ak in the news: walrus, and now seals

Happy holidays folks, and sorry for dropping the ball here for a bit. There's actually been some interesting news about sea ice and mammals, thanks to AP's Dan Joling and the first tricklings, it seems like, of study on how this year's dramatic loss of ice has affected bears, walrus, and ribbon seals. Joling had this update on walrus, and this one on seals.
There was also a back-and-forth between Gov. Palin and a woman from the Center for Biological Diversity on what to do about polar bears, in contrasting opinion pieces.
I wrote a story last week on making solar power in our solar-deprived Far North. (It's getting lighter now, if only slowly.)

real cold

It's 32 below at my cabin tonight, the first real cold we've had this winter. For those who haven't had the pleasure of real cold, here's a few observations. The car light doesn't come on for a few seconds after I open the door, and the door itself doesn't close well -- something to do with the latch being a moving part. Extension cords get stiff. The moisture in cabin air instantly tops the saturation point of the outside air, and my glasses, chilled from a minute outside, freeze over with ice when I come inside. Every breath somehow feels like a nice deep breath. And you appreciate every time your car starts, and doesn't break down on the way home.

ak in the news: duck hunting and sun dresses

OK, I'm back. I had a few days off from work and flew 4,000 miles back to Massachusetts to see my mother and sister. There was a snow day when I was there, but from ice rather than snow. I thought back nostalgically when we had snow days from snow, and it seems those aren't gone completely. The East is getting dumped on now, and western Mass already has a foot.
I missed the Northern Alaska Environmental Center's protest "plunge" down a ski hill (pictured here), which didn't have great turnout but did make an AP story that ran around the world.
The NY Times had a good multi-media piece on observed changes in Missouri duck hunting, which had lots of voices from wildlife managers and hunters themselves.
National Geographic had some pretty amazing pics of permafrost.
And the AP wrote a story on sea ice, quoting the oft quoted and quotable Mark Serreze, and with the alarming premise that summer sea ice could be nearly gone by 2012.

ny times goes to barrow

The New York Times has a pretty exciting story about oil drilling bumping up against the whaling lifestyle in Barrow. There's even an audio slide show with some nice pics.

climate change 101

Please excuse my delinquent posting. I'm taking a class at the University of Alaska Fairbanks on climate and climate change, and last week was the final exam. I think I might have tanked it despite studying a fair amount. I completely missed the first question by confusing dynamical feedbacks, which deal with the transport of energy over latitudes, and biogeochemical feedbacks, which highlight the way biology can effect climatic changes.
Tuesday I have to give a half-hour presentation, which I've chosen to do on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The PDO is a pattern of atmospheric changes something like El Nino/La Nina but on a longer time scale and located primarily in the North Pacific rather than the tropical Pacific. It's important for Alaska because it caused at least some of a big jump in air temperatures in 1976, and confuses the question of how much the state has warmed in the last 50 or 100 years because of anthropogenic climate change. Some ignore the PDO as say, Look! Alaska is 4 degrees warmer now, while others point to the PDO and say, No sweat, it'll get cold again.
Today I had a scattered day of reporting that included interviewing an Alaskan environmental leader on Gov. Palin's environmental positions, blogging about the natural gas pipeline, covering a Ron Paul rally, doing a short profile of a woman from southern California, typing up the police report, and interviewing the brother of someone who was just killed by a drunk driver in Anchorage.
In my spare time, I've been cleaning my caribou skull to make a European mount.

in the news: whales, walrus, and al gore

Andy Revkin had a witty blog entry on what Gore and Bush might have talked about during their half-hour chat yesterday. Some of the reader comments are imaginative, too.
Doug O'Harra had an update on walruses hauling out this summer.
And the Christian Science Monitor had a story on the environmental conundrum of trying to save endangered orcas while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How are they linked? Orcas need salmon, salmon need salmon streams, those streams provide clean hydro power. This is relevant to Alaska because there's talk of dusting off plans for a major hydro power project on the Susitna River, and this time around, proponents say they've got the backing of AK green groups. More on that later, I'm sure.
There's also this post from Grist, which takes the cake for making doom and gloom funny. "World's poor to be shafted most by climate change, U.N. report says."

defining twilight

One of the things that surprised me most when I moved to Fairbanks two Decembers ago was how it was never really bright out. It always looked like sunrise, or sunset, but never quite day. The sun is only up for a short period of time, and it arcs around the sky without ever climbing very high.
The saving grace is that it's actually light for quite a while before the sun comes up and after it sets. There are words for that! I just learned them last week, and pass them along now as terms to define what anyone who's lived here has known all along.
Civil twilight, from heavens-above.com, is "The time after sunset and before sunrise when the Sun is below the horizon but not more than 6° below it. . . [T]he sky is still quite bright and only the very brightest stars and satellites can be seen."
Nautical twilight is when the sun is between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon. The brighter stars used for navigation have come out, but the horizon and general shapes of things can still be seen.
Another thing about sunlight. With such a big spread between summer daylight hours and winter, the rate of change is quick. We're losing about 7 minutes a day now, or close to an hour a week.
In news, the LA Times had a story on dealing with erosion in Kivalina. And Gore got to talk with Bush . . .

fairbanks heat wave

I rode my bike to work Wednesday in the middle of a Fairbanks heat wave. On Monday, it was 4 below. Wednesday morning when I left my cabin, it was 20. As I passed the university, it was 22, and when I got to Phillips Field Road, it was 29. Down the road, a sign said 37, but when I looked back at the other side, it was already 38. It was windy, and the air felt tropical. At work, it was 39.
I wrote a story about the weather for today's paper. (There's also been a paucity of snow.)
The warmth hasn't really been a problem for me, but it does remind me of the folks up in Barrow who talked about having their meat spoil when they went hunting in the fall like they always do, and the temps were higher than normal. I put some big chunks of ice in the tote with my caribou meat, which is still outside for lack of freezer space.
In news, there's some new research on polar bears, apparently the first real link between shrinking sea ice and polar bear survival. One of the authors is Ian Stirling, who's a respected bear guy from what little I know about it.
There's also a big series coming out now in the Toronto Star by reporter Ed Struzik, who spent a year on a fellowship studying climate change in the Canadian Arctic. Sounds pretty cool. I haven't read all the stories yet, but they seem well-researched, level-headed, and with some real color, as we say in the newspaper world.
Andy Revkin from the NY Times reported on the sinking tourist ship in the Antarctic, and wrote a piece on it for his blog. It's often these side stories, about the reporting itself, that tell the most.
There's also a story in the Christian Science Monitor about cranberries moving north. My first reaction is, So what? But at some point, each of these stories (like the maple syrup industry, etc.), even if they affect only a small number of people, show that other things are affected by slight changes in climate even if we humans, largely disconnected from the natural world, aren't. (In Alaska, people clearly still are connected, and affected. I imagine people are affected in the rest of the country -- soybean farmers, birders, roofers -- but those stories aren't really getting told in the big press.)

ak in the news: shishmaref and wal-mart

Shishmaref was in the news today for reportedly dodging the climate change bullet. A big storm was forecast, but sea ice that blew in with the storm ended up protecting the eroding village. It looks like KTUU flew a reporter out there for the storm. Doug O'Harra had a report, too, as did the ADN.
O'Harra had this on big-picture temperature records for '07, and KTUU reported that Alaska Airlines put wingtips on its first 737-900 in a move that's expected to reduce fuel consumption in the plane by three percent, saving about 100,000 gallons a year.
In national news, the IPCC is planning to release a summary report soon, and Wal-Mart has just put out its first sustainability report. Here's Grist's take. Here's Wal-Mart's own info. People have lots of reasons to complain about the super chain, and there's probably interesting arguments over their environmental impact. But when a giant like that starts using language like this, it's a pretty big deal.

What we are learning about our footprint on the environment is both shocking and inspiring. Despite our excellence in efficiency, commerce creates a lot of waste. Fortunately, we've identified plenty of opportunities that, if captured, can transform our entire industry. Because we're experimenting in many areas, we expect to make mistakes along the way.

Wal-Mart's stated goals include "to be supplied 100% by renewable energy" and "to create zero waste."
Oh, and Jill Homer, bike blogger and Juneau Empire layout person, is famous!

TEK in tanana

I survived my first trip in a small plane Tuesday, although some here wouldn't even call it a small plane. It was a two-propper with six passenger seats, and it was just me, a photographer, and someone going out to the village for the same reason we were -- for Tanana's new wood-fired boilers, which residents hope will wean them a bit from pricey diesel fuel. We sat between flats of apple juice and the pilot, who wore blue jeans and a baseball hat and flew with one hand on the controls and one draped over the empty co-pilot seat.
The plane was loud as hell and moved around enough at 5,000 feet that you felt like you were flying. Not sure how to convey that, but a jet feels like a bus, and this felt like a motorcycle. You're out there -- 5,000 feet above the spruce, the snaking river, and some low, snowy mountains. The plane flew fine, of course, but the inside was just beat up. One replaced seat, trim falling apart, etc. If it was a couch at the dump, you'd leave it there.
Tanana was wonderful. I went to Barrow in September, and that was technically my first time off the road system, not counting Juneau. But this was different. Trying to set up interviews, I kept hearing, "Sure, give a call when you get in. I'll be here." There's nowhere to go. People are at home, at city hall (a two-story log cabin), or maybe down at the senior center, or the washeteria. (The last was new to me -- it's a laundromat, water source, and shower facility, as most of town isn't connected to the city water and sewer system.)
People drive around -- there's roads and pickup trucks -- but overall, it's quiet. You could tell if an airplane was arriving.
We flew out for a celebration of the wood boilers, but had a chance to talk with some folks about fish and climate change. Mostly fish. We talked with Pat Moore and Lester Erhart, who both fish and keep kennels of about 45 sled dogs. Pat's daughter is racing this year, as is Lester's son. They catch thousands of chum salmon for the dogs each year, and feed them to the dogs dried or fermented. We talked with Stan Zuray and Charlie Campbell, who fish and run dogs. They've both been in town for many decades, and probably know more about their piece of the Earth than most people know about any piece of the Earth -- Stan takes his dog team when he goes out on his trapline because dogs (and his skill using them) are more reliable than an old snowmachine. They're both white, and when I ask Charlie about climate change, they joke about TEK, or traditional ecological knowledge, and their ability to offer it. The term generally refers to the knowledge of people like Pat and Lester when that knowledge is compiled with more scientifically collected data.
I told them all I was there to listen first, and I was, but I still felt a bit like I had come looking for evidence that climate change was affecting fish. Read some of the big reports, and it sounds like fish are getting or will get completely screwed in Alaska. For these guys -- the ones living it -- climate change was just one, hard to identify issue, and its connection to fish laughably inconclusive. You'd have to know, among other things, how Yukon River water temperatures have changed over the years. No one really knows, because there's only scattered data. Pat's TEK says this year was a little wierd, but previous years haven't really shown any trend. You'd want to know how many king salmon were infected with a disease that's been linked to warmer waters. Pat says as many as 30 percent. Lester says one or two fish a year.
And on and on.
The hospitality was amazing. And thanks especially to Stan for sharing his king strips, canned salmon, and daylight hours when two tires needed fixing on his old Volkswagon without an engine.

moose mountain triathlon

I had a mini-adventure yesterday involving the mountain bike, an unopened ski area, and my "white rocket" military surplus/telemark skis. There was a picture in my paper last week of a couple hiking up our local slope, so I figured this was something people did. Not really. I think theirs must have been the only tracks I saw. There was so little snow you could pick cranberries through it on the way up.
I figured if I had to hike anyway, I would make the whole thing human-powered. I rode the 10 miles or so to the mountain, (switched to the hiking boots,) hiked up, (switched to the tele boots,) skied down, (put the bike shoes back on,) and rode home. I say "mini-adventure" because doing anything outside for 4 hours when it's 10 degrees is an adventure as far as I'm concerned. And yes, I did wear the bike helmet on the ski down.

the northwest passage

These are not small airplanes.
I just talked to Adm. Arthur Brooks, the guy in charge of the Coast Guard in Alaska, about the work they're doing up north. They called today, and have been offering interviews, I guess as part of their effort to increase their presence up there. Late last month, they flew a C-130 from Barrow up around the North Pole as part of a series of scouting missions to see what's going on and figure out how well their equipment will work in an arctic environment. Now they're doing regular trips.
With shrinking sea ice, they're seeing more activity up north than ever before -- cruise ships, for instance -- and want to prepare themselves for increased traffic in the future. They're checking out whether they need more navigational buoys, and what they'll have to do to be prepared for rescue missions in the Arctic Ocean.
It will probably take some additional funds, according to Brooks.
There was a lot of coverage this summer of international jockeying for newly accessible ocean and sub-sea lands. That's not up to the Coast Guard to figure out, but it does affect them.
"I do not know what I'm responsible for," Brooks said.

and now for something completely different

I wrote a story for today's News-Miner about my first caribou hunt last month. It was so good our Web site couldn't handle it, so you have to buy a real paper. The pictures are the best part anyway.
In terms of real news, Sen. Ted Stevens is getting behind carbon sequestration, and wrote this is a news release yesterday, after a hearing before the commerce committee on the technology.

“This technology, while helping to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, can also aid in recovering reserves of petroleum previously thought to be unrecoverable. Doing so will become more and more important as global oil reserves diminish and as petroleum prices rise.”

He added this about testimony from Ron Wolfe, natural resources manager for Sealaska Native Corp.

In addition to providing clean air, trees in Alaska's forests have a tremendous capacity to take up and store carbon, Mr. Wolfe said. During his testimony, he emphasized that carbon regulatory programs should reward actions that increase the ability of forests to absorb carbon and enhance ecological function. Forests can be managed to maximize carbon sequestration and be part of a comprehensive approach to managing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Forest management practices directed to sequester carbon can provide a wide array of economic opportunities important to the public, especially to American Indians and Alaska Natives,” said Ron Wolfe in his written testimony. “Sequestering activities can create new commerce and job opportunities in some of the poorest rural, predominately Native, areas of Southeast Alaska while enhancing the forest's ecological functions.”

Not really sure what to make of that. I guess that if we can capture the stuff, we can keep emitting it. And that there's some big bucks in capturing it.
Then there was this, involving a Yup'ik girl, Lisa Murkowski, and Rush Limbaugh.
If you haven't heard Peter Larsen's talk on dollar impacts of climate change on state infrastructure, he's giving it at next Tuesday's ACCAP teleconference.
And here's just a great lede from an NY Times story.

For photographers lacking training, experience and even the ability to click a shutter button, they produce remarkable pictures. Under the sea, deep in the woods and high in the sky, furry, feathery and leathery-skinned creatures are opening up vistas by taking cameras where no human can go.

palin's sub-cabinet, and flaming methane

Gov. Palin's sub-cabinet on climate held its third meeting yesterday, in Fairbanks and open to the public. I couldn't help but think back to the first meeting of the AK Climate Impact Assessment Commission, which was held in the same room on the UAF campus. That felt like high school. This felt like college. The presenters seemed more on point, the public testimony more direct, and the people listening, I got the sense, more prepared to act.
Here's the story I wrote for today. It's not exactly sexy, I realized after I wrote it, but at the time it seemed like a big deal -- that a large number of states were doing significant, creative things, and that Alaska might.
The meeting of the work group on immediate needs was just as exciting, but I had to skip out half way through and barely mentioned it in the story. Representatives from the coastal villages IDed as having the most serious risk of getting washed away described their struggles trying to find money and work with federal agencies like the Army Corps. A few talked about the need to have a lead federal/state agency handling erosion and village relocation, I heard after. That's been talked about since the assessment commission got started (almost a year ago) and I'm sure for longer than that. I wonder when it will happen.
Another when is when Palin is going to spend the first state money on climate change. Right now the sub-cabinet is just relying on funds from the individual departments. At some point, it will need some money. The CCS guy yesterday said his group would demand "enough [money] to show that you're serious."
This morning I got an e-mail from a man at a North Carolina "free-market" think tank with a long list of writings on why CCS is bogus and a bad idea. Here's a taste.
The reason I skipped out of the meeting yesterday was to go see Katey Walter in action. I realized after that it was basically a live press release I was going on -- I had thought we were tagging along on some real fieldwork -- but I don't regret it. Walter is getting lots of attention for her work on the release of methane from Arctic lakes -- why it's happening, whether it's increasing with thawing of the ground under lakes, how great a climate feedback it is. We went to test for methane, I suppose, although we basically just went trotting around a few ponds looking for gas pockets we could light on fire. UAF's PR department was there taking video. Sorry I don't have a picture to post.
At the first pond we went to, Walter showed us an underwater bubble trap, shaped like an umbrella, used to measure the amount of gas coming up from a source on the bottom. A Romanian grad student punched through the ice with a steel digging bar, and Walter pulled out ice chunks and then the trap with bare hands. They poked holes in bubbles in the ice and lit them on fire, and Walter warmed her hands in the flame. It was about 15 degrees.
At the second pond, they lit off pockets of methane over and over again. The grad student stabbed holes in the ice with a river knife, while Walter held matches to it. Big fireballs sent her stumbling backwards more than once. Gas from one hole roared out like air from a flat tire. One flame burned for 30 seconds.
I got it after the first explosion that there was methane in lakes. After we'd crisscrossed the pond and lit off a good dozen, one of them shooting flames 20 feet high, I started to think, Holy sh_t there's a lot of methane!

ak in the news: the arctic and the desert

Ned Rozell has this report on a talk by Matthew Sturm, a big name in snow research up here, about Sturm's 2,200-mile snowmachine trek across the Canadian arctic.

"They know that the climate is warming, and that mineral and oil gas exploration is booming," [Sturm said]. "They also know that all the old problems due to remoteness, cold, isolation, and darkness still exist in some form. They know the changes have brought new problems like meth and out-migration. . . . As I traveled, I was struck by a palpable sense of change in the wind. It isn’t that there is climate change and technological change, there is just change — a holistic thing, difficult to predict."

There's also this, from the Canadian magazine the Walrus, which I've not read all of -- "Climate change as the Inuit see it: 'From the inside out.'"
I did get a chance to read the NY Times story from last weekend on climate-related drought in the US West and efforts to deal with it. Not about Alaska, but a good story all the same.

step it up in the snow

Well, Anchorage's Step It Up event looks a little better attended, from this stolen shot, but what's up with doing it inside? The Fairbanks crew, which included a polar bear, a dog, two bicycles and a skeleton (if we screw up the Earth, we're all going to die), did it outside in the snow. I'll post a pic when one is available.

ak in the news: flaming bears

The US House's committee on energy independence and global warming took testimony today on the link between forest fires and climate change. In a news release, the committee claimed a victory over Bush's much-reported "censoring" of the head of the CDC on climate change and health. The head of the forest service said (pretty much) what she was going to say about wild fires: "I think we can demonstrate higher severity, larger fires and certainly over the last seven-eight years more frequent fires and a longer fire season."
The Christian Science Monitor had a good story on the link.
Also, the ADN had this story on Gov. Palin's opposition to listing polar bears as threatened.
When the last governor, Murkowski, opposed it, he clearly expressed concerns about impacts on development. Palin has been less explicit about why she's so opposed. I'll ask.
Also, there's this from the ADN, which was news to me:

The Associated Press reports that three Alaska mayors are attending a two-day summit in Seattle on local efforts to reduce carbon emissions and global warming: Mark Begich of Anchorage, James C. Hornaday of Homer and Bruce Bothelo of Juneau. Headlining the event today and tomorrow: former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

fire and feedbacks

Forest fires produce their own greenhouse gases. Lots of them.
That's the news in an AP story today that offers up numbers on emissions from CA fires and fires around the country. In the US, fires annually spit out about 5 percent of what fossil fuel combustion does. In Alaska, it's much higher.

The Western continental United States is responsible for more than one-third of the country's carbon dioxide from fires. But Alaska is king. Alaskan fires produce twice as much of the greenhouse gas than burning fossil fuels in that state. Alaskan fires make up 27 percent of the nation's yearly fire-related carbon dioxide emissions.

This is like a lot of things, where natural and man-made warming lead to more natural warming. Is it still a "natural" source if there's reason to believe it was spurred in part by man-made warming? (Studies project that fires will increase in a warmer world.) Consider the release of methane gases from thawing lakes, or the increased absorption of solar energy with reduced sea ice. Attribution only really matters in the policy debate, but understanding the many feedback loops is important for being able to predict the extent of the warming.
The picture is from a prescribed burn near Fairbanks.

a hearty halloween

I'll be celebrating today's holiday with a 'bou, specifically the one I shot a few weeks ago up on the North Slope. 'Bou stew for lunch, 'bou steaks in the freezer, 'bou burger waiting to get ground up . . .
In the news today, there's still chatter about the White House editing testimony from the CDC on public health and climate change. Here's an AP story and a Boston Globe editorial, along with a take from Rolling Stone (one inconvenient truth: "Global warming might kill grandpa").
The U.S. House's Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is holding a hearing tomorrow on the link between climate change and forest fires. An increase in fires -- at least in the Arctic -- has been projected for years. The notice for the hearing notes the big fires in California, which are consistent with climate projections, according to some. (I understand there's some debate over this.)
Also, the NY Times' Andy Revkin, my old prof in journalism school, has started a blog on climate. It's called Dot Earth.

cap and trade

The Western Climate Initiative is hosting a teleconference tomorrow to fill people in on its work plan and take public comments. The group was started in February by the governors of WA, OR, CA, AZ and NM as a way to collectively commit to emissions reductions. UT, BC, and Manitoba have since joined. Alaska is officially observing.
The group announced a collective goal in August to reduce emissions to 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. It's since developed a work plan that's 30 pages long and not exactly exciting, which is the subject of tomorrow's talk. "Interested stakeholders" can call in. Here's the link.
And here's a story I did back in July.

stepping it up at the last minute

Surely in response to my post, Sitka and Fairbanks have joined Anchorage and Homer in hosting Step It Up events this Saturday.
The event in Fairbanks is scheduled for 11am at Golden Heart Plaza and will be rather informal. (The host is this polar bear.)
Check the calendar for other stuff this week and next.

ak in the news, and how the heck...?

So I've been nibbling away at a story on Syun Akasofu and his well-received efforts to get people to chill over climate change. His public presentation is remarkably simple. He basically claims that climate modelers have figured out the relative effect of greenhouse gases by dividing the observed temperature change by the known increase in gases -- that a certain jump in ppm of CO2 has led to an increase of about 1 degree in 100 years. He argues they ignore what Earth was doing without the greenhouse gases, and concludes most of the warming came from those natural causes, based on simply extending the trajectory of natural warming leading into the industrial age.
Naturally, it made me wonder how modelers know how much a certain increase in CO2 will increase the temperature. The Christian Science Monitor had a story recently that at least gives an overview. One thing they don't mention is that the details of the warming also suggest anthropogenic causes rather than natural ones (that's my understanding, anyway). For example, it's warming faster in the winter than the summer, and faster at night than during the day.
The Anchorage Daily News had stories on Anchorage's efforts to go green, and Alyeska (the ski resort, not the pipeline company) buying green tags for its tram. (There's mention of offsetting 100 kw hours with wind power for 2 bucks, which would mean 2 cents a kw hour difference in price between coal or gas and wind -- sounds fishy to me, unless wind is getting cheap. I guess it's not from Alaska, but that's OK, it's global warming.)
Doug O'Harra describes how the lack of sea ice proved a boon for the owner of the Red Dog Mine by Kotzebue, which has to ship all its ore during the ice-free season.
And Alaska makes the grade when it comes to beautiful pics of species reportedly threatened by climate change, joining Australia and Bangladesh. Alaska, where new species are still being discovered...
Oh, and there's this story from the Washington Post, which also features Alaska. Reading it is a bit like opening a full closet and having all kinds of stuff fall out. The story is part of a bigger series.

ak in the news

Superstar Katey Walter, UAF student, IPY fellow, and now prof, was in the news again last week for getting an article published in Science. She and her co-authors propose that methane released from thawing lakes contributed a third to almost all of the increase in atmospheric methane during the past warm, interglacial period, and could have a big warming impact again.
Here's the Science abstract, and here's the story my paper did.
Walter was also featured last month by NPR.
In other news, NPR has a bit of a primer on the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor. And Doug O'Harra of Far North Science has a good explainer on this year's disappearing sea ice.

big day in Fairbanks

Gov. Palin's sub-cabinet is holding its next meeting in Fairbanks on Nov. 6. The agenda is packed.
A good chunk of the meeting will be open to the public, and the first thing on the agenda is a public comment period. After that, they'll get quick overviews from UAF researchers Terry Chapin and David Atkinson on adaptation and coastal erosion, respectively. Buck Sharpton, the UAF vice chancellor for research, who's also on the sub-cabinet, will talk about digital mapping (I think to scale down climate models to make them more useful here). There's also a pitch by CCS, the company that's helping the state inventory emissions, for how it might help the sub-cabinet.
A second chunk of the meeting is closed to the public, and has some exciting stuff, like figuring out how much money the state should ask for next year to develop a strategy.
The sub-cabinet's working group on immediate action is also meeting that day in Fairbanks, starting at noon at the Regency Hotel, and that meeting is open to the public. Fairbanks' own Luke Hopkins is on there. One interesting tidbit is that Peter Larsen is scheduled to talk on the "foreseeable economic impacts" of climate change. He was the lead author for ISER's study on potential costs to state infrastructure -- the only such study out there, as far as I know -- but he now works for the Nature Conservancy as their climate change point person in Alaska. Not sure what capacity he's speaking in, or whether being a green will harm his credibility.
Click here for more on the two meetings.

step it up, again

Remember in April when thousands of people held climate change (or anti-climate change) rallies around the US? Well, it's happening again, under the name Step It Up 2.In April, I wrote a bit about the one down in Juneau, which I didn't actually attend (I think I was snowboarding). There were 15 events in Alaska then, and only two scheduled for the second take, which is next Saturday. They're in Anchorage and Homer, two cities where the local government has been quite active on climate stuff. The guy who brainstormed the whole thing, Bill McKibben, wrote The End of Nature (in 1989), which argues that man-made climate change has caused the end of any true nature because now there's really NO place in the world that's not touched in some way by man. Maybe it's elitist, but that's a pretty strong regret for someone like me who's not living in sinking Tuvalu or depending on sea ice for sustenance. The book was so depressing his friends convinced him to follow it up with something more hopeful, which he called Hope, Human and Wild.

ak in the news, and polar bears

Sorry, I dropped the ball a bit for an exciting weekend away involving a truck, a 400-mile dirt highway, and big herds of caribou.
Here's some news clippings.
The News-Miner's RA Dillon wrote an update of climate legislation in DC.
The Arctic Sounder had a story on coastal erosion (and some amazing pictures of the whales caught this fall).
And Rachel D'Oro's story on walruses (walri?) showed up in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The big news today is from Gov. Palin, who's still urging the feds not to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act despite recent USGS estimates that shrinking sea ice could do in two thirds of the world's polar bears in 50 years.
In a letter sent Monday to Interior Secretary Kempthorne, Palin wrote there wasn't enough evidence showing that the polar bear would be endangered "throughout all or significant portions of its range within the the foreseeable future," or showing that the bear populations weren't being well-managed already.
She didn't mention impacts on resource development, but argued the "listing of a currently healthy species based entirely on highly speculative and uncertain climate and ice modeling and equally uncertain and speculative modeling of possible impacts on a species would be unprecedented." The floodgates would be open to thousands of listing petitions, she wrote.
Palin said the state shared the feds' concern over the bears, and she asked for an extended comment period to sort things out.
This is a complicated topic. I wrote about it back in early April and again in mid April. Dan Joling did a story in late April.
Here's one summary.

whence the money?

The ADN's Beth Bragg had a good story today on the costs and issues association with coastal erosion and village relocation.

Where will all the money come from?

"That's the million-dollar question," said Sally Russell Cox, a state planner who is involved in the Newtok relocation.

It's closer to a billion-dollar question, and it's getting a lot of attention at the federal, state and local levels.

The usual sources are being tapped, among them the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the state Department of Transportation, the Village Safe Water Program and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Even the idea of using some of the Permanent Fund has been floated.

Cox hopes dollars alone don't drive the discussions.

"I hate to put things in economic terms, because these are human beings we're talking about," she said. "These are lifestyles they've led for thousands of years that have been passed on to them by their forefathers. How can you minimize all that (by putting it) in economic terms?"

In years past, Natives would have moved to safer places if nature's wrath threatened their homes. Today, things like school buildings, airstrips, roads and washeterias keep once-nomadic people anchored in place.

Click here for the whole story.
Rachel D'Oro did a profile yesterday of Stanley Tom, the administrator of Newtok and one of the people dealing with erosion.

stevens and landrieu

Here are audio files from last Thursday's hearing in Anchorage of the Senate's Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery. Sen. Ted Stevens was there, along with the subcommittee's chair, Sen. Mary Landrieu. It's the meeting where Stevens acted like a coastal storm, according to the ADN.
The first is panel one. The second is panel two plus a news conference.
Enjoy.
Http://Stevens.senate.gov/misc/erosion1.mp3
Http://Stevens.senate.gov/misc/erosion2.mp3

Mr. Milkowski, get your Facts STRAIGHT!

The Anchorage Daily News picked up the story I did about the state climate change hearing and put it on their Web site. They have a deal where readers can weigh in, and the title here comes from someone who did.
Here's what happened. The engineer I wrote about, Dennis Nottingham, made strong accusations about what he said were failed erosion control projects in a few Alaska villages. Good reporting dictates that we check the facts -- even if someone else's name is on them -- and give anyone accused of something a chance to respond. I did neither of these because Nottingham's comments seemed most like opinions, which we don't check. In retrospect, I probably should have. A few people from Unalakleet challenged Nottingham's assertion.
The mini-blog gets into a critical discussion, but its tone is bad.

gore v. akasofu

Right, so Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his climate crusading. I spent part of the morning with Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who until this year led the fancy new International Arctic Research Center on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. His field of study is the northern lights, but lately he's been looking into climate change, and has been widely spreading his belief that it really isn't caused by human activities -- mostly -- and that there's nothing we can or should do about it other than adapt.
Thursday he talked to a group of UAF students; Friday morning he met with a group of local miners.
He ripped on the IPCC and its findings, and took a few jabs at Gore, basically for promoting bad science.
He's a very small man, and very polite, and also very witty, so when he sent me an e-mail later in the day, I'm pretty sure he meant it tongue-in-cheek. He had no problem with Gore winning the peace prize, he wrote, as long as it's not a science prize. More on him later.

the biggest of the small

Fairbanks doesn't really have mountains like some parts of the state (think Juneau), but it does have hills, and today I rode the biggest of them, Murphy Dome. It was overcast, about 32 degrees, and fairly breezy, which is to say it could be one of the last nice, warm fall days here. Our summer was beautiful (I wrote a story about it), but it left in a hurry. As a fellow reporter said, it left without giving us a chance to say goodbye. Daylight is disappearing, too, at the rate of nearly an hour a week. I had an early meeting Friday, and when I got out at 9, the sun was just coming up and it was 11 degrees. So today seemed nice.
The ride was about 2300 vertical feet on a rocky dirt road covered with increasing amounts of snow. The top is right at treeline, and today the wind was howling and it was quite a bit colder. Coming down into a headwind, fast enough for it to be exciting, with cold fingers and toes, let me taste a little bear meat, which is good to do once in a while.
"Riding in the cold builds toughness," my friend used to say.
The round trip was about 27 miles.
Anyone else dealing with frozen waterbottles yet?

the ferocity of a US senator

The Anchorage Daily News' Beth Bragg had this colorful lede for a story on Sen. Ted Stevens' hearing Thursday in Anchorage on coastal erosion.

Sen. Ted Stevens displayed the ferocity of an Alaska sea storm Thursday morning, pounding federal officials for not responding aggressively enough to coastal villages imperiled by erosion, flooding and other effects of global warming.

Here's the full story.

follow the money

The AK Climate Impact Assessment Commission met all day yesterday in Anchorage. A discussion of sorts came together in testimony from three separate invited speakers, including one of the commission members, who charged the Army Corps with funding ill-planned erosion control programs. The Army Corps sort of defended itself, but also explained that it simply didn't have the authority, which sounded like news to Sen. Gene Therriault, a studious state lawmaker.
The commission also heard some dramatic stuff about the impacts (real and potential) on salmon, as well as eloquent public testimony on how climate change was making impossible a way of life that's been developed over thousands of years in tune with the land and climate.
I wrote about the allegedly wasted money. Here's the story.
Sen. Ted Stevens stopped in and made the point that erosion is a larger problem now that villagers have fixed infrastructure like power plants and schools. Later in the day, he traveled to Shishmaref with Sen. Mary Landrieu. He's holding a hearing on coastal erosion today in Anchorage. Check back later for an update.

climate impact commission meeting today

The group set up last year by state lawmakers to tally the impacts of climate change in Alaska is holding its last public hearing today (Wednesday) in Anchorage.
The hearing is scheduled to last all day, with invited testimony running till 3:15 and public testimony coming after that. It's taking place at the legislative information office in Anchorage, but people elsewhere can listen in through their LIO or by calling (888) 295-4546.
Among those scheduled to speak is Fairbanks' own Luke Hopkins, who's on the Fairbanks borough Assembly and has been driving the push for a local response to climate change.
The full agenda is pasted below.
The Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission was supposed to do a final report with recommendations by January 10, but asked for and got an extension till February 29 -- making up for days lost last year to special sessions on oil and gas bills.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Anchorage Legislative Information Office, Anchorage, Alaska

8:55am Dial teleconference bridge - (888) 295-4546

9:00am Chairman Samuels welcome / introductions / check teleconference

9:05am - 9:30am Dennis Nottingham, PND Engineers - Erosion Control in Alaska - Success and Failure

9:30am - 10:00am George Canelos, Federal Co-Chairman, Denali

Commission - Threatened Villages Relocation Issues

10:00am - 10:30am Lawson Brigham, Arctic Research Commission - Arctic

Marine Shipping Assessment for Alaska

(former 30-yr. Coast Guard officer, ice-breaker pilot)

10:30am - 11:15am A.O.G.A. presentation

11:15am - 11:45am Joseph David, Sr., Community Elder, Nunivak Island

11:45am - 1:00pm (lunch break)

1:00pm - 1:30pm Sue Mauger, Stream Ecologist, Cook Inletkeepers - Changes in Salmon Stream Habitat Due To Climate Warming

1:30pm - 2:30pm COL. Kevin Wilson, Commander, Alaska District, Army Corps. of Engineers;

Patricia Opheen, PE, Chief of Engineering Division, AK District, COE Jon Zufelt, Ph.D, PE, Army Cold Regions Research/Engineering Lab

2:30pm - 3:15pm Alaska Municipal League - Climate Warming Impacts on Alaskan Communities - Mayors Bruce Botelho, Juneau & Mark Begich, Anchorage, and Luke Hopkins, Presiding Officer, Fairbanks-North Star Borough Assembly Member

3:15pm - 3:30pm (afternoon break)

3:30pm - 5:00pm (open public testimony)

new posts, new blog

Welcome to northern flux, which takes over where the accidental naturalist left off.
I've made some big changes. I'm expanding the focus and hope to share some of the other things I care about while still being a resource for people wanting to learn about climate-related changes in Alaska, what's causing them, and what people are doing about them.
I'm a newspaper reporter, not an advocate. I just have a strong appreciation for the out-of-doors and a special interest in climate change.
All the old posts are still up. There are more links now, including some fun ones that have nothing at all to do with climate change. Feel free to join the discussion, and let me know if there's anything you'd like to see on the blog. I know there's people interested in this stuff, and I'd love to be a resource. You can reach me at stefan@billburg.com.

summer break

That shrinking of the sea ice turned into a big story. The Anchorage Daily News had this story about how the lack of ice is affecting walrus (and the people hunting them), and my paper ran this follow up by the AP.
Also, I seem to be on the renewable energy beat lately, covering new projects at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks and the Chena Hot Springs Resort outside the city.
Anyway, I'm taking a bit of a break, for trips up the Dalton Highway, for instance (shown here).
The blog will be back at some point.
Thanks for reading.

see ice?

Scientists are expecting arctic sea ice to shrink more this year than in any year since they started recording nearly 30 years ago, according to a story today in the NY Times.

William L. Chapman, who monitors the region at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and posted a Web report on the ice retreat yesterday, said that only an abrupt change in conditions could prevent far more melting before the 24-hour sun of the boreal summer set in September. “The melting rate during June and July this year was simply incredible,” Mr. Chapman said. “And then you’ve got this exposed black ocean soaking up sunlight and you wonder what, if anything, could cause it to reverse course.”

fishing the arctic

Ted Stevens is in the news for other stuff these days, but last week he introduced a resolution relating to climate change. The resolution calls for the development of an international framework to manage arctic fisheries created through fish migrations into warming waters and/or easier boat access in newly ice-free waters.
Here's from a news release.

“Although there is much to learn about climate change patterns, the Arctic Ocean and its fish habitats are changing,” Senator Stevens said. “Fish stocks may colonize this ocean in the coming years, and we need to act now to put appropriate international fisheries agreements in place."

Wow. Click here to see the whole release.

a new scale

OK, I'm back now from a crazy weekend of fishing, trekking, and driving.
NPR keeps doing its stories from around the world, the latest one on the physiological value of the midday siesta. On another scale completely is this story on the potential for massive global changes under a warming climate, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Eruptions of Pavlof volcano in Alaska, for example, tend to occur during the winter months when, for meteorological reasons, the regional sea level is barely 30cm (12in) higher than during the summer. If other volcanic systems are similarly sensitive then we could be faced with an escalating burst of volcanic activity as anthropogenic climate change drives sea levels ever upwards.

Seems a little on the speculative side, but a good read anyway. The picture is of Augustine Volcano right here in Alaska.

subcabinet meets

Just a joke, just a joke.
Gov. Palin's subcabinet on climate change met Wednesday in Anchorage and heard from, among others, Luke Hopkins of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and representatives from the Denali Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the office of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
The subcabinet spent a good bit of time talking about forming subgroups to address specific issues, including . . .
-research needs (identifying them)
-immediate action (figuring out what to do in Kivalina and Shishmaref, for instance)
-alternative energy and energy conservation
-carbon sequestration
-and policy tracking (weighing in on federal legislation or participating in regional initiatives)
The subcabinet also got an update on the Department of Environmental Conservation's work to refine a state carbon emissions inventory -- the hope is to get it done by the end of the year.

ak in the news

NPR's trip around the world to report on climate change brought a few reporters to Barrow for this story on changes in Alaska.
News-Miner reporter Robinson Duffy wrote this about UA's getting some federal money to study climate change, with comments from UAF wizz Terry Chapin on the importance of local knowledge.

adn blunder

I wouldn't ordinarily criticize another reporter's writing, especially publicly, but this one has got me fired up.
The Anchorage Daily News today ran a story by Peter Porco about a recent USPIRG report tallying temperature data from across the country.
The article is superficial and irresponsible and borders on being inaccurate.
Here are my criticisms.
-Porco sources USPIRG for data that he could have easily checked himself, but throws out there that the cause of increasing temperatures "remains in dispute" without sourcing anyone. The conflict between the journalistic principle of balance (showing both sides of an issue) and the reality of scientific consensus on this issue has been documented. See this study by the Boykoff brothers, who found that press coverage of climate change has contributed to a divergence between scientific understanding of the issue and public perception of it.
-Porco writes that an AkPIRG woman "admitted" Alaska was not the problem. Bad word. It implies others have come to an agreement that Alaska is not the problem. And, another study just found (with some caveats) that Alaskans emit three times as many greenhouse gases per person as average Americans.
-Porco writes that Alaskans may not mind if it gets warmer. His source? A few bumper stickers. Also, the sentence suggests a lack of understanding of the difference between global warming (that the Earth as a whole is getting warmer) and climate change (the whole host of effects a warming planet will have on weather, precipitation, storms, etc.). That is, climate change is not just about things getting warmer.
-And permafrost is not melting, not any more than a steak melts when you take it out of the freezer. It's thawing.
I'm not sure who Porco is. He's not on the ADN's online masthead. I appreciate his effort to make the story interesting and maybe to play down the gloom and doom with some jokes, but not at the expense of an accurately portraying what's happening.

spastic global warming

Ted Stevens recently said the following on his co-sponsoring a bill that would impose a cap-and-trade on carbon dioxide.

(This bill) is not just a flash-in-a-pan, publicity stunt. . . . This is a very modified cap-and-trade concept and it has a balance in it. It is dealing with global climate change rather than a spastic kind of global warming.

I think spastic is considered an offensive word, but aside from that, it looks like Stevens is trying to differentiate between a reasoned, scientifically sound "climate change" and an emotional, irrational "global warming."
I think he might be missing the point. The two terms get used interchangeably, but actually have very different meanings. The simplest explanation I've seen is from Tim Flannery in "The Weather Makers," who writes,

Greenhouse gases are a class of gases that can trap heat near Earth's surface. As they increase in the atmosphere, the extra heat they trap leads to global warming. This warming in turn places pressure on Earth's climate system and can lead to climate change.

And this on the difference between weather and climate:

Weather is what we experience each day. Climate is the sum of all weathers over a certain period, for a region or for the planet as a whole.

Oh, refreshing clarity!

chatanika river

Don't be fooled by the photos! These were taken during the two minutes of sunshine on our 4-hour trip down the Chatanika River yesterday. The rest of the time it rained, drizzled, and poured. We paddled from Long Creek to the state campground at mile 39 of the Steese Highway -- about 10 river miles. The river was low, but full of fun little drops and sweeps around fallen and piled-up trees. There were blueberries along the riverbanks, bright red king salmon getting set to spawn after a thousand-mile trip from ocean, and even a few arctic grayling (the one I caught was about an inch too short).

going public

And now for some actual climate news!
A governor's cabinet and sub-cabinets generally meet privately, but Gov. Palin's newish sub-cabinet on climate change is inviting the public to part of its Aug. 1 meeting. The morning session is not for public testimony, just invited speakers making presentations. A Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman said some municipal leaders, including Juneau Mayor Bruce Botelho, have expressed a desire to meet with the sub-cabinet, which consists of a bunch of commissioners and a University of Alaska representative.
Anyone wanting to listen in should contact the DEC at 465-5009.
The public notice of the meeting also provides a summary of the sub-cabinet's duties.

Governor Palin has formed a Sub-cabinet comprised of several Commissioners to develop a Climate Change Strategy for Alaska. The Strategy will be designed to improve the state’s scientific knowledge about actual and expected effects of climate change, develop appropriate measures and policies to prepare communities for the impacts of a changing climate and develop recommendations on Alaska’s participation in regional and national efforts to curb the causes of a warming climate.

Larry Hartig, commissioner of the DEC, said earlier this month the sub-cabinet had formed some sub-groups (sub-sub-cabinets?) to tasked with specific jobs, including researching options for alternative and renewable energy and working with state and federal agencies about the Alaska villages in need of relocation.
Palin hasn't actually signed the administrative order forming the sub-cabinet, a draft of which has been on her desk for a while.
See the calendar (over on the right) for other stuff going on.

southeast!

Last weekend I got to paddle among whales and sea lions near Juneau. The salmon were jumping clear out of the water at all angles, skipping along the surface and belly-flopping as if they had jumped with no plan for the landing. One guess is that they're jumping to loosen their egg sacks, but no one really knows why they do it, according to my guide on this trip, my friend Laura.
We camped on an island, ate pistachios, and actually slept fairly well. The main feats of the trip were lighting a fire in the rain forest after some pretty steady rain (with help from some local publications) and crossing the channel when all we could see in every direction was water, fog, and low clouds. The non-feat was twice nearly catching a sizable salmon.

granite tors trail

I'll start writing about climate change soon, but here's one more trip report, or maybe two . . .
I wanted to do this one for a while. If you drive out Chena Hot Springs road most the way to the springs, there's a trail that runs 15 miles up a ridge and among the tors, which are big chunks of granite that were formed 60 to 80 million years ago when molten rock came up from below but cooled before hitting the surface, according to my guide book. When softer stuff eroded around the granite, the tors were left above the surface. Some are the size of a pickup. Others are hundreds of feet high.
I ran the route on a day that spit rain, shone sun, and did everything in between. Low clouds and somewhat cool air made the whole thing quite dramatic, as did bright pink fireweed sprouting in burnt-out, charred black spruce. (Hint to prospective visitors: the fireweed in June and July is amazing.) The spring that was supposed to "bubble out sweet and cold" was nothing more than a puddle, so I ate tart blueberries to wet my mouth. There were a few hikers, and a group climbing one of the tors with ropes and harnesses, but mostly it was me and the wet fireweed, roots, rocks, and soft, wet tundra.

tanana river

In place of a picture, here's a thousand words (or a few hundred anyway):
On July 4th, a friend and I canoed down the Tanana River from Fairbanks to Nenana. We left at 3 in the afternoon and paddled into the village at midnight. It was almost dark. The air smelled like fireworks smoke and fish guts. People were hanging out on a little sand beach, and a woman was throwing a stick to a dog who bounded into the river after it like a deer, which cracked me and Ian up after nine hours of paddling and not much food. A few guys were moving around long wooden poles they were using to make a fish wheel, and across the bank across from town, people were lighting off fireworks.
The trip is about 60 river miles. Our hours in the boat drifted by without much sense of time or place, especially for me, a first-timer on the river. The water was big and tan, completely saturated with glacial silt, the grains of which we could here like sandpaper against the side of my plastic boat. Where channels came together, currents swept under us and threatened to spin the boat around. At one side cut, where a near-cliff of light brown dirt calved into the river, there were veritable whirlpools.
The river banks are a mix of low shrubs, willow, aspen, birch, balsam poplar, and white and black spruce, depending on how recently the land was burned or carved into by the river. The river bends and widens, breaks into channels, and nearly loops back on itself at times, constantly changing.
Toward Fairbanks, there were river boats and picnickers camped on sandbars. Further downriver, we watched an airboat crank its giant fan and launch off a mudflat and up the river with mind-boggling inefficiency, bending branches and willows like a hurricane. After that, we saw few boats and few people until we neared Nenana, when a race boat and one or two others passed going upstream.
There's signs of life, like little marks on trees for fish camps, I'm guessing, and a sign for Skinny Dick's, but mostly the river is wild. Ian likened it to a highway -- it's fairly well traveled, and you can't really get lost -- but I mostly saw it like a big, remote river. Yeah, we were never more than 10 miles from the road, but that's a day's hike through thick brush and swamps, and we were a good 30 river miles from anything at one point.
So maybe that's the lesson -- what would be wilderness anywhere else is a highway in Alaska.

blueberries

What do blueberries have to do with climate change? OK, I can't really think of anything, except that some people have expressed concerns during state hearings about the impact of warming on berry crops. Two weeks ago, I was surprised to see ripe berries during a hike, and everyone I've talked to since seems to agree they're ready early this year. Which is just fine with me. Here's from about an hour's picking, the first half of which was spent just looking for the right spot. I'll honor the Alaska tradition of not saying where I found them . . .
Expect a bumper crop of cranberries this year, too.

pinnell mountain trail

I'm back. I've just last night had my dry cabin in Fairbanks set up for cable Internet. It was quite an operation that took three GCI guys (in three separate vans) about an hour. One climbed an extension ladder to the top of a utility pole to get to the cable (not buried around here), while another put a ladder to the roof and brought the cable over. A third drilled through the cabin wall. Anyway, now I have fast Internet and an outhouse.
I've wanted to post some pics for a while, so here goes, from a hike over the Pinnell Mountain trail northeast of Fairbanks at the start of the month. A few hours into the first day, with the sun still shining, it started to pelt down hard, cold rain (that's called elkonh dehoon hek-edee'onh in Denaak'e). The rest of the trip was beautiful, breezy, high above treeline. We saw a caribou and a marmot.
Much of the land is slowly sliding downhill in little clumps that form their own shadows and micro-systems. Jim Dau, the area biologist out in Kotzebue, talked about something similar during the Kotzebue hearing of the state climate commission.