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.)