Climate Change

Kodiak Island residents have been reporting a large number of common murres washing up dead on local beaches.

The small black and white seabird usually establish breeding colonies on the Alaska Peninsula and in the Aleutian Islands.

Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge bird biologist Robin Corcoran said there are a few colonies on the island, but they’re less than 200 birds.

Corcoran said the refuge first started receiving reports in April and May about a handful of murre die-offs.

“They were showing up in places where people don’t normally see them. These are birds that are usually pretty far off shore,” she said. “We were getting all these reports of them being seen close to shore, foraging.”

Corcoran said more and more reports of dead birds started coming in August. She said some beaches have a large number of carcasses; there are over a hundred on the shores of Pasgashack.

She said she doesn’t know what could have caused the deaths, but it could be related to the birds’ inability to catch fish because they’re currently going through a flight feather molt stage.

“They spend about 70 days where they can’t fly, and so the die-off seems to coincide with this flight feather molt where they’re flightless and it might be that they don’t have the mobility to move to locations where they can find the forage fish,” Corcoran said,

Making things worse is that the birds are in a mostly unfamiliar territory. No one knows why they’re congregating on Kodiak Island. Corcoran hypothesizes that colony abandonment in other areas could be a factor.

Corcoran said 2012 the last year they saw a major bird die-off, that time of both murres and grebes in January through March. They collected carcasses and sent them to the National Wildlife Health center in Madison, Wisconsin, where they ruled starvation as the cause of death.

The carcasses they’ve sent this year have been emaciated. Corcoran said the murres’ plight it could be connected to recent whale die-offs.

“[We’re] looking into the possibility of harmful algal blooms. … It could be related to the warm ocean temperatures having an impact on forage fish populations,” she said.

Corcoran said refuge survey data indicates that several other bird species’ numbers have declined, like the pigeon guillemot and the marbled murrelet. She said she’s read about the die-off reaching Homer, as well as along the Alaskan Peninsula and into the Aleutians.

Thick fog enveloped the mountains as about 75 people from Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley attended workshops and panels on climate and faith.

“Any person who has a devotion to God in any form should think of the Earth as a creation that needs to be protected, needs to be cared for in a proper way,” said panelist Orthodox Bishop David Mahaffey. “So as a human being who knows and loves a creator God, I feel it’s my role to be involved in these things.”

The Bishop said he incorporates protection of the environment in his daily life and sacraments. For him and many of the other speakers at the conference, faith and environmental protection are not just linked; they are inextricably tied together.

And for some leaders, like Dr. Genmyo Zeedyk of the Anchorage Zen Community, that means speaking up about climate change.

A 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that the more people hear about climate change from their religious leaders, the more likely they are to believe in it.

But Presbyterian Reverend Dr. Curt Karns said that doesn’t mean climate change is an easy conversation to have with congregations in oil-dependent Alaska.

“In our churches, where we all want to be nice to each other, we often try to dance around important topics. But you need then the prophets who say you’ve got to take a look at this. What we’ve found is that it’s hard to get a congregation up and moving. But there are few folks who get the vision so we try to connect them across congregations.”

The 2014 survey shows that Hispanic Catholics in the United States are the most likely religious group to be concerned about climate change. White Evangelical Protestants are the least likely. The nation as a whole is split 50-50.

Jamboree attendee Cyrus Hicks says the division among Christians may be because of different interpretations of scripture.

“I think there’s a huge emphasis on personal salvation and how temporary this life is. A lot of times you hear we are supposed to be ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ it. And there are scriptures that say not to love the ways of the world. But then you have other scriptures that say God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.”

But for Bishop David, ultimately that doesn’t matter. “All of us have an obligation to care for the environment. It doesn’t matter what your faith is or your background is. We were put here as the caretakers, the stewards of this. We will answer for what we do or don’t do for the environment.”

The event was hosted by the InterFaith Earth Care Action Network.

In what’s becoming an increasingly common sight, tens of thousands of walrus have hauled out on the coast of the Chukchi Sea near the Native Village of Point Lay.

An estimated 35,000 Pacific walrus are currently crowding a barrier island just north of Point Lay, a phenomenon that has become more and more common.

The U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Native Village of Point Lay hosted a media teleconference last month to offer updates on the haulout and guidelines for the media. Tony Fischbach, a USGS wildlife biologist started off the call with an overview of the issue.

“So the main point here is that this is a new phenomenon of large coastal haulouts forming on the U.S. shores of the Chukchi Sea that has only been seen during years of complete loss of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea.”

The haulouts were first observed in 2007, coinciding with a record sea ice melt in the Arctic, as sea ice extent plummet to 39 percent below average. Female walruses and their young generally spend their summers on the sea ice, foraging in shallower areas for food. But as summer sea ice retreats, walrus are forced to spend summers on shore.

The haulout are concerning both to scientists and those who rely on them for food, as any disturbance can lead to deadly stampedes. Last year an estimated 60 young walruses were killed due to the concentrated haulouts.

Wildlife biologist Jonathan Snyder with Fish and Wildlife Service commended the nearby village for providing a safe place for the animals to haul out.

“I think the fact that walrus continue to haul out near the community of Point Lay year after year is testament of the fact of the great stewardship role that that community has taken. I’d imagine if that were not a safe place the walrus would not keep returning.”

Point Lay is doing its best to keep the walrus safe, but the village frustrated by the media that won’t keep their distance. In conjunction with Fish and Wildlife Service, USGS, and NOAA, the village of Point Lay issued a statement urging the media to keep their distance.

“The community does not have the capacity to house anybody visiting. This is a small community. Our population is only about 246 and it’s a subsistence community.”

Leo Ferreira the III, Tribal Council President of the Native Village of Point Lay, says the media isn’t listening. At least one person has disobeyed the villages’s multiple requests to keep their distance.

Gary Braasch, an environmental photographer, flew over the haulout on August 23rd. While he says he obeyed flight guidelines, a spokesperson for the Fish and Wildlife Service speaking to the Guardian newspaper, says his photos show walruses that appear to be agitated, fleeing the area.

Ferreira vented his frustration at the media.

“It’s very disturbing when you guys disrespect our way of living, disrespect our community and our wishes for the fact that you guys want a story and think you guys can come here and then go rent a boat, rent somebody’s boat and go across and disturb the walruses on your own,” he said. “That’s not permitted. Not even our own people are permitted to go over there and disturb the walruses with a mass haulout like this.”

The community is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to issue notices and guidelines to pilots in the region. Ferreira says resident hunters have also have been reduced or redirected away from the haulout.

With freeze-up not expected until mid-October, the walruses are hunkered down on shore and the community and scientists hope that disturbances are kept to a minimum.

Scientists today laid out a truly worst-case scenario for global warming — what would happen if we burned the Earth’s entire supply of fossil fuels.

Virtually all of Antarctica’s ice would melt, leading to a 160- to 200-foot sea level rise.

“If we burn it all, we’re going to melt it all,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The huge Antarctic ice sheet stores more than half of the planet’s fresh water, and Caldeira had long wanted to know how much of that ice would melt if people just kept burning fossil fuels until they’re gone.

“I’ve been wondering about this question for 35 years but was never able to address it,” he says, explaining that ice sheet science has only recently gotten sophisticated enough.

He and some colleagues used an estimate of how much fossil fuel is left in the ground to do computer simulations. They found that if current trends continue, sea level is expected to rise 2 or 3 feet this century.

Then the rate of sea-level rise will start increasing, Caldeira says. “And so we’ll have something like 100 feet of sea-level rise 1,000 years from now, which means basically abandoning most of the major cities of the world.”

He says places such as New York City, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Washington, D.C., would all be under water.

The study appears in the journal Science Advances.

Caldeira believes the world has basically done nothing to address human-made climate change. “So to ask ourselves, well, what would happen if we continue to do nothing, I think, is a valuable exercise,” he says. “It would make a lot of sense for us to really think about transforming our energy system to one that does not use the sky as a waste dump.”

But others say this worst-case scenario does not seem plausible.

“I don’t think there are many people who have thought about it who think we will burn all the fossil fuels on the planet in the next few hundred years,” says Michael Levi, who studies energy policy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If you create implausible global scenarios, you get truly horrifying outcomes,” Levi says. “If you create plausible but bad scenarios, you get bad outcomes. That’s not a surprise either.”

This study also contains less-extreme scenarios. Those are the kind that interest Levi, since he says they’re more likely to be ones we might actually face.

Scientists have said they think the West Antarctic ice sheet has already reached a tipping point and that its disintegration is likely unstoppable.

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Throughout President Obama’s tour of Alaska last week, he spoke at length about efforts to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. He spoke very little about his support for Arctic Ocean drilling.

The drilling policy could affect the global climate much more than any of Obama’s climate-friendly initiatives.

The president wrapped up his climate-change tour of Alaska in Kotzebue, just above the Arctic Circle.

“One of the reasons I came up here is to really focus on what is probably the biggest challenge our planet faces,” President Obama said. “If there’s one thing that threatens opportunity and prosperity for everybody, wherever we live, it’s the threat of a changing climate.”

In Kotzebue, Obama spoke of climate-friendly initiatives big and small around the state.

“And I know you guys have started putting up solar panels and wind turbines around Kotzebue,” President Obama said.

And he highlighted his government’s biggest initiative of all aimed at helping the climate: the national Clean Power Plan.

“Last month, I announced the first set of nationwide standards to end the limitless carbon emissions from our power plants, and that’s the most important step we’ve ever taken on climate change,” President Obama said.

Alaska is exempt from that plan. The president did not mention one of his policies that has direct relevance in Kotzebue and the rest of Alaska.

Kotzebue is one of the Western Alaska port towns getting business from the quest for oil in the Chukchi Sea. Shell’s Arctic Challenger oil-spill barge and other support vessels are based in Kotzebue Sound.

The Obama administration gave Shell the green light in August to drill into oil-bearing rocks beneath the Chukchi Sea.

The U.S. Geological Survey says more than 20 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from beneath the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. If that oil is burned in engines and homes and businesses, it would pump many times more carbon dioxide into the sky than the president’s big clean power plan would keep out of the sky.

“Approximately 15-times greater,” says Lois Epstein, an engineer with The Wilderness Society in Anchorage. Her group has been opposed to drilling in the Arctic Ocean mainly for non-climate reasons.

She says Obama’s approval of Arctic drilling is inconsistent with his big push to fight climate change.

“The administration should be at least trying to be consistent in their decision making,” Epstein said. “They have chosen not to be consistent, and that will have climate consequences.”

Other environmentalists have been less diplomatic, calling Obama hypocritical or even schizophrenic when it comes to climate change.

Shell Alaska spokesperson Meg Baldino declined to comment on the climate impacts of Arctic Ocean oil.

But earlier this year, the head of Royal Dutch Shell, Ben Van Beurden, said he agrees the world can’t burn all of its fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change.

“I accept the fact that having the climate change beyond 2 degrees C is probably highly undesirable, and we should do everything to prevent that from happening,” he said.

Van Beurden spoke with the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in England.

Even though this year’s plummeting oil prices reflect a world awash in oil, the Shell CEO said his company can’t stop looking for new sources, in the Arctic or elsewhere.

“I think to just say we can do without hydrocarbons, and we don’t need them anymore, stop exploring for them because they are coming out of our ears already—that is not quite an accurate reflection for a company like us,” Van Beurden said.

Van Beurden put responsibility for opening the Arctic Ocean to drilling on the U.S. government.

“The opening up of the Arctic is not our decision. It’s the decision of an Arctic nation, in this case, the United States,” he said. “And it’s our task to figure out: Can we do this responsibly? Can we do this profitably? Can it be done at all? If the answer to all that is yes, then we should consider it as an investment opportunity.”

Shell officials say it could be 10 to 20 years before any oil from the Chukchi Sea would be available as fuel. That would mean Arctic drilling could remain controversial for a long time.

During the president’s three-day tour, White House handlers didn’t let journalists ask him any questions, with the exception of an exclusive interview and photo shoot with Rolling Stone magazine.

An Arctic conference in Anchorage, hiking glaciers in Seward, and getting hands-on with salmon in Bristol Bay — all a prelude to President Barack Obama’s final stops on his tour of Alaska. The president ended his three-day tour of Alaska on Wednesday with visits along the western coast — first in Dillingham and then Kotzebue, where he officially unveiled new initiatives aimed at helping Alaska’s rural villages cope with climate change in the fast-thawing Arctic.

As a regional hub for 10 remote villages about 30 miles above the Arctic Circle, Kotzebue is where Obama came closest to actually seeing the communities he’s touted throughout his trip as being imperiled by climate change. Millie Hawley is native village president of Kivalina and says her community is seeing those impacts first-hand to both the environment and their food supply.

“We barely got any seal,” she said. “The bearded seal is what we rely on year-round.”

Usually, Kivalina gets 80 seals each year, but this year the community got only eight. Changing migration patterns of belugas and caribou have also affected Kivalina’s food supply.

“Even though we try to protect our children from worry or fear, they sense that things are happening to their home,” Hawley said.

How to address a complex issue in a meaningful way? The president took to the podium at the Kotzebue junior and senior high school to outline plans for a joint tribal, state, and federal effort to help plan — and pay for — more than 30 communities in rural Alaska looking to relocate or rebuild. Obama called it “climate resilience.” The effort will be led by the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency that’s worked on Alaska infrastructure projects for nearly 20 years.

“This is going to cut through bureaucracy and red tape — free up communities like yours to develop and implement solutions for events like coastal erosion, flooding, and permafrost degradation,” Obama said.

The Denali Commission is also bringing $2 million to the table for relocation efforts. And while relocation is the goal for communities like Kivalina, clean water and functional sewer systems remain elusive for many rural communities. In his Kotzebue speech, the president announced a revision on eligibility with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Alaska Village Program, opening the doors to more than 30 communities for water and sewer grants.

“You shouldn’t wait until disaster strikes,” the president said. “We should see if we can invest in communities before disaster strikes to prevent. So today we’re announcing $17 million in USDA rural water grants for infrastructure projects in remote Alaska communities.”

But is it enough? Northwest Arctic Borough Mayor Reggie Joule lives in Kotzebue. The borough has fewer than 8,000 people spread out over an area larger than the state of Kentucky. Estimates put the cost of relocating just one village at more than $100 million, with emergency evacuation roads costing as much as $2 million a mile.

“None of what we have on the plate — none of what many parts of rural Alaska are asking for — are things on a wish list. They’re things that people need,” Joule said.

The president ended his trip with a tour of Kotzebue’s Shore Avenue, a reinforced roadway along the coast that local leaders held up as an example of engineering that overcomes climate challenges — something they said Alaska desperately needs more of. In his speech, Obama said fast action is essential, and he pledged the federal government’s support.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Obama said. “The effects can be irreversible if we don’t act, and that moment is almost here. You know this better than anybody. I want you to know, as your president, I’m here to make sure you get the support that you need.”

But before flying out, Obama made a final detour — a brief moment with Iditarod musher John Baker. The president donned a “Team Baker” jacket for a picture with Baker’s prize-winning pups. The Commander in Chief even cradled a blue-eyed puppy named Feather. A quick photo behind Baker’s dogsled, and then a quick hop from motorcade to the airplane and the president was gone.

Like many Alaskans, most in Kotzebue saw Obama only at arm’s length — a handshake or a glimpse as he walked amid a throng of secret service, staff, and reporters. But many said they’re happy he made Kotzebue his final stop and hope it will cause the conversation about the American Arctic to finally start.