called the Provisional Measures Zone (PMZ) within the contested area, where both countries have fishing rights. Within this zone, both Chinese and South Korean vessels are permitted to fish. Surrounding the PMZ, there are “transitional zones” designated for each country, with an agreement to gradually reduce fishing in each other’s transitional zones and eventually return control of these zones back to their respective country.

Oceana’s work revealed the following:

Despite the shared nature of the PMZ, and despite the recent agreements to reduce fishing, China continues to dominate the fishing activity in these areas. In the three-year period between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024, South Korean vessels appeared to fish for just 66,267 hours in the jointly managed PMZ. Meanwhile, Chinese vessels appeared to fish for over 8 million hours – over 100 times more than South Korea. This is enabled by China’s massive fishing fleet, the largest of any country in the world. In the PMZ, China operated over 30 times as many fishing vessels as South Korea. Even in South Korea’s “transitional zone” where China should be scaling back its fishing, China outpaced South Korea’s apparent fishing hours by 36%, with over twice as many active vessels.

Is it any wonder that fish stocks are disappearing from the waters around South Korea, and that South Korean fishermen are having to travel further from home in their aging fishing vessels, in search of fish? One might have thought the BBC article would have touched on this fundamental issue. One might have though that, but one would be wrong.

But what the hell? Let’s just blame climate change.