Climate Change

About 70 people — and Frostpaw the Polar Bear — gathered in the parking lot of the Embassy Suites hotel in Midtown Anchorage on Tuesday evening, holding signs that read “Keep it in the ground” and “Chill the drills.”

Inside, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, was holding one of 10 public meetings around the state to get input on potential offshore lease sales. The agency wants the public to weigh in on plans for offshore drilling over the next five years. The tentative proposal would allow lease sales in the Arctic Ocean and Cook Inlet.

That plan has drawn opposition from environmentalists, who see their fight as part of a worldwide effort to halt climate change. The bureau’s plan covers the years 2017-2022, and tentatively includes three lease sales in Alaska: in Cook Inlet, and in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

BOEM’s draft environmental impact statement looks at effects on local communities, infrastructure, subsistence, marine mammals and the potential for oil spills.

The one issue it doesn’t address is the one critics are most concerned about.

“We don’t say, if this much oil, for example, is taken out of the ground, it will have this much effect on climate change,” said Jennifer Bosyk a marine biologist with the Bureau. Bosyk said that kind of discussion is left to policymakers.

But Eric Grafe, a staff attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice, called that a major omission.

To reach the climate goals agreed to in Paris last year, he said, the world can’t burn much of the oil that’s already been discovered – let alone any new oil.

“If we burn all the oil we know about, the glass is already overflowing — and we’re pouring more water into the glass,” Grafe said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

There has been no offshore lease sale in Alaska since 2008. The Department of the Interior canceled sales planned for the current cycle after Shell pulled out of the Arctic last September, citing the company’s disappointing results and a lack of other industry interest.

BOEM’s new commenting process led to a somewhat surreal scene at the Embassy Suites. Instead of accepting verbal comments in a town hall-style event, the agency set up stations in a conference room, where members of the public could speak with experts and then record written comments in laptops.

Sergio Acuna came to support more offshore drilling. Acuna works in pipeline maintenance. Like many people in the room, he wore a bright orange sweatshirt with the logo for the Laborers’ International Union of North America, Local 341.

“We, the laborers, we’re the ones who care for our beloved trans-Alaska pipeline,” he said.

Acuna said he thought the protest was great. But at the end of the day, he said, a lot of jobs depend on how much oil is flowing through that pipeline.

“I understand their point of view,” Acuna said. But, he added with a laugh, “My only question for them will be, like, what do they do for work? Because, if there’s no more oil in Alaska, I may have to come up to them and ask them for work.”

BOEM is accepting public comment on its draft environmental impact statement through May 2.

A camp constructed by the U.S. Navy on a sea ice floe in the Arctic was evacuated last week in an early closure that coincides with a record low sea ice extent in the Arctic.

Located about 200 miles off the coast of Prudhoe Bay, the camp was host to American sailors and scientists from the around the world.

The Navy has held its Ice Exercise, or ICEX for short, to test military readiness and conduct scientific research in the far north every few years since 1960.

Commander Tommy Crosby is the public affairs officer for the Navy’s submarine forces.

“The camp itself is a temporary camp that is built on an ice floe that is moving,” explained Crosby. “With currents and wind direction and ice rubbing up against each other and moving, cracks do form and refreeze.”

The Navy’s exercise was scheduled to wrap up at the end of this week, but Crosby said changes in sea ice caused the camp to close early.

“We had a crack that got close to camp,” Crosby said, so “for the safety of everyone … we demobilize(d) a little early.”

The crack shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Last week, the National Snow & Ice Data Center reported the lowest maximum sea ice extent in the Arctic in satellite history.

Ted Scambos is the NSIDC’s lead scientist. He says warmer than normal temperatures in the region led to the record low.

“It was unusually warm near the North Pole, up to 6 degrees centigrade,” Scambos explained. “When you’re averaging, over three months, something like an 11 or 12 degree above average mean temperature, (it’s) a huge deal.”

Scambos said the warmer temperatures didn’t just affect the sea ice extent.

“Not only did the ice not spread out very far from the Arctic Ocean and out into the Bering (Sea) and North Atlantic, but it’s also probably thinner than it has been in decades past,” explained Scambos.

The U.S. Navy should expect thinner ice conditions. This year’s early closure mirrors what happened two years ago almost to the day, when rapidly changing sea ice forced them to pack up ahead of schedule.

The camp’s more than 200 participants were evacuated safely. The two submarines involved in ICEX will continue their operations under the thinning Arctic sea ice through early April.

Scientists say warm winter weather around the circumpolar north has led to another record-setting year of decreasing sea-ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean. The extent of sea ice formed over this past winter fell short of the previous record-low extent set last year.

National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze struggled for words a few weeks ago to describe the warmest of last winter’s weather.

“It was just crazy warm,” he said. “I’ve never really seen anything like it.”

Scientists with the center again cited the weird weather Monday, when they announced the amount of sea ice that formed over the winter in the Arctic Ocean was for a second year far below average – the average based on when the center began satellite monitoring sea ice in 1981.

“You know, if I look at December, January, February average air temperatures, over the poles they’re almost 12 degrees Celsius above normal,” says Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist with the center.

Twelve degrees Celsius equals about 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That’s a huge anomaly in the temperatures for the Arctic,” she said.

Stroeve says some of that warmth came from El Nino and “The Blob” – the mass of warm-water that parked in the North Pacific late last year.

She says those phenomena won’t be present next year, so it seems unlikely the sea-ice extent at the end of next winter will set another record. But she says the overall trend is clear.

“The long-term warming from increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere – all climate models that we’re going to continue to lose the sea ice,” Stroeve said.

The Denver-based National Snow and Ice Data Center says sea-ice extended an average of 5.6 million square miles over the Arctic Ocean as of Thursday. That’s about 5,000 square miles less than last year’s maximum sea-ice extent.

Serreze says that suggests the sea-ice minimum, recorded at the end of summer, may also break that record, set in 2012.

“Where it sits in the record books depends on the summer weather pattern,” he said. “And we just can’t predict that.”

The center will issue its report on the minimum sea-ice extent in September.

If you thought Alaska was pretty warm and dry this winter, you were right. In fact, it could come close to setting a record.

The latest figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information show it may be the second warmest winter since they started keeping Alaska temperature records 90 years ago.

For the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Island and the north Gulf Coast, the winter of 2015-16 was the absolute warmest. For other areas from Northwest Alaska down to the Southeast Panhandle, it was within the top five warmest winters.

Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, points to the lowest statewide winter temperature as an example of how unusual and how persistent the warmth has been in Alaska. The lowest recorded temperature this winter in the state was minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit. That was in Arctic Village around Christmas.

“If this holds up, this would be by far the warmest Alaska minimum temperature for the whole winter,” Thoman said. “In the last century, the warmest has been 53 below.”

Thoman said for the entire state, winter temperatures were significantly above normal for 61 days out of the winter’s 91 days. Statistically speaking, that’s twice as many as you’d expect.

Since the 1970s, Thoman said Arctic winter temperatures have been increasing about 1.4 degrees Celsius a decade.

It was also a fairly dry December through January throughout much of the Interior and the northern part of the state. Exceptions included Southcentral, the Gulf of Alaska coast and northern Southeast which were all slightly wetter than normal.

“Persistent Southeast winds aloft kept bringing storm after storm into the western Gulf Coast for months. … Most of that moisture gets wrung out” as storm systems cross into the rugged terrain of Alaska, Thoman said.  “So, this pattern — not surprising at all given the predominant weather pattern we’ve had for months.”

Thoman said the seasonal maximum sea ice extent in the Bering Sea is shaping up to be the lowest since 1979.

The overall Alaska snowpack is better than last year, but winter snowfall in areas like Anchorage was still below normal.

“Similarly in Juneau, running actually near normal right up to New Year’s, but it’s collapsed since then,” said Thoman. “Only 2 inches of snow since the new year in Juneau. The lowest of record for New Year’s to now.”

The Blob, El Niño and climate change

So, what’s the cause of the warmer winter temperatures and less precipitation in many Alaska regions this winter?

Thoman said it’s a combination of the warm water sea surface temperature anomaly in the northeast Pacific Ocean known as The Blob and one of the strongest instances of El Niño, or equatorial ocean warming. Both events can affect the southern or eastern portion of the state. Low ice coverage in the Bering Sea can also affect the western Alaska climate.

“At this point, the Arctic is clearly leading the rest of world in overall climate change. The overall warming is greater,” said John Walsh, chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Walsh is co-author of an extensive report just released by the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed recent research of extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts and heavy precipitation and whether such events could be attributed to climate change.

Walsh said climate change may be enhancing the variability of unusual weather events and shifting the extremes.

“There have been some studies that have shown that the temperature extremes are changing as you would expect. There are a lot more record highs and a lot fewer record low temperatures,” Walsh said. “Sort of a mixed bag of conclusions about precipitation.”

But aside from the shift to more extreme temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic, Walsh said there’s not yet a smoking gun, nothing that stands out when linking recent events to climate change. At least, not yet. Walsh suggests that all it takes is for someone to do the research.

“We don’t really have anything to point to in the Arctic that stands out in terms of extreme events. Now, we do say that that’s partly because not too many studies have been done on extreme events in the Arctic. So, we’re not ruling out some gold nuggets in there from the Arctic. But, so far, they have not really surfaced in the scientific literature.”

Spring and summer

What could all of this mean for Alaska this spring and summer?

Thoman expects warmer than average temperatures across Alaska and northern Canada.

“Given the state of the snowpack, which is in the Interior overall pretty near normal, at this point we would probably favor an earlier than average breakup and so a reduced, but not zero chance, of significant ice jam flooding,” Thoman said.

Thoman said a low winter snowfall could add to the wildfire danger this summer, although this winter’s snowpack was still better than the previous year’s snowpack. He expects slightly above normal precipitation, which may be good as long as it doesn’t come with thunderstorms that ignite wildfires.

Work began early this year on protecting the highway that serves Alaska’s North Slope oilfields from a repeat of last year’s flooding.

“In December, we started to see overflow on the Dalton Highway near the same area where we had the aufeis and overflow and flooding last year,” says Meadow Bailey, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Transportation. Aufeis is a type of ice that forms into piles of sheets, usually caused by overflowing rivers.

Bailey says workers picked up where they left off last fall on projects to prevent floodwaters from the Sagavanirktok River from washing out the northernmost stretch of the Dalton Highway. Sag River flooding closed the highway several times last year, severing the lifeline to the giant Prudhoe Bay complex.

“We knew that similar conditions were developing,” she said, “and so we took some proactive measures.”

Bailey says workers built the roadbed up to about 10 feet above the surrounding tundra and are digging 5-foot-deep trenches in ice near the highway to divert floodwaters back into the riverbed.

“What we’re trying to do is build an infrastructure that will withstand whatever conditions are present,” she said.

Observers say they’ve never seen the Sag River flood like that. Bailey says there’s only about 50 years of historical climatological data for the area, so it’s hard to determine whether the flooding is unusual and whether it’ll occur again – perhaps, like last year, during spring breakup.

“What we don’t know is what breakup will look like. Based on last year, it was really the most extreme situation that we could have imagined,” Bailey said.

Experts suspect unusually warm winter weather contributed to the flooding. Warmer weather in recent years has presented many new challenges to transportation engineers in the far north, says Billy Conner, who directs the Alaska University Transportation Center at UAF’s Institute of Northern Engineering.

“We’re seeing the possibility of rainstorms in the middle of January – (that) didn’t use to happen,” Conner said. “That throws us in the transportation world into a real tizzy, because we’re not used to dealing with that.”

Conner says climate change probably accounts for some unusual weather. And he says it probably indirectly contributes to roadway damage, for example by creating conditions that increase wildfires, which accelerate permafrost thawing and cause the subgrade of nearby roadways to settle and buckle.

But Conner says oftentimes simply building a roadway creates conditions that cause problems, for example clearing vegetation or altering drainage by building up a roadbed

Scientists, policy makers and environmental enthusiasts from around the world gathered last week in Fairbanks for Arctic Science Summit.

Climate change was a popular topic during the summit, particularly the long-term effects and how that impacts weather patterns down south. Warming temperatures have also limited subsistence hunting and fishing for those who depend the most on the resources.

KTOO’s Matt Miller was at the summit, which included a tour of a permafrost tunnel — a hole cut inside a layer of permafrost. Prehistoric fossils are sometimes found in the frozen ground below.

Hear more about the summit here: