Early Warming. Nancy Lord

       INTRODUCTION

      Among the visuals that accompany reports and projections of global warming, there’s typically a map of the world that uses color to indicate temperature change.¹ Blue stands for cooler than the mean for a given time period, yellow and orange for hotter. The reddest bands circle the high northern latitudes, and at least on the NASA map showing trends since 1955, the hottest spot of all lies like congealed blood over Alaska and the Canadian Northwest. This is where I live and where, like others from the north, I’m acutely aware of environmental change that has killed most of the spruce trees in my part of Alaska, eroded shorelines, and shifted our fisheries into different species and ranges.

      Globally, surface air temperatures have increased by a bit more than one degree Fahrenheit in the last hundred years. A measly one degree, and yet, already, the climate disruption that’s resulted from that warming has been profound. Climate, it helps to remember, is the pattern of weather—encompassing averages, extremes, timing, and spatial distributions of temperatures, precipitation, and “events” like blizzards and tornadoes. Climate change refers to altered patterns. A small change in global average temperature (an index or indicator of the state of the global climate) can mean large changes in the patterns.

      In Alaska and other parts of the north, average temperatures have increased rapidly and dramatically. Just in the last fifty years, Alaska temperatures averaged across the state and through the year have risen by 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter temperatures have risen more sharply, by an average of 6.3 degrees. Temperature increases have varied by community.² My community—Homer, Alaska—has seen its year-round temperature increase by 3.1 degrees and its winter snows turn to rain. In February of 2010 even the slush melted away, moose knelt in our yards to eat green grass, and my neighbors and I went about without jackets or hats in sunny warmth as temperatures shot toward fifty. Then in March a blizzard dumped four feet of snow, temperatures dropped to zero, and schools were closed for the first time in decades.

      “Polar amplification,” the science phrase for the tendency of temperature change to increase with latitude, depends on a number of factors, some of which are not yet well understood.³ The main process at work is the “ice-albedo positive feedback,” which simply means that when ice and snow melt, the darker land and water surfaces absorb more solar heat, causing more ice and snow to melt. More open water allows for strong heat transfers from the ocean to the atmosphere.

      The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects that climate change in the Arctic will be among the largest and most rapid on earth, with wide-ranging physical, ecological, sociological, and economic effects. Its fourth assessment, in 2007, noted that the polar regions are “extremely vulnerable to current and projected climate change,” of considerable geopolitical and economic importance, and are “the regions with the greatest potential to affect global climate and thus human populations and biodiversity.”

      In other words, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. The polar regions function as the cooling system for our planet. As the climate and environment of the north change, so will the climate and ocean systems that regulate the entire world. The Kansas farmer and Florida vacationer don’t need to care about desperately swimming polar bears or Inupiaq hunters falling through ice to be concerned about what’s happening at the top of the world.

      In the north, we live with disappearing sea ice, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, drying wetlands, dying trees and changing landscapes, unusual animal sightings, and strange weather events. We live with such change, and we respond to it, through the myriad of daily choices we make about when and how to travel, what to plant in a garden or when to hunt or harvest, where to build, or how much to invest in a business like salmon fishing or snowplowing. Communities pull together to work on erosion control, wildfire prevention, and water supplies; some, like my town, have adopted (if not fully embraced and implemented) climate action plans.⁴ Our universities and other institutions support research and publish information they hope will be useful at all levels, including that of policy making. Governments respond—slowly, hampered by bureaucracy and the political strength of certain industries and skeptics.

      Deborah Williams, a former Department of the Interior official and passionate conservationist, has been called “Alaska’s Al Gore.” One day in 2008 in the Anchorage office of the organization she founded, Alaska Conservation Solutions, she gave me what amounts to her “stump speech.” Alaskans are seeing the effects of global warming sooner than the rest of the world and “as witnesses have a moral responsibility to talk about what we’re seeing, the cause of what we’re seeing, and the imperative need to act.” Alaska, she said, should not just be the poster child for global warming but set an example by reducing its own carbon footprint. Alaskans can show what it takes to be both resilient and transformative. We’re first, in consequences and opportunity.

      Two years later, in early 2010, President Obama’s secretary of interior Ken Salazar announced the selection of the University of Alaska as home to the first of eight planned regional climate science centers in the nation. He said this: “With rapidly melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, and threats to the survival of Native Alaskan coastal communities, Alaska is ground zero for climate change. We must put science to work to help us adjust to the impacts of climate change on Alaska’s resources and peoples.”

      Yes, there is a great variability, as the scientists say, to weather