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.