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.

tipping point?

Is it just me, or does it seem like climate efforts in the U.S. have really picked up serious momentum recently? Just in the last few days, Stevens and Murkowski got behind a big emissions reduction bill on the federal level, Live Earth was global news, and now Florida is doing some dramatic stuff. States in the west and east are both coordinating regional emissions reduction plans in lack of federal leadership, with the western states set to announce a goal in the next few weeks.
The NY Times had stories today on Florida's efforts and a new soup-to-nuts study of potential impacts in New York State and the Northeast, my home.

Without reductions in emissions, sea levels could rise, inundating coastal areas on southern Long Island and pushing water into parts of Lower Manhattan, flooding the financial district and swamping the subways, making them inoperable. Atlantic City could be flooded every other year by late century.

. . . Long Island lobsters would disappear or move to cooler waters up north. Without a hard frost to set buds, New York apple trees would not produce as much fruit as before. Under stress from invasive species, maple, beech and birch trees could disappear from certain regions of the state, including the Adirondacks.

And since it would often be hotter than dairy cows like, milk production could decline by 15 percent or more in late summer months.

Click here for the whole thing.

geothermal, hydrogen, oil, and gas

I seem to be on the energy beat lately, which suits me fine. In case you missed them, here's a few stories I wrote recently about renewable energy projects out at Chena Hot Springs and the debate over oil and gas drilling near Teshekpuk Lake on the North Slope.
On Chena:
Chena Hot Springs eyes hydrogen as energy source
Chena Chiller collects major innovation award
On the lake:
Coastal erosion intertwined with gas, oil plans
Land bureau may pursue drilling near Teshekpuk Lake
The photo is of Chena's two geothermal units.
See the reading library for a powerpoint of how the hydrogen project will work.

going big

U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Ted Stevens have signed on to what looks like the latest wide-reaching climate change bill before Congress. I don't know much at all about it, so here's their news release for now. It's the strongest links I've heard them make between human actions and climate change, and it looks like the bill would include some major money for Alaska. It ties in nicely with the story I did today on the state still trying to figure out what the heck to do.

murkowski and stevens introduce major climate change legislation

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Alaska Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski today joined a bipartisan group of six senators in introducing major legislation to address global climate change by reducing carbon emissions, encouraging technological innovation, and developing alternative fuels.

The Low Carbon Economy Act of 2007, sponsored by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), would establish a “cap and trade” program which sets annual targets for carbon emission reduction. Carbon-emitting power plants and businesses would be allowed to buy, sell, and trade credits equal to their emissions to reach their target emission levels. To ensure these industries are able to meet their targets, the cap and trade program also establishes an allowance system, which would initially grant 76 percent of the credits for free and make all remaining credits available for purchase through auctions.

The cost of buying emission credits should slow the growth of, and ultimately reduce, domestic carbon output: emission levels in 2020 would be the same as in 2006; decline to 1990 levels by 2030; and fall to nearly 60 percent below last year’s levels by 2050. If other nations follow suit with similar policies, the 60 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions would fall within the 50 to 80 percent global reduction that a host of international scientists say is needed to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit later this century. If temperatures rise past that point, significant environmental damage could result.

"There is little doubt that Alaskans are feeling the effects of climate change more than anyone else in our nation," said Senator Stevens. "Regardless of whether these changes are caused solely by human activity, we must take steps to protect people in the Arctic. This bill would help accomplish that goal by taking a balanced and realistic approach which reduces carbon emissions without damaging our economy. In addition, this legislation would direct much-needed resources to Alaska to deal with the consequences of climate change."

“In Alaska we have been feeling the impacts of a warming climate for decades,” said Senator Murkowski. “The permafrost is melting, Arctic ice is disappearing and wildlife habitat is changing. It is responsible for us to take actions to reduce carbon emissions, as long as we can do it without harming our economy. By starting now with a program that funds and spurs technological research and development we can purchase an insurance policy against catastrophic climate effects at relatively little cost.”

The legislation would send clear price signals now that carbon will cost more in the future and would encourage new technology, alternative energy, and consumer purchases that will cut emissions. In contrast to prior proposals, such as the Kyoto Protocol, this legislation would avoid drastic economic repercussions for not meeting standards for carbon reduction.

A portion of the funds taken in from the emission credit auctions would be used to fund research and technology to cut carbon emissions. Under this plan, by 2020, $35 billion will be provided to encourage coal-fired power plants to retrofit or build new plants that can store carbon underground. That could help spur truly clean coal development in Alaska, which leads the nation in coal reserves. Funding will also be provided for cellulosic ethanol production, potentially including biomass from wood fiber, and advanced vehicle technology, such the development and promotion of “plug-in” hybrid electric vehicles.

In addition, $25 billion per year would be available to provide assistance to states to help pay infrastructure damage costs which result from climate change. This adaptation funding is particularly important to Alaska, which has been affected by climate change more than any other state. Under this proposal, Alaska would receive tens of billions of dollars starting in 2009 to cover the cost of highway and airport damage, water and sewer line repairs, seawall construction, port and pipeline repairs, and village relocation costs caused by climate-induced erosion or thawing. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, nearly a dozen villages in Alaska already face damage. Entire village relocations, costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars, will most likely be necessary.

According to a preliminary review by the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, the bill could actually help get an Alaska natural gas pipeline project built by increasing the relative value of natural gas compared to other fossil fuels.

The bill already has won the support of the National Commission of Energy Policy, AFL-CIO, United Mine Workers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, United Auto Workers, International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Southern California Edison, American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Ameren Power Co., Puget Sound Energy, NRG Energy, PNM Energy, and AES Corps.

It is also supported by the following conservation groups: the American Fisheries Society, American Fly Fishing Tackle Association, American Sportfishing Association, Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Boone and Crockett Club, Bear Trust International, Berkley Conservation Institute, Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, Dallas Safari Club, Ducks Unlimited, Inc., Federation of Flyfishers, Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, International Game Fish Association, Mule Deer Foundation, National Wild Turkey Federation, North American Grouse Partners, Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, Pheasants Forever, Quality Deer Management Association, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Texas Wildlife Organization, Trout Unlimited, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and Wildlife Management Institute.

alaska a little bit different

Here's the story I did for today about the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative. The group doesn't have a Web site yet, but you can see the agreement in my reading library. Six Western states and two Canadian provinces are working out a plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, but Alaska has so far remained on the sidelines.

for inspiration

Here's Fabian Cancellara winning the third stage of the Tour. Amazing. Click here for the story.

live earth

Alright, if anyone's reading, here's your chance to speak up. I'm curious what you think about the Live Earth concerts that happened yesterday around the world -- what they signify, and what impact they might have, if any.
I'll start it off with my own reaction:
Mainstream media, mainstream rock stars, mainstream crowds all endorsed the fight against climate change like they've endorsed fights against poverty and disease. That's Metallica, the Beastie Boys, and Shakira. Even if they do nothing now to slow climate change, they've at least established that it's a looming problem and that doing what you can to prevent it is the right thing to do.
And my own favorite part:
Chris Rock telling fans to drive "smaller-ass cars."
Now for yours...

climate impact commission

Here's a pic from the Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission hearing last week in Kotzebue. It comes courtesy of Mikayla Saito, who interned for Rep. Reggie Joule last year and helped get the commission going.
Mikayla was in Kotzebue for the hearing and spoke poignantly of her concerns about climate change as a grad student at UAF, an intern at the Alaska Center for the Environment, and a "representative of the younger generation."
Mikayla talked about building huge forts in the trees in her backyard in Homer, then having to cut them down years later after spruce beetles got to them. She described finding a mammoth tusk on a shoreline and thinking about all the history that's literally eroding away.
As a graduate student, she said, she'd like to see history recorded, possibly through hearings like those held in the 1980s by judge Thomas Berger on the impact of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
Mikayla's message as young person was simple. "Keep us in mind."

the snackwells moment

Here's a fun story from the NY Times' Fashion and Style section.

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

. . . It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

Click here to read the whole thing -- well worth it.