In Alaska, hotter weather provokes startling changes
iht.com
Timothy Egan The New York Times
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
ANCHOR POINT, Alaska To live in Alaska when
the average temperature has risen about 7
degrees Fahrenheit over the last 30 years means
learning to cope with a landscape that can sink,
catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season.
In the village of Shishmaref, on the Chukchi Sea
just south of the Arctic Circle, it means high water
eating away so many houses and buildings that
people will vote next month on moving the entire
village inland.
In Barrow, the northernmost city in North
America, it means coping with mosquitoes in a
place where they once were nonexistent, and
rescuing hunters trapped on breakaway ice at a
time of year when such things once were unheard
of.
In Fairbanks to the north, where wildfires have
been burning off and on since mid-May, it means
living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from
slouching and buckling on foundations that used
to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is no
longer permanent. Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a
recreation wonderland a few hours' drive from
Anchorage, it means living in a 4 million-acre (1.6
million-hectare) spruce forest that has been killed
by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects ever
recorded in North America, federal officials say.
Government scientists tied the event to rising
temperatures, which allow the beetles to
reproduce at twice their normal rate. In Alaska,
rising temperatures, whether caused by
greenhouse gas emissions or nature in a
prolonged mood swing, are not a topic of debate or
an abstraction. Mean temperatures have risen by
5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees centigrade) in
summer and 10 degrees Fahrenheit in winter
since the 1970s, federal officials say. While
President George W. Bush was dismissive of a
report the government recently released on how
global warming will affect the nation, the leading
Republican in this state, Senator Ted Stevens,
says that no place is experiencing more startling
changes from rising temperatures than Alaska.
Among the consequences, Stevens says, are
sagging roads, crumbling villages, dead forests,
catastrophic fires and possible disruption of
marine wildlife. These problems will cost Alaska
hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Alaska is harder hit by global climate change
than any place in the world," Stevens said.
Scientists have been charting shrinking glaciers
and warming seas in Alaska for some time. But
only recently have experts started to focus on
what the warming means to the people who live in
Alaska.
The social costs of higher temperatures have been
mostly negative, people here say. The Bush
administration report, which was drafted by the
Environmental Protection Agency, also found few
positives to Alaska's thermal rise. But it said
climate change would bring a longer growing
season and open ice-free seas in the Arctic for
shipping.
"There can no longer be any doubt that major
changes in the climate have occurred in recent
decades in the region, with visible and measurable
consequences," the government concluded in the
report to the United Nations last month.
It does not take much to find those consequences
in a state with 40 percent of the nation's surface
water and 63 percent of its wetlands.
Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a forest nearly twice
the size of Yellowstone National Park is in the last
phases of a graphic death. Century-old spruce
trees stand silvered and cinnamon-colored as they
bleed sap.
A sign at Anchor River Recreation Area near this
little town poses a question many tourists have
been asking, "What's up with all the dead spruce
trees on the Kenai Peninsula?" The population of
spruce bark beetles, which have long fed on these
evergreen trees, exploded as temperatures rose,
foresters now say. Throughout the Kenai, people
are clearing some of the 38 million dead trees,
answering the call from officials to create a
"defensible space" around houses for fire
protection. Last year, two major fires occurred on
this peninsula, and this year, with temperatures
in the 80s (around 30 centigrade) in mid-May,
officials say fire is imminent.
"It's just a matter of time before we have a very
large, possibly catastrophic, forest fire," said Ed
Holsten of the Forest Service.
Joe Perletti, who lives in Kasilof in the Kenai
Peninsula, has rented a bulldozer to clear dead
trees from the 10 acres where he lives.
"It's scary what's going on," Perletti said. "I never
realized the extent of global warming, but we're
living it now. I worry about how it will affect my
children."
Perletti, an insurance agent, said some insurers
no longer sold fire policies to Kenai Peninsula
homeowners in some areas surrounded by dead
spruce.
Another homeowner, Larry Rude, has cut a few
trees down, but is taking his chances at the house
he owns near Anchor Point. He says he no longer
recognizes Alaska weather.
"This year, we had a real quick melt of the snow,"
Rude said, "and it seemed like it was just one
week between snowmobiling in the mountains
and riding around in the boat in shirt-sleeve
weather."
Other forests, farther north, appear to be sinking
or drowning as melting permafrost forces water
up. Alaskans have taken to calling the
phenomenon "drunken trees."
For villages that hug the shores of the Bering,
Chukchi and Beaufort seas, melting ice is the
enemy. Sea ice off the Alaskan coast has retreated
by 14 percent since 1978 and thinned by 40
percent since the mid-1960s, the federal report
says. Climate models predict that Alaska
temperatures will continue to rise over this
century, by up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kivalina, a town battered by sea storms that erode
the ground beneath houses, will have to move
soon. Stevens said it would cost $102 million, or
$250,000 for each of the 400 residents.
The communities of Shishmaref, Point Hope and
Barrow face a similar fate. Scientists say the
melting ice brings more wave action, which gnaws
away at ground that used to be frozen for most of
the year.
Barrow has not only had beach erosion, but early
ice breakup. Hunters have been stranded at sea,
and others have been forced to go far beyond the
usual hunting grounds to find seals, walruses and
other animals.
"We've had so many strange events, things are so
different than they used to be, that I think most
Alaskans now believe something profound is going
on," said Glenn Juday, an authority on climate
change at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
"We're experiencing indisputable climate
warming. The positive changes from this take a
long time, but the negative changes are
happening real fast." |
