Climate Change

At the U.N. climate summit in Paris, the U.S. has a big footprint. Cabinet officials scurry from meeting to meeting, trying to get a binding deal that would help some 200 countries slow the planet’s warming. Yet in some ways, the United States is an outlier.

“Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously,” President Obama said during his visit to Paris at the start of the summit. “They think it’s a really big problem.”

As the president acknowledged, he leads one of the few advanced democracies in the world where climate change is still the subject of political debate.

“You travel around Europe, and you talk to leaders of governments and the opposition, and they’re arguing about a whole bunch of things. One thing they’re not arguing about is whether the science of climate change is real and whether we have to do something about it,” he said.

As the summit began, House Republicans in Washington were debating a bill to gut the Obama administration’s clean energy plan.

“These EPA rules affect jobs, and they affect the amount of money in the pockets of moms and dads all across this great country,” said South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan.

This is not just small-ball domestic politics that the rest of the world ignores. The debate in Washington shapes the perception of the United States in Paris. Some countries at the summit accuse the U.S. — which, in the 20th century, has emitted more carbon than any other — of trying to have it both ways: emitting more carbon per capita than almost any other country, while wagging fingers at the rest of the world.

Chandra Bhushan is with the Indian delegation in Paris. He gave a long presentation comparing the U.S. to India.

“If all the U.S. power plants were considered a country, it would have been the third largest polluter of greenhouse gases in the world,” he noted.

Changing Perceptions Of U.S.

Outside of the main complex where negotiations are taking place, an area called “Climate Generations” provides a gathering place for environmental groups, civil society organizations, activists, and others from around the world.

There are indigenous tribes and bicycle-powered computer chargers, groups singing hymns and people waving placards. French interpreter Claudine Pierson says she was “surprised to see how many Americans are around.”

And how are they perceived?

“Like polluters, I guess,” she says.

Everyone is aware that Congress is fighting Obama on carbon emissions, Pierson says, “because it was all over the newspapers.”

Many people share her view of the U.S.

Mamadou Mboudji is an an environmental advocate from Senegal.

“I perceived the Americans as a country that does not respect the others’ opinions,” Mboudji says.

Hanging over all of this is the fact that the U.S. has walked away from global climate deals before — most notably, the landmark 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Still, many people at the summit note a big change since Obama took office. They say the U.S. is no longer seen as a spoiler in these talks.

“The relationship has never been this close, open and transparent,” says Tony de Brum, the foreign minister for the Marshall Islands. “In all my years working with the U.S. government, I’ve never felt them more a real part of the effort to resolve the problem.”

U.S. Faces A Political ‘Complexity’

The question now is whether the hot political debate in Washington is tying the hands of American negotiators in Paris. U.S. Energy Secretary Earnest Moniz says it isn’t.

“The programs that have been put forward will be executed,” he said in an interview this week in Paris. “They are based on existing authorities, whether it is efficiency standards for vehicles or the clean power plan for power plants.”

Yet as Republicans threaten to shut down the federal government if the U.S. delegation in Paris commits to paying too much money to developing countries to deal with the impacts of climate change, Moniz acknowledges that “Certainly, certain issues require Congressional action.”

“I think the phrases that you hear here are that everybody understands that the American delegation is negotiating in good faith,” says Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s special envoy for climate change.

People understand that U.S. climate politics can be complicated, she says.

“And that is a complexity that everybody understands the U.S. will have to work its way through,” says Kyte.

People outside the United States are a bit “perplexed” by this, Kyte adds. But, it’s not the first time the rest of the world has found the U.S. perplexing.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

During the summer, toxic algae whip through marine currents in Southeast and are consumed by filter-feeding bivalves, like mussels. One such algae is an armored dinoflagellate called Alexandrium.

Alexandrium was common only in summer months previously, but now may be present in the winter, too.

“Blue mussels are kind of like the pigs of the sea. They never stop feeding,” said Chris Whitehead, environmental program manager of the Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins partnership.

Blue mussels are one entry point for Alexandrium to work its way up the food chain. The algae cause paralytic shellfish poisoning, affecting animals that eat blue mussels, like Dungeness crabs and humans.

And another harmful algae, Pseudo-nitzschia, is circulating in the Pacific too.

From California to Washington, commercial Dungeness crab fisheries were closed or delayed this fall because of the Pseudo-nitzschia bloom. Some species of the algae produce domoic acid, a neurotoxin.

The Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins partnership and University of Alaska Fairbanks oceanographer Liz Tobin have created a program to test for blooms and toxicity in Southeast.

September SEATT data from Juneau indicates Pseudo-nitzschia was present at Amalga Harbor, Auke Bay, Eagle Beach and Point Louisa. According to Tobin, the presence of Pseudo-nitzschia has been documented in Southeast but there is no evidence of the harmful domoic acid.

Whitehead, with the tribal partnership, said the Pseudo-nitzschia found in Southeast could be a different, nontoxic species than the one documented down south.

Moving up the coast, “somewhere in Canada everything changed,” he said. “As soon as it left the West Coast of Washington and moved into British Columbia something switched.”

At the Juneau testing sites monitored this September, Alexandrium was present at all locations except Eagle Beach, although there was no bloom.

In the past, it was considered safe in Southeast to consume bivalves harvested from September through April, because Alexandrium was uncommon. But there was a case of PSP documented last December in Juneau, according to Whitehead.

While the monitoring project for toxic algae is in its infancy, researchers believe future studies will detect blooms before they become harmful to people. Monitoring plans include testing bivalves and dungees for the toxins.

A recent study from Haines found the guts of Dungeness crab tested higher for PSP than Food and Drug Administration limits for human consumption. While most people don’t eat the guts, the results may be worrisome for crab consumers.

Christine Woll fishes for dungees by kayak from North Douglas. She drops a collapsible pot each spring and paddles to it weekly throughout the summer to retrieve her catch. She guts each crab and keeps the meat only.

Woll used to make crab stock out of the leftover carapace, but she has stopped.

“If there are extra parts of the crab left there on the shell that might be toxic, that would be a place that I might get in trouble,” she said.

According to oceanographer Tobin, as far as research can tell, only consumption of infected dungee guts, not the meat, is toxic for human consumption when it comes to PSP.

But domoic acid accumulates in crab meat.

Tobin said a few environmental factors are responsible for prolific algae blooms.

“Temperature seems to be a driving factor, but considering that this year we had anonymously high sea surface temperatures in the Juneau area, and we didn’t see a bloom (of Alexandria), that indicates that it’s not the only contributing factor,” she said.

Wind speeds, freshwater runoff and nutrient loading could also affect the blooms.

An unusual mortality event of 18 endangered whales near Kodiak has raised concerns toxic algae could be harming whales, too.

All of these questions call for further monitoring by the tribal partnership.

The group’s new biotoxin lab in Sitka will take a leap forward in early detection of harmful blooms. The monitoring program could allow documentation of toxins before they work through the food chain from mussels to crabs and humans.

As world leaders discuss climate change in Paris this week, Juneau residents get a chance Thursday night to explore what climate change means on a local level.

In “A Pain in the Crevasse,” performers such as Juneau playwright Frank Katasse and assemblymember Maria Gladziszewski will read six short plays on climate change at the Mendenhall Glacier pavilion.

The free event is being organized by Perseverance Theatre and University of Alaska Southeast.

Perseverance Theatre’s Shona Osterhout said the plays will provide an interesting angle on a serious issue.

“These are all plays that have been written all over the world, but you can really take it in and have your own thoughts about it,” Osterhout said. “I think art is really great to talk about issues like these.”

The theater event is one of many taking place around the world through the initiative Climate Change Theatre Action. Short plays on climate change are being performed in cities throughout the U.S. and in more than 20 countries.

One of Thursday night’s plays is called, “An Average Guy Thinking Thoughts on Global Warming.”

“You get an average guy who doesn’t know a lot and he’s being honest and he’s showing himself to the audience for what he is and it’s hilarious and at the same time, it’s very poignant and you take something away after you read it,” said UAS student Bryan Crowder.

Following the six short play readings, the audience is invited to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center for a panel discussion with glaciologists and local climate change experts. Panelists include UAS professors Eran Hood and Cathy Connor, UAS assistant professor Glenn Wright and Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center Director John Neary.

“A Pain in the Crevasse” begins at 7 p.m. Thursday.

“I actually think we’re going to solve this thing.”

That’s what President Obama said in a news conference just before he left a United Nations summit on climate change.

“Climate change is a massive problem,” Obama said. “It is a generational problem. It’s a problem that by definition is just about the hardest thing for an political system to absorb, because the effects are gradual, they’re diffused. And yet despite all that… I’m optimistic. I think we’re going to solve it.”

Just a few years ago, Obama said, nobody would have predicted that more than 150 leaders would come to Paris holding plans to cut greenhouse emissions.

“All of this will be hard,” Obama said. “Getting 200 nations to agree on anything is hard… but I’m convinced that we’re going to get big things done here.”

Obama leaves the conference but his deputies will remain in Paris in an effort to craft a global, legally binding agreement intended to curb climate change. The big goal: To keep the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees celsius.

At the moment, if you add up all the commitments on the table at the summit and assume that they would be met, the temperature would still rise by 2.7 degrees, Obama said.

“That’s too high,” Obama said. But “what we expect is that we’ll hit these targets faster than expected and … we could pick up the pace.”

Obama said that is not just “foolish optimism” but an expectation based on past experience. The United States, for example, was able to meet its goals faster than expected.

“The key here is to set up the structure so we’re sending signals all around the world that says this is happening and we’re not turning around,” Obama said.

Obama touched on a whole host of other issues during conference. Here are a couple of highlights:

— Obama says that the fact that the peace process for Syria is progressing in Vienna is a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin “realizes there is not going to a military solution to the situation in Syria.”

Eventually, Obama said, he expects the Russians to shift their focus in Syria from trying to prop up the regime of Bashar Assad to fighting the Islamic State.

“I think Mr. Putin understands that for him to get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he is looking for,” Obama said.

In other words, Obama said, both the U.S. and Russia agree that the only lasting solution in Syria will be political.

“Where we continue to have an ongoing difference is not in the need for a political settlement, it’s whether Assad can continue to serve as president as that transition goes on,” Obama said.

Russia believes Assad should play a role and Obama believes that “it is impossible for Mr. Assad to bring that country together.”

— On the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, Obama said Congress should act. Just as the country takes huge, costly steps to fight terrorism, they have to take steps to reduce gun homicides.

“At the end of the day, Congress, states, local governments are going to have to act in order to make sure that were are preventing people who are deranged or have violent tendencies” from getting weapons that magnify the damage that they can do, Obama said.

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Earlier in the day, President Obama urged Turkey and Russia to ease tensions by focusing on a common enemy: the Islamic State.

The relationship between the two countries has been frayed since Turkey downed a Russian jet in November. Turkey has refused to apologize, saying the Russian war plane crossed over into Turkish airspace. Russia has implemented a series of sanctions.

Reuters reports that Obama said that the United States supported Turkey’s right to defend its airspace, but he also urged the two countries to “de-escalate tensions.”

“We all have a common enemy. That is ISIL,” Obama said using an acronym for the Islamic State, according to the AP. “I want to make sure that we focus on that threat.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The Arctic is on the front lines of climate change. Alaska is warming at twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Some of the most visible impacts are in Native communities located on barrier islands in Northwest Alaska. These communities are facing a future without the ice that used to protect them from storms that threatened to wipe them away. A group called Alaska Common Ground hosted an all-day forum in Anchorage over the weekend to answer the question, “What are we doing about it?”

The answer: not much, yet.

Studies recommended relocating villages like Newtok, Kivalina and Shishmaref. But more than 10 years later they are still there, with waves getting higher and storms getting stronger. Part of the reason is that emergency programs don’t finance this kind of ongoing situation and erosion.

That’s left people like Mike Black with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium trying to engineer patches to keep communities functioning as the ground turns to jelly or melts out from under them.

One of the solutions is to cool the foundations. That used to be done with passive systems developed for the pipeline, which enables cold air from the surface to sink down into the ground to keep the permafrost frozen. Now that air is too warm to do the job and engineers are forced to use energy to refrigerate the foundations.

“Refrigeration can work in the summertime extremely well when you’re using solar panels because we have constant sun. So in that way it’s kind of an elegant solution. But the reality is you can only protect some relatively limited spots the rest of the community often times will have to suffer from the melting of that permafrost,” Black said.

To cope with heaving ground, engineers are also abandoning metal pipes for flexible plastic ones to take water and sewage away from village homes. Black sees this as a stopgap measure. He and others want to design more mobile structures and systems that will allow small Alaska communities to move as the water rises and ground sinks in the warming Arctic.

One solution to slow the warming is to reduce methane and carbon dioxide emissions. That’s where taxing carbon comes in making oil and other fossil fuels more expensive to use. Many west coast governments are working to reduce emissions and have imposed various kinds of carbon taxes. Alaska remains a holdout.

Former Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Bill Ross says Alaska needs to adopt some type of emissions tax because it will be good for the economy as well as the planet. He points to the economic impact of the places that have adopted carbon taxes.

“The number of green jobs is growing twice as fast as regular jobs in those economies. So even though they are moving aggressively to reduce carbon emission their economies are thriving compared to anyone else that is their peers,” Ross said.

He suggests using the Permanent Fund to pave the transition away from oil. A lot would need to change in the state to make that happen… including Alaskans’ attitudes toward taxes. But even simple things remain undone… like removing regulations that make it hard for state departments to borrow money to make buildings tighter and more energy efficient.

Larry Merculieff with the Alaska Native Science Commission says there is no time to waste. Native elders he works with say there’s no climate change, but instead a climate crisis. They say everything will warm up much faster than anyone predicts and that people need to act now.

“The elders certainly are unanimous about this in all the regions and I’m talking about not just older people. I’m talking about elders who are tradition bearers and have wisdom recognized by the community,” Merculieff said.

To underscore the magnitude of change that needs to be made, Merculieff quoted Albert Einstein, who said you can’t solve the problems that face humanity with the same consciousness that created those problems.

While their average size is decreasing and 500-pounders are rare today, new research suggests Pacific halibut may adapt favorably to increased ocean temperatures.

Greenland halibut may not be so lucky.

Dr. Cathleen Vestfals, Oregon State University, presented her Ph.D. research at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences Juneau Fisheries Seminar recently.

Vestfals researched the life cycles of two different halibut species that reside in the Eastern Bering Sea: Pacific halibut and Greenland halibut. Both are large flatfish, have big mouths lined with sharp teeth and inhabit some of the same areas.

Pacific halibut get much larger than Greenland halibut do: 8 feet long compared to 4 feet. Pacific halibut are mottled green on top and white on their bottom-facing side. Greenland halibut are blackish purple on top, iridescent yellow-green on their underside.

And they may respond differently to climate change.

For her research, Vestfals compared the success of the two flatfish species in past warm and cold years.

Pacific halibut live from California, north through the Bering Sea and across the Pacific to Japan. Due to the extent of their southern range, Pacific halibut may continue to breed and disperse successfully if the ocean becomes a few degrees warmer.

“We would expect that they would do really well under warming conditions. Their habitat is likely going to expand under warming scenarios,” Vestfals said.

Greenland halibut, on the other hand, occupy only circumpolar waters. If the ocean warms by a few degrees, their cold water habitat may contract northward.  According to Vestfals, fisheries scientists already “have noticed a northward shift in species and changes in species assemblages in response to warming.”

So global warming could mean fewer Greenland halibut.

According to Vestfals, Pacific halibut “have a better chance than Greenland halibut would to make it.”

To follow flatfish, visit the Flatfish Fan Club Facebook page Vestfals made.