Not really. Just to clarify for the committee, the 2006 study was a study done to understand the impacts of biodiversity laws on human well-being, one of which is fisheries, but there are other things, like water quality and other issues, that we dealt with. So it was a fairly broad treatment of the benefits the ocean provides to society—economic and other benefits—and how they're impacted by the loss of species. We showed that in world fisheries—and this has not been disproved or disputed—there has been a trend over the last 50 years of an increasing proportion of species collapsed or being exploited. The Food and Agriculture Organization data show that, and other data show that. That part's not disputed. What we said in the paper was that if, and only if, that trend we and others had documented were allowed to continue for another 50 years, we would eventually run out of species to fish. It was a scenario.
It was reported in the media, I agree, that fish stocks will become extinct by 2048 or something, which is not what we talked about. It was a scenario in case we just continue that historic trajectory.
There were criticisms by fisheries scientists who said this trajectory may be a general worldwide trajectory of over-exploitation, but there are some regions where we've deviated from that and are managing to rebuild.
The new paper, also in Science, called “Rebuilding Global Fisheries”, looked at those success stories, if you will, in more detail, and asked what we could learn from them. To be sure, they are few and far between, but they are instructive in telling us how to change our destructive patterns. That's something we thought was important to get out.
The important part is that we repeated the analysis in this paper of the increasing trajectory in stock collapse as we documented in 2006. And we used other data sources that were independent of the ones, better data sources than the catch data we used in 2006, and we came up with exactly the same trajectory. So that part hasn't been disputed, and I'm not stepping away from that.