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.