High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

‘It’s all over the area,’ Farmer told me. ‘I trap way up towards Hog River, and all those lakes are drying out too.’

I asked what difference it made to the animals.

He shook his head sadly. ‘Ducks, beaver, muskrat…We used to shoot muskrat off this hill right here, but everything is drying out, so we can’t get nothing. With beaver it’s the same thing.’ He pointed to the edge of the bank. ‘There used to be a beaver house right over here. They’re all moving someplace, I don’t know where.’

We stood in silence, as Farmer stared at the ground. ‘It’s just – what do you call it?…Pitiful really. Even the geese and stuff, they’ve started disappearing now. Every year it’s getting harder and harder to live up here.’

Polar warming

Evidence of dramatic climate change is piling in from right around the Earth’s polar regions. Greenland’s ice sheet is thawing so fast that meltwater is running off at a rate equivalent to the annual flow of the Nile.

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(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the Northern Hemisphere winter snowcover has declined by a tenth since 1979,

(#litres_trial_promo) whilst rivers and lakes are freezing a week later and thawing a week earlier than a century ago.

(#litres_trial_promo) Alaskan mountain glaciers are losing ice at a rate fast enough to have a measurable impact on global sea levels,

(#litres_trial_promo) whilst other glaciers and snowfields are disappearing throughout the region.

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This warming is mirrored in the Southern Hemisphere, where the Antarctic Peninsula is warming at a rate similar to that in Alaska. (The Antarctic continental interior, which is surrounded by cold circumpolar winds and sea currents which isolate it from wider global temperature changes, has warmed much more slowly, if at all.) As a result, snowcover and glaciers on the Peninsula are shrinking, ice-dependent Adelie penguin populations shrinking and new plants are beginning to colonise the landscape.

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About 10,000 square kilometres of ice shelf have been lost from both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula, culminating in March 2002 with the spectacular collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, an event which made headlines around the world. Before its sudden demise, Larsen B was a floating wedge of ice 200 metres thick and larger than the entire country of Luxembourg. ‘The speed of it is staggering,’ said a British Antarctic Survey glaciologist at the time, as his ship navigated through the armada of new icebergs. ‘Hard to believe that 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month.’

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Much of what I had heard from Alaskan residents is backed up by hard scientific evidence. As Clifford Weyiouanna told me, sea ice is thinning rapidly. This observation is confirmed by submarine cruises under the Arctic ice, which reveal a thinning trend of over 40% over the last thirty years.

(#litres_trial_promo) The total area of Arctic sea ice is also diminishing rapidly: satellite data shows an area one and a half times the size of Wales is lost every year.

(#litres_trial_promo) In September 1998 ice cover in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas around Alaska (Shishmaref is on the Chukchi Sea) reached a record low, a quarter less than the previous minimum extent over half a century of observations.

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As Clifford and other Shishmaref Eskimo residents told me, this reduction in sea ice is bad news for marine life, much of which congregates around the edges of the ice, where multitudes of plankton and fish form a food bonanza. Walruses, for example, need sea ice thick enough to hold their weight but in shallow enough water to allow them to dive and feed on the sea bottom. Similarly, ringed seals depend on sea ice as a habitat for pupping, moulting, foraging and resting. The same is true for many Arctic species: the health of populations of walruses, ringed and bearded seals, polar bears, belugas and bowhead whales are all strongly correlated with sea ice cover.

The reported changes on land are also well supported by scientific research. Satellite pictures of the Alaskan interior confirm that lakes and ponds have been drying up during the last decade.

(#litres_trial_promo) The IPCC suggests that this phenomenon is linked with melting permafrost: frozen ground forms an impermeable layer, but once it thaws, surface lakes can drain away.

(#litres_trial_promo) As I had discovered in Fairbanks, widespread permafrost melting is well underway across large areas of Alaskan territory, affecting not just buildings and roads, but also wild forests.

Huge areas of woodland have also been destroyed by another side-effect of warming – spruce-bark beetle infestations, which have killed 2.3 million acres of trees since 1992 across a broad swathe of southern Alaska. The devastated area reaches right to Anchorage itself, and visitors flying into the city’s airport cross islands covered with the bristling, white skeletons of dead trees which are easily visible through the plane windows. It’s the worst insect outbreak ever to hit North American forests, and is directly related to higher temperatures: in colder winters, the beetle eggs had been killed off and the population had been unable to explode.

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On the southern Kenai Peninsula, an area famed for its undisturbed natural forests, the beetles attacked like a plague of locusts. One local wildlife specialist compared it to ‘an Alfred Hitchcock movie’. As he told Alaska Magazine: ‘They would be in your hair and eyes, you’d have to brush them off. I’ve heard people saying they could see them in clouds, miles off, coming down the valley.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And the only thing that stopped the plague was when there were no more trees left alive to attack.

PRUDHOE BAY

The spruce-beetle outbreak, the destruction of forests, buildings and coastlines by melting permafrost, and the disappearance of sea ice are a disaster for Alaska’s people, wildlife and natural heritage. So who is to blame? Partially – and here lies the irony – the chain of causation leads straight back to Alaska itself. Oil extraction has dominated Alaskan industry for over twenty years, and this oil has been contributing directly to rising temperatures through the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere during its combustion.

You’d be hard pressed, however, to find anyone in Alaska prepared to admit this. People know which side their bread is buttered on, and with 80% of state revenues coming from royalties paid by drilling companies,

(#litres_trial_promo) and many of the highest-paying and most reliable jobs based on extraction and oilfield services, no one wants to rock the boat.

Oil money has poured into the coffers of state politicians, with both Democrats and Republicans competing to offer the industry tax breaks and other incentives.

(#litres_trial_promo) And ordinary Alaskans benefit too – every year every state citizen, from the oldest granddad to the youngest baby, gets a payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state fund now totalling more than $20 billion, collected from decades of oil company royalties. In 2002 the APF dividend cheque came to $1500, free money for everyone, and a convincing reminder of the rewards paid by Big Oil.

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Many articulate environmentalists have found a place in Alaska, but they are marginalised and vilified by the political establishment, and the Prudhoe Bay oilfield is a no-go area for anyone identifying themselves as a ‘green’. Greenpeace ran a long battle against a new BP offshore facility in the Prudhoe Bay area in the late 1990s, but was practically run out of town by a coalition of local Eskimos and oil drillers.

More recently the debate about whether the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be opened up for oil extraction has polarised the situation still further. Although polls show that most Americans want the Refuge protected, Alaskan politicians almost unanimously demand it be opened up. Concerns have been raised by the Gwich’in Indian tribe and others that oil drilling would destroy the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, but this claim is strenuously denied by politicians and oil companies alike.

The coastal plain of the Refuge, under which somewhere between two and ten billion barrels of oil are thought to lie, has been called ‘America’s Serengeti’. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for managing the Refuge, it is vital not just for the caribou, but for golden eagles, snow geese, polar bears, lynx, muskoxen, arctic foxes, wolverines, grizzlies and countless other species.

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None of this dewy-eyed, liberal concern cuts any ice with Alaskan businessmen or politicians. Indeed, a well-funded lobbying group in Anchorage called Arctic Power exists expressly to campaign for opening up the Refuge, and receives donations not just from the oil industry but directly from taxpayers via the state budget (the 2001 state appropriation totalled $1.8 million

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Knowing that this was among the best places to hear an oil driller’s view of the situation, I visited Arctic Power’s offices.

The director Cam Toohey is as Alaskan as they come: born and raised in the fishing community of Homer, he is also a keen ‘musher’, and raced sled dogs for fifteen years. A framed photo of his wife and two blond boys next to a swimming pool was propped up on the desk, and his office walls were decorated by Eskimo face masks and posters of colourful Arctic sunsets. He was personable and chatty, and wore a perpetual smile – until I asked him about global warming.

Then he looked uneasy. ‘Well, you have to understand that 10,000 years ago we were in an ice age.’ I should therefore realise, he informed me, that climate changes were natural and happened all the time.

‘Yes, but do you accept that the human-enhanced greenhouse effect is currently underway and having an impact in Alaska?’

‘Well, I think the jury’s still out about how much of a contribution the public has made to the greenhouse effect in their consumption of fossil fuels. No one has determined that we can stop consuming fossil fuels today and still have a healthy environment and a healthy economy.’

I was mystified as to how consuming fossil fuels was necessary to maintain a healthy environment, but decided to let it pass.

Instead, I tried a more emotive tactic. ‘The latest predictions coming from the scientists at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks suggest catastrophic warming for Alaska over the next century. This is where your kids are going to grow up. Doesn’t that worry you?’

He repeated once again that temperatures had been changing for thousands of years. ‘Obviously if science is able to determine that this greenhouse effect is being caused by human contribution then I’m sure the nation and the world will do things to try and address that. But it is not a clear-cut scientific situation right now.’

I had given up pretending to be neutral. ‘Yes it is,’ I insisted, referring to the three landmark reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the latest in 2001.