Climate Change

Public lands managers in Alaska say climate change brings new challenges to the decadeslong dilemma over balancing resource extraction with conservation of undeveloped land within the state’s 425 million acres.

“That’s a huge scale – it’s a continental-sized landmass that’s being managed,” says Mark Myers, who managed Alaska’s 100 million-acre share of that landmass – a chunk about the size of California – until about two months ago, when he resigned his job as the state’s Department of Natural Resources commissioner.

Myers said in a recent forum on Arctic policy at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks that conservationists believe vast expanses of land should be protected because they’re the last opportunities in the United States to preserve entire healthy ecosystems.

“Other parts of the country – that land’s been overwhelmed by development,” he said. “There is very little truly functional ecosystem land left. In Alaska, it’s largely intact.”

But much of that land also holds valuable natural resources, and Myers says climate change has complicated the task of balancing conservation and development because warming has melted enough sea ice to open up access to those resources.

“Our sea routes – they’re opening, with the changes in sea ice,” he said, “and that’s putting some significant new demands, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of stressors, and in terms of a need to monitor and understand the environment.”

Myers says despite today’s low prices, demand for oil and gas in the coming years will increase, and that and other resources in the circumpolar north will draw industry here.

“A huge part of the undiscovered resource endowment left in the world sits in the Arctic,” he said. “And of that, about 27 percent of that sits in Alaska.”

International law professor Betsy Baker says much work needs to be done to enable development of those resources, including infrastructure such as deep-water ports and further surveys of the Arctic Ocean floor. Meanwhile, Baker says managers and leaders must carefully plan to achieve a balance between conservation and development.

“We still have a chance to get it better up here, to get it right,” she said.

Baker, who sat in on the Arctic-policy forum, says projects like the Red Dog zinc mine in northwestern Alaska demonstrate the economic benefits of a well-managed resource-development operation that also protects the ecosystem in which the mine operates.

Fisheries researchers are investigating why pink salmon, a staple of Southeast Alaska’s commercial fisheries, seem to be growing bigger every year while other, longer-lived salmon species are getting smaller in size.

“These pink salmon that we got in early this year are some of the largest I’ve seen in quite a long time,” said John Joyce, fisheries research biologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute, in an interview last summer.

As Auke Creek flowed over rocks and returning salmon lingered in a nearby pool, Joyce explained how the creek’s weir provided more than 35 years of continuous data that is valuable for climate change research.

“We had a real warm event,” said Joyce. “It would be logical to assume that it’s creating a pretty good growth regime for these fish and we’re seeing evidence of that with these fish coming back.”

Joyce said the adult pink salmon are returning earlier every summer, a total of two weeks earlier since counting started. Pinks returning in 2015 also came back in big numbers in the northern part of Southeast Alaska, and they’re bigger than usual. For just the Panhandle, pink salmon harvested in 2015 were 12 percent heavier than the previous year.

During the Salmon Ocean Ecology Meeting held in Juneau in March, research biologists presented their findings suggesting pink salmon runs may be affecting the growth and abundance of other salmon species in the north Pacific.

Leon Shaul, coho research project leader for Southeast Alaska for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said they’ve noticed a trend develop in the Gulf of Alaska and Southeast Alaska over the last several decades. Older chinook and coho are getting smaller while young reds and pinks are getting bigger.

“The size of salmon the region have shown a pattern of convergence with everything that was smaller 30, 35 years ago trending larger and the larger fish trending smaller,” Shaul said.

Shaul wonders if the salmon’s forage base is being altered by the recent swings in water temperature. When ocean temperatures are cool, young pink salmon usually grow by feeding on the bigger and fattier zooplankton. It just so happens that squid like zooplankton, too.

“Pink salmon may be changing the whole forage base similar to the phenomenon of fishing down the marine food web or taking out the squid which is a direct competitor with them for zooplankton,” Shaul said. “Pink salmon is an intraguild predator that both eats its competitor and eats the prey of its competitor.”

It’s possible that when pink salmon bulk up by consuming squid, they’re also depriving offshore coho and chinook of their primary food source.

Shaul acknowledges they still haven’t pinned down whether young pinks are benefiting from more zooplankton because those older pinks are scooping up all the squid. And since less fatty zooplankton are prevalent during warm conditions, they’re not sure how pinks are still getting bigger with the recent warm water Blob in the northeast Pacific.

“If it’s driven by climate, then you would expect – going back into a warm period – that they would’ve been smaller in size. And, yet, pink salmon have continued to grow larger in 2015,” Shaul said. “And, so they’ve followed this recent trend which suggests that there’s something more than just the change in climate. That there is plenty of food out there and somehow they are benefiting.”

Elsewhere in the north Pacific, researchers have already documented what they believe is one salmon species possibly crowding out another.

During the Juneau conference, Greg Ruggerone of Seattle-based Natural Resources Consultants reviewed earlier research on how eastern Kamchatka pink salmon runs may be affecting Bristol Bay red salmon abundance. Pinks usually take two years to mature while reds usually take three years. Since both stocks intermingle in the north Pacific, huge pink runs compete for food with the young reds during their second year at sea.

“Basically, what you see is a very strong alternating year pattern,” Ruggerone said. “Pink salmon are about 40 percent more abundant in odd numbered years. When you see lots of pink salmon, you see the reduction in growth (in red salmon). It’s fairly consistent over time.”

As well as less growth for red salmon, Ruggerone said there are fewer of them in alternating years.

With warming ocean temperatures, the risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning can linger all year-round, and Alaska has only one Food and Drug Administration certified laboratory to test shellfish. There are no labs to protect those digging for their dinner, but that may soon change.

At the end of the month, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska will open an environmental research laboratory and – with all hope – take a bite out of the testing market.

This time last year, the room in the corner of Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Resource Protection Department was bare. And now, it’s got a fume hood, test tubes in every color, and a $49,000 machine.

Michael Jamros is the lab’s new manager. And the “robot” in question is a plate reader, one of several machines that can analyze toxins in shellfish. After the shellfish arrive, Jamros shucks all the meat out and puts it in a blender to homogenize it. He then extracts the toxins and removes the solids using a centrifuge.

Using a pipette, Jamros will dispense the solution in 96 tiny wells on one plastic plate. Imagine filling a tray with batter for 96 muffins, but instead of putting it in an oven, he feeds it into a plate reader.

Jamros is running an ELISA assay, measuring the toxicity of each well. The results appear on his laptop. “From here we have our data that we can calculate from and figure out how much toxin is in our samples,” he said.

You hear that? Data. Cold, hard numbers that take the guesswork out of eating butter clams or blue mussels. In Southeast, there’s never been a way for subsistence harvesters to assess the risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning or measure harmful algal blooms, or HABs, which load shellfish with toxins until now.

Chris Whitehead is STA’s environmental program manager and the driving force behind the lab, set to open in May. “Native people have been harvesting clams for thousands of year. A lot of the elders I talk to don’t do it anymore because they just don’t know. So, to be able to bring that back and be able to utilize that resource is huge,” Whitehead said.

When he came to Sitka in 2013, Whitehead wanted to create a warning system for clam diggers, like in Washington state. “The Washington Department of Health has a great website so you can see what beaches are open or closed. And when I got to Alaska there wasn’t anything.”

Whitehead called up Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which tests all commercial shellfish for the state. He discovered, however, there would be a time lag to ship shellfish to Anchorage and await results. “The turnaround time for the (DEC) data – to actually be usable for us and to prevent human health issues – wasn’t going to work,” he said.

Given this, Whitehead decided to pursue a local solution by creating his own marine biotoxin program right here in Southeast. He locked in $1 million in grant funding for the next three years. He formed Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins (SEATT), a coalition of 13 other tribes in the region and organized trainings for them with state and federal agencies, like NOAA, to be “eyes in the water,” monitoring local beaches for toxic blooms.

“So those sites will be monitored at the expense of the tribe and the resources that the tribes have every other week. So every tide cycle pretty much,” Whitehead said.

Jerry Borchert was in Sitka to lead one of those trainings. Borchert coordinates marine biotoxin management for the state of Washington.

In speaking with KCAW, he said, “My first time here was a year ago in September. It was a smaller group. I think there were six tribes at the time and for a lot of these folks, this was brand-new to them. Looking at plankton, trying to identify what a harmful species looks like, how to record it, how to share this information, and it’s those same tribes in the beginning that are now the teachers and the program is expanding. This is amazing.”

With the new laboratory, subsistence harvesters can hopefully send their shellfish to Sitka and get test results back in one business day. Eventually, the lab hopes to run tests for commercial entities – like shellfish growers and processors.

But some hurdles remain. The lab needs the blessing of an alphabet soup of agencies, like the FDA, to become a full-fledged regulatory lab, on par with the one on Anchorage. Borchert said, “Long term stability is something I’m a little concerned with. The state regulatory folks are finally coming to these workshops and I’m hoping they can recognize what can happen.”

For his part, Whitehead is taking it one step at a time. The lab is running test samples all this month and sending their results to NOAA in Seattle, for verification. If those check out, the lab will begin accepting subsistence shellfish as early as May.

Fisheries researchers say the appearance of a warm water anomaly in the northeast Pacific Ocean likely added a new wrinkle into recent predictions of Alaska salmon runs that are used by commercial fishing industry for the upcoming season’s planning. Because of the variability of West Coast salmon populations, a simple cause and effect may be impossible to pin down.

Biologists admit they’re still not sure exactly how the warm water Blob is affecting salmon up and down the West Coast.

“The thing that we need to think about is that warm water in Alaska is really different than warm water in California,” said Brian Beckman, a research fishery biologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

“Warm water in California can be so warm that it is actually injuring the fish, whereas warm water in Alaska just means that it is abnormally different and maybe the ecosystem is different. But it’s still a comfortable place for fish to be,” said Beckman.

Beckman was one of the organizers of March’s Salmon Ocean Ecology Meeting in Juneau, which featured biologists and researchers from California to Alaska.

Because of differences in the life cycles and migration patterns of the five Pacific Ocean salmon species, Beckman said it’s impossible to immediately determine how The Blob is affecting salmon abundance, run timing, growth, forage habits and complicated predator-prey relationships.

“It’s really hard to talk about salmon runs all across the coast in any one single focus because they all kind of do different things,” Beckman said. “The Blob does not have one specific effect across all salmon stocks.”

Why would any of that information be important? The $414 million answer to that question comes from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That’s the dock price paid for all salmon harvested last year. In addition, the McDowell Group of Juneau says Alaska’s salmon fisheries generate $845 million in income for 18,400 direct jobs.

Joe Orsi, fisheries research biologist at NOAA’s Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute at Auke Bay, explained why they research salmon biology, and do modeling or run simulations to predict Alaska salmon abundance, run timing and even size of the fish.

“Basically, you confront the stakeholders and say this is what we think is going to happen, and you interact with the industry people,” said Orsi. “This is when the decisions are made.”

They include decisions by state fisheries managers who plan the timing and length of the openings, the processors which dispatch tenders and hire outside help to work in the plants, and the fisherman who must budget his or her expenses and figure out how many deckhands to hire.

Orsi said they’re not sure if it was The Blob’s presence in the northeast Pacific that upended their modeling for last year’s salmon runs. Overall, last year’s pink harvest in Southeast Alaska fell well short of predictions with runs in the southern part of the Panhandle doing poorly.

Another big question is whether El Niño or equatorial warming has encouraged other species to wander north.

“Of course, we have unknown ecological impacts of the subtropical fish species that were occurring in the Gulf of Alaska: tuna, sunfish, thresher sharks,” Orsi said. “We don’t know if there’s going to be increased competition or predation as a result of those.”

In order to get a better handle on what is happening, researchers have created a coast wide database that is intended to show how The Blob is affecting various salmon runs. Bryan Burke, research fishery biologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, helped design it.

“This could be a good way to summarize when and where did The Blob impact salmon,” Burke said. “The fact is that we don’t know yet because a lot of the salmon that were in The Blob have not returned yet.”

Some of those fish that have not returned yet are mature Copper River reds. Those fish are usually harvested during the very first commercial fishery of the year. It could kick off as soon as mid-May.

For millions of Americans, climate change is making the weather nicer. That’s the conclusion of a new study that points out winters are getting quite a bit milder, while summers aren’t getting that much worse.

The study’s authors say the mild temperatures might be one reason some people aren’t so worried about climate change.

For most of the U.S., the hottest temperatures in July haven’t gone up much — scientific consensus is about half a degree over the past 40 years. Same for sticky humidity — not much change, if any.

But January’s highest temperatures have warmed up on average more than 4 degrees. Patrick Egan at New York University says for lots of people, that means weather many people view as “pleasant.”

“I live here in New York City, and you’ve got shirtless beach volleyball games taking place on Christmas Eve in Central Park,” Egan says. “And on Christmas Day we had a cookout. We were all wearing shorts, and … it was bizarre and it was unusual. It was no Currier & Ives Christmas, but it was also pleasant.”

As they might say in New York, you got a problem with Santa in shorts?

Egan is a political scientist who has studied why people live where they do, but the temperature numbers come from climate science. What Egan and colleague Megan Mullin at Duke University have done is calculate that about 80 percent of Americans live in places where winters are warming faster than summers. “You know, for many Americans,” Egan says, “they’re not experiencing really hot Julys as much as they are experiencing really warm winters. That’s really the crux of this study.”

Egan notes that research on where people choose to live shows that they often put a premium on warmer winters. So he says it’s fair to conclude that lots of people are enjoying the change in the weather — unless they’re skiers or snowboarders, perhaps. Egan and Mullin say that might be one reason many people aren’t so worried about climate change.

Writing in the journal Nature, Egan says public attitudes may change quickly when summer temperature increases start increasing faster, which scientists say will happen in several decades. How fast depends on whether and by how much the world cuts back on emissions of greenhouse gases.

In the meantime, though, rapidly warming winters do pose all sorts of problems for plants and animals that can’t adapt as readily as people can. And while the U.S. hasn’t been hit too hard by heat waves, other parts of the world have, some of which are seeing summer maximum temperatures rise quickly.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The U.S. Coast Guard is gearing up for a busy summer in the Arctic.

In preparation for the flagship voyage of the Crystal Serenity, a thousand passenger cruise ship set to sail through the Northwest Passage this summer, the Coast Guard has been hosting search and rescue drills, tabletop exercises, and meeting with communities along Alaska’s coast.

A contingent of Coast Guard officials visited Nome Monday. Rear Admiral Dan Abel led yesterday’s meeting at Old St. Joe’s community hall.

“Clearly Nome is a hub and we need to make sure we enfranchise what’s important to Nome with a plan,” Abel said.

The Coast Guard contingent heard comments from Nome’s Mayor Richard Beneville, City Manager Tom Moran, along with business and nonprofit representatives.

Both sides agreed that activity in the Arctic isn’t slowing down.

“What is happening here in the far north is the opening of the Arctic,” said Mayor Beneville. He and others at the meeting continually referred to the Arctic as a ‘new ocean.’

Nome and others along Alaska’s coast will see a bump in visitors and summer revenue from ships like the Crystal Serenity, but there is concern about the region’s ability to deal with a potential disaster at sea.

Tom Vayden chairs the Local Emergency Planning Committee.

“I think it’s very important that the major players remember that Nome is here with a lot of resources and that we can be on the ground first and help,” Vayden said.

He urged better communication between the Coast Guard and coastal communities like Nome.

The Coast Guard and the Department of Defense are scheduled to host the Arctic Chinook Drill in late August, just days after the Crystal Serenity passes through Nome’s port.