For you climate fans, on the warming of Alaska
Earl Evleth
Alaska, No Longer So Frigid, Starts to Crack, Burn and Sag
By TIMOTHY EGAN
ANCHOR POINT, Alaska, June 13 — To live in Alaska when the average
temperature has risen about seven degrees 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.
From 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 four-million-acre 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 in
summer and 10 degrees in winter since the 1970's, federal officials
say.
While President 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 change from rising temperatures
than Alaska.
Among the consequences, Senator 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, he
said.
"Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the
world," Senator 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
80's 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, a scientist with 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," Mr. 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."
Mr. 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 down a few trees but has
decided to take his chances at the house he owns near Anchor Point.
Mr. Rude says he no longer recognizes Alaska weather.
"This year, we had a real quick melt of the snow, and it seemed like
it was just one week between snowmobiling in the mountains and riding
around in the boat in shirt-sleeve weather," Mr. Rude said.
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-1960's, the federal report says. Climate models predict that
Alaska temperatures will continue to rise over this century, by up to
18 degrees.
Kivalina, a town battered by sea storms that erode the ground beneath
houses, will have to move soon, residents say. Senator 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.
Shishmaref, on a barrier island near the Bering Strait, is fast losing
the battle to rising seas and crumbling ground. As the July 19 vote on
whether to move approaches, residents say they have no choice.
"I'm pretty sure the vote is going to be to move," Lucy Eningowuk of
Shishmaref said. "There's hardly any land left here anymore."
Barrow, the biggest of the far northern native villages with 4,600
people, 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.
"To us living on the Arctic coastline, sea ice is our lifeline," Caleb
Pungowigi testified recently before a Senate committee. "The long-term
trend is very scary."
A 20-year resident of Barrow, Glenn Sheehan, says it seems to be on a
fast-forward course of climate change.
"Mosquitoes, erosion, breakup of the sea ice, and our sewage and
clean-water system, which is threatened by erosion as well," he said.
"We could be going from a $28 million dollar sewage system that was
considered an engineering model to honey buckets — your basic portable
outhouses."
The people who manage the state's largest piece of infrastructure —
the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline — have also had to adjust to
rising temperatures. Engineers responsible for the pipeline, which
carries about a million barrels of oil a day and generates 17 percent
of the nation's oil production, have grown increasingly concerned that
melting permafrost could make unstable the 400 or so miles of pipeline
above ground. As a result, new supports have been put in, some moored
more than 70-feet underground.
"We're not going to let global warming sneak up on us," said Curtis
Thomas, a spokesman for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which
runs the pipeline. "If we see leaning and sagging, we move on it."
North of Fairbanks, roads have buckled, telephone poles have started
to tilt, and homeowners have learned to live in houses that are more
than a few bubbles off plumb. Everyone, it seems, has a story.
"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 Dr. 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."
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