Climate Change

Juneau’s record-breaking glacial outburst flood in August nearly sent a condo building on Riverside Drive into the Mendenhall River.

The morning after the disaster, Riverside Condominium Homeowners Association treasurer John Dittrich saw the building hanging over the edge of the riverbank. He called a meeting of the HOA board.  

“It seemed very precarious, where it was sitting. So we acted immediately,” Dittrich said. “We authorized emergency use of our reserves. Which were never intended for something like this.”

Money collected from residents for routine maintenance like trash pickup or the occasional paint job became a disaster relief fund instead. There was enough money to stabilize the precarious Building D, but that was just a fraction of the necessary repair work. Building D needs a new foundation, and the erosion left three more buildings vulnerable to future floods. 

The cost to fix those things is estimated at more than $1 million. 

The state disaster declaration freed up some recovery money — up to $20,500 per homeowner. But the way Alaska law treats HOAs — and the way state disaster aid is doled out — makes the Riverside Condo residents ineligible for state aid. 

“You’re stuck paying, but you can’t put your hat out for some more money,” Dittrich said. “So it’s frustrating for a lot of people.”

Recovery aid falls short 

Condo residents say recovery aid from familiar safety nets like insurance and federal and state disaster aid has fallen short of their expectations. In the weeks since the flood, insurance has denied most of their claims. Then, in late September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied requests for disaster aid. 

Brenna Heintz still hasn’t been able to get into her unit on the top floor of Building D. She applied for individual disaster assistance from the state, which can hypothetically cover repairs for property that’s damaged in a natural disaster. But she was denied.

The state told her that repairs for her damaged building were not her responsibility. 

“It’s the HOAs responsibility. But in order for them to fix that they need money, and that comes from us,” Heintz said. “I am not eligible for homeowners aid, even though the money is coming out of my pocket.”

That’s because Alaska state law requires that homeowner’s associations share responsibility for “common elements.” In this case, all of the Riverside Condo buildings count as a common element, and all 51 homeowners in nine HOA condo buildings are on the hook for repair costs, even though most of the buildings were untouched by the flood.

Each individual condo owner will have to pay between $21,000 and $26,000 for the repair work, depending on the size of their unit. But under those same state laws, the HOA is treated like a nonprofit business, not a group of individuals. Which means people like Heintz can’t access most forms of individual state disaster aid. 

“I was naive about the scope of this when it first happened. And I was naive about the actual amount of money it would take,” Heitz said. 

Donations, private loans fill the funding gap

Heintz and some of her neighbors are relying on donations from family, friends and the community at large. One of Heintz’s friends set up a GoFundMe that raised almost $28,000 — just enough money to cover Heintz’s share of repairs. 

She said that without those donations, she’d have to take out a loan. And that’s what many residents in the undamaged buildings are doing. A local lender, True North Federal Credit Union, offered loans with below-market interest rates for up to 20 residents. Dittrich says most of those loans have been claimed. 

Loans from the federal Small Business Administration recently became available. Unlike aid from FEMA, homeowner’s associations are eligible. But Dittrich said that option came too late. Individual condo owners might pursue it, but the HOA won’t. 

Other condo owners, like Joanna Forst, took money out of their savings. Forst owns a unit in the undamaged Building A along the riverbank, which she rents out. She said her obligation to pay for the cost of repairs came as a shock at first. 

“That’s a lot of money out of everybody’s pocket. Yet, that’s what I signed into,” Forst said. “And that was a hard pill to swallow.”

Forst was able to make her payment in full, but as a stay-at-home mom, she said that money had been an important supplement to her husband’s income. 

“My spending has basically been cut to absolutely no spending,” Forst said.

But in the end, she said repair work felt like a worthy investment to protect her unit from future flooding. 

Dittrich says about three-quarters of Riverside Condo residents have made their payments, while the rest navigate different payment options. 

“Our goal is to get much of this work done before winter sets in,” Dittrich said. “And that’s certainly a tall order.” 

Much of the initial work to armor the bank is nearly done.

Qaiyaan Harcharek was hunting for bowhead whales in the spring of 2007 when he first saw a humpback whale in the waters off Utqiagivik, his hometown and the nation’s farthest north community.

He and his fellow hunters had been “boating and boating and boating for days,” heading toward the site where a whale was spouting from its blowhole, when they encountered the humpback in the Beaufort Sea, well north of where that species usually swims.

“It should have been a bowhead because that’s all that’s ever up there that time of year,” Harcharek said

That is no longer the case. Humpback whales, better known in the waters between the tropics and the Bering Sea, are now commonly spotted in Alaska’s Arctic waters.

A recently study co-authored by Harcharek reviews the multitude of sightings since his 2007 encounter, and it shows how they have increased exponentially.

Aerial surveys conducted form 2009 to 2019 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center tallied 150 sightings of 220 humpback whales in the Arctic waters, with twice as many sightings between 2017 and 2019 as in the three years prior.

Most of the humpbacks were seen between about 67 and 68 degrees north latitude, which is slightly north of Kotzebue, according to the data. It appears that there is some sort of feeding hotspot near the Inupiat village of Point Hope that is drawing large numbers of humpback whales, said lead author Kate Stafford of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute.

Farther north, where Harcharek’s 2007 encounter with a humpback was one of the first ever reported in the waters off Utqiagvik, the total sightings have not been as numerous, but there has been a similar increase in recent years. Data collected by the North Slope Borough’s Department of Wildlife Management shows that from 2020 to 2022 there were six nearshore sightings of humpback whales in the far-north waters, some with multiple animals, according to the study. In one single event in 2022, 10 humpback whales were seen breaching and slapping their pectoral fins on the water.

Harcharek, who said he sees a humpback whale “darn near every time I go boating,” has mixed feelings about the new arrivals.

“It’s fascinating to see new species. However, we don’t know what impact that is going to have on the whales that we live off of,” he said. “It’s fascinating. It’s interesting. It’s also a little terrifying because we rely on the bowhead for so much.”

The catalyst for the study, Stafford said, was a 2021 boat survey with the late Craig George, the renowned whale biologist who worked for decades at the North Slope Borough’s wildlife department. They were watching a whale feeding in the Beaufort Sea that they assumed was a bowhead. Looking closer, she said, they saw the distinctive fin of a humpback whale.

That led them to a search of records kept by the borough and to consultations with Inupiat residents. People were eager to share their knowledge with George, Stafford said.

“Of course, Craig was the go-to person when people saw something interesting,” she said. “Because people trusted him with their information and observations and because he would listen to them with respect and with consideration, people went to him.”

Bowhead whales, with their thick bow-shaped skulls that can break through ice, have evolved to thrive in the Arctic. Inupiat hunting tradition targets bowheads and belugas, another Arctic-dwelling species.

In contrast, Alaska’s humpback whales spend part of their lives in the warm climates, wintering in Hawaii, Mexico or the waters off Japan and the Philippines.

There are five population groups of North Pacific humpback whales, three of which summer in Alaska waters. They are commonly seen in Southeast or Southcentral Alaska and the Bering Sea. They were known to occasionally range as far north as the southern Chukchi Sea, above the Bering Strait, but those appearances were considered rare – until now.

The new study, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, shows how that range has expanded farther north still.

A possible explanation for the expansion, the study said, is climate change. Long-term warming has reduced Arctic sea ice, not only in the summer melt season but, as the past year’s record shows, throughout the year.

If lack of sea ice is a factor, humpback whales are not the only species taking advantage to expand northward. Previous studies have shown how killer whales are increasingly present in Arctic waters used by bowheads. One of those studies, led by George and published in 2017, tracked trends for wounds in the bodies of harvested bowheads and found increasing incidence of killer whale bite marks; a related study, published in 2020, provided direct evidence of killer whales preying on Arctic bowhead.

Another factor that might be at play, also related to climate change, may be warmth-driven changes in the food web that created more favorable foraging conditions for humpback whales, Stafford said.

Another possible explanation is the steady increase in the North Pacific humpback population, she said.

Humpbacks have thrived sufficiently in recent years that some are no longer considered members of an endangered or threatened species. Previously, all humpback whales worldwide were listed as endangered, but in 2016 NOAA Fisheries identified 14 “distinct population segments” and determined that Endangered Species Act protections were no longer warranted for most of those.

Of the three distinct population segments that swim in Alaska waters, one is classified as endangered, one as threatened and one, which winters in Hawaii, no longer has any Endangered Species Act listing.

George died in July in a rafting accident near Denali National Park and Preserve. The newly published study may not be the last to bear his name as an author due to his work before his death, Harcharek said.

“Honestly, I would not be surprised if there’s other work. Although he was retired, he was never going to be retired completely,” he said.

George’s death hit Utqiagvik hard, Harcharek said. “I’ve known him my whole life,” he said.  “I’m sad. It sucks right now. We just lost an encyclopedia of knowledge of whales and ecosystems. That’s aside from just the amazing person he was.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Communities big and small are trying to rein in climate change. But many people working on these climate solutions are running into a big obstacle: falsehoods and conspiracy theories about their work. So what does this mean for fighting global warming?

To talk about the current state of climate disinformation, we checked in with three NPR reporters who have reported on climate, disinformation and the media — and they can answer our questions: Climate solutions reporter Julia Simon, media correspondent David Folkenflik, and reporter Huo Jingnan, who writes about conspiracy theories among other things.

This was adapted from a roundtable discussion on All Things Considered.

What kind of false narratives about climate are we talking about?

Julia Simon: Climate disinformation in the past — sometimes paid for by fossil fuel interests — often related to false ideas that global warming is a scam or that the threat is overblown. Those falsehoods are still around, but what we’re seeing a lot more of these days are attacks on climate solutions even if we don’t always know who funds them. Think attacks on renewables. False ideas that wind turbines cause cancer or cause birth defects in animals. Disinformation may be spreading because solutions are really spreading.

For instance, this weekend we’ll have a story about a trend in urban planning called 15-minute cities — designing cities so that you access amenities in a short walk, bike ride or trip on public transport. Now there’s a conspiracy theory saying that this is a way to restrict people’s movement or to trap people in an open-air prison.

Podcaster Joe Rogan spoke about it on his show last month. “You’ll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave,” Rogan said, “That’s the idea they’re starting to roll out in Europe.”

That is false.

Earlier this week the U.K. transport minister Mark Harper used some of the language of conspiracy theories when talking about 15-minute cities at the conservative Tory party conference. “What is sinister and what we shouldn’t tolerate,” Harper said, “is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops.”

It is false that local governments in the U.K. are deciding how often citizens can go shopping.

Huo Jingnan: The false narrative surrounding 15-minute cities is but one part of a larger sprawling conspiracy theory called the Great Reset. The theory goes that a shadowy global elite — often Jewish — wants to strip away ordinary people’s freedoms and make us live a life of deprivation. Under this theory, 15-minute cities are a ploy to take away people’s freedom to move around.

More about false narratives about climate change:

• An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America
• Misinformation is derailing renewable energy projects across the United States
• How rumors and conspiracy theories got in the way of Maui’s fire recovery

What is the role of the media in all this?

David Folkenflik: Different kinds of false information spread in different ways. But if you’re considering misleading claims about climate — that’s predominantly on the right. And that involves an information ecosphere defined by Joe Rogan, as we heard above, but also Alex Jones, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and above all Fox News.

The funny thing is they are at once testers and popularizers of things that have gotten some traction online, and then you hear prominent figures on the right picking up the melody.

Back when he was on Fox earlier this year, Tucker Carlson made utterly unsubstantiated claims about dead whales coming ashore on New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts beaches.

Tucker Carlson: The government’s off-shore wind projects, which are enriching their [read: Biden] donors, are killing a huge number of whales, right now.

Folkenflik: But you hear versions of it from former President Donald Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — once it passes audition, it makes the rounds.

More about the role of media:

• After a deadly Capitol riot, Fox News stays silent on stars’ incendiary rhetoric
• Tucker Carlson built an audience for conspiracies at Fox. Where does it go now?
• Conspiracy theories are having a moment. It’s bad for democracy

How does fear-mongering affect the actual implementation of climate solutions?

Huo: It is a distraction from the issues we need to work on. If these narratives ring true to you, you might think that climate activists aren’t really talking about climate but about something else, so much so they could be secret agents of the government trying to take away your freedom.

One interesting example of a strawman here is one of the subplots of the great reset conspiracy theory, which is that the government wants to force people to eat insects. Including insects in the human diet has been an idea on the edges of climate circles. The mainstream idea is simply to eat less meat. But it attracted more attention over the years because many news outlets — including NPR — are easily intrigued by the idea of eating something seen as exotic.

And that gets turned into raw material for conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones in March 2022:

Alex Jones: Coming food crisis recommends more sustainable diets of – wait for it – fly larva, fly larva, fly larva.

Simon: And a muddied information landscape about climate solutions can sometimes complicate the process of getting them enacted, says Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“In the end, it actually doesn’t matter if 99% of the public believe in climate change,” King says, “if you’re able to embed real fear and seeds of doubt about the solutions that are on the table you end up with the same outcome, which is no legislative agenda, no meaningful policy proposals, no local action.”

More about how fear-mongering affects solutions:

• From 4chan to international politics, a bug-eating conspiracy theory goes mainstream
• Gas stoves became part of the culture wars within a week. Here’s why

What sort of impact do these conspiracy theories have on the people in the field trying to work on climate solutions?

Simon: I met with Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Colombian professor who developed this idea of the 15-minute city — these more walkable, bikeable neighborhoods that conspiracy theorists think are preludes to open-air prisons. Moreno says he’s gotten death threats, and so have other scientists and researchers.

Moreno says the attacks give his colleagues a reluctance to publish articles about their work. And he says this is what the conspiracy theorists want: to silence them. And we’ve seen harassment and threats based on conspiracy theories targeting climate scientists and meteorologists for years.

More on the impact of conspiracy theories:

• Maui residents grapple with rumors about the fire and aid as they try to rebuild
• A meteorologist got threats for his climate coverage. His new job is about solutions

Can anything break the cycle of disinformation or rumors?

Folkenflik: It’s not in the interest of Fox News and others who benefit financially from stoking outrage and, by and large, also have partisan rooting interests. In a few instances, there have been defamation cases against those media outlets — but those all come from specific people and institutions who claim they’ve been knowingly harmed and defamation law isn’t going to solve the wider issue of spreading false claims about climate research and solutions.

For other journalists and others, it’s tricky — you do need to address falsehoods and fact-check them. But by fact-checking, you’re also sometimes elevating these ideas that may not get widespread currency. News organizations, including NPR, generally try to balance those imperatives as they plan out coverage.

Huo: When it comes to social media, the platforms can change how they label, recommend and moderate content to change what users see and how they interact with platforms. Studies by researchers who were able to run experiments on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 election showed that changing the algorithm changes user behavior, sometimes leading to less time spent on the platforms.

There’s also a practice called pre-bunking, like a form of inoculation against bad information, which has two strands. One way involves preventatively unraveling specific false claims before they reach a critical mass. Another is essentially news literacy training, to help equip people with tools to evaluate such claims critically. These things have to be done in a way that appeals to the people they’re trying to reach, not patronize them, and also acknowledge that known facts sometimes change, as they have for COVID-19.

While we do not have enough experimental studies on altering platform design to draw conclusions beyond specific interventions, experts in the field place hope in them. A lot of people put stock in hearing from those they trust (like friends) and those they admire (like influencers and celebrities). And they need to absorb it in settings where they seek such content out. That said, some major platforms are dialing back how much news they serve up and how much attention they want to spend on moderating. There’s no single easy or widely embraced answer yet.

More on disinformation and rumors:

• False information is everywhere. ‘Pre-bunking’ tries to head it off early
• Seth Rich’s killing was exploited on Fox News and online. His parents are fed up
• Fake news: How to spot misinformation

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

When JJ Apodaca was starting graduate school for biology in 2004, a first-of-its-kind study had just been released assessing the status of the world’s least understood vertebrates. The first Global Amphibian Assessment, which looked at more than 5,700 species of frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and other amphibians became “pretty much the guiding light of my career,” said Apodaca, who now heads the nonprofit group Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy.

Nineteen years later, a second global assessment of the world’s amphibians has been completed.

“It’s a gut punch,” said Apodaca, who was not involved in the study but has reviewed its findings. “Here we are 19 years later with things not only not improved but getting worse.”

The assessment, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, looked at two decades worth of data from more than 1,000 scientists across the world. It assessed the status of nearly for nearly every known amphibian on the planet, “Ninety-four percent,” said Jennifer Luedtke, one of the lead authors on the study. Though, she noted, an average of 155 new amphibians are discovered each year.

Discovered or not, the study found that the status of amphibians globally is “deteriorating rapidly,” earning them the unenviable title of being the planet’s most threatened class of vertebrates.

Forty-one percent of the assessed amphibians are threatened with extinction in the immediate and long-term, Luedtke said. “Which is a greater percentage than threatened mammals, reptiles and birds.”

Habitat loss from agriculture, logging and human other encroachment, was the biggest driver of the deterioration. As was the case in 2004. Diseases like the infectious chytrid fungus were a major threat as well.

But the scientists were struck by how fast climate change is emerging as one of the biggest threats to amphibians globally. Between 2004 and 2022, the time surveyed in the new assessment, climate change effects were responsible for 39% of species moving closer to extinction, Luedtke said. “And that’s compared to just one percent in the two decades prior.”

As global temperatures have warmed, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the length and frequency of droughts is increasing. Seasons are shifting. Precipitation patterns are changing. Extreme weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves and wildfires are becoming more common.

And amphibians are particularly vulnerable to changes in their environment. Many rely on water to reproduce. They’re cold-blooded and, thus, susceptible to small changes in temperature.

“They don’t have any protection in their skin,” said Patricia Burrowes, a professor of biology at the University of Puerto Rico. “They don’t have feathers, they don’t have hair, they don’t have scales.”

Scientists have documented many species moving to new places, retreating to higher ground, as temperatures have shifted. Burrowes studied the forest coqui, Eleutherodactylus portoricensis, a small, endangered yellow or tan frog, native to the mountains of Puerto Rico. It had been observed moving to higher elevations while some similar Puerto Rican frog species were not. Burrowes and a graduate student found that the specific, already endangered, forest coquis that were moving were more sensitive to small shifts in temperature.

“Patterns aren’t predictable anymore,” Burrowes said.

Salamanders and newts were found to be the most at risk, according to the new assessment. The highest concentration of salamander diversity in the world is in the southeastern U.S. — the Southern Appalachia — where Apodaca, the executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, works and lives.

“This isn’t just a problem of things going extinct in the Global South and Australia and Central America and places like that,” he said. “This is the story of things declining and being endangered right here in our own backyard, so it’s our responsibility, our duty to save these things.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

In August, MacKenzie Englishoe returned home to a place she’s never actually lived.

Englishoe is 20 years old, a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. As summer waned, she packed her bags and boarded a nine-passenger plane for the hour-long flight to her mother’s hometown: Gwichyaa Zhee, also known as Fort Yukon, a village of less than 500 people on the upper Yukon River. The plan is to move here permanently.

“I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to come back here and be in my community,” Englishoe said.

For Englishoe, this move has been a long time coming. Her mother’s family has lived in Gwichyaa Zhee for generations, but Englishoe herself grew up with her dad and brother near Chandalar Lake, in a remote stretch of the Brooks Range. She moved to Fairbanks when she was 12 to attend school. But she visited regularly. Gwichyaa Zhee is where she feels most rooted.

Like most of the village, Englishoe is Gwich’in. She grew up deeply connected to the land up at her father’s cabin near Chandalar Lake, trapping and hunting from a young age. But she feels like she missed out on being in the village, among her people.

“I just wish I had a little bit more of a stronger connection to [Gwichyaa Zhee] when I was younger,” she said.

Now that she’s back, she’s making up for lost time.

Gwichyaa Zhee sits on a flat network of dirt roads that hug the Yukon River. The speed limit is 15 miles per hour, and most people greet each other as they pass.

“Everybody here waves to each other,” Englishoe said, driving through town the day after she arrived. “We’re pretty much all family here.”

Running errands, she runs into relatives and elders: at the local AC store, the post office and during open house at the school.

“I’m back for good,” she told each one with pride.

But Gwichyaa Zhee today is very different from the village she remembers visiting as a kid.

Life here used to revolve around salmon. The first kings would arrive in late June, swimming up the Yukon River from the Bering Sea to their spawning grounds. Chum salmon would follow in late summer. Both species had struggled for decades. But four years ago, the runs abruptly collapsed, with fewer fish than ever returning to the Yukon River. State and federal fishery managers have all but shut down fishing for communities like Gwichyaa Zhee ever since.

Researchers say climate change is driving the collapse, as warmer river and ocean water temperatures wreak havoc with the salmon’s biology and prey species. Residents say it’s made life here unrecognizable. For Englishoe, it means she can’t participate in the very culture and traditions she came home to learn.

Along the bank of the Yukon River, at the edge of town, it’s quiet. That’s not what August used to feel like, Englishoe said.

“Everyone would be hopping on boats to go to fish camp or visiting each other, or giving fish to each other, smoking fish together,” she said.

Now, on the riverbank, half a dozen fish wheels lie idle, in what Englishoe calls the “fish wheel graveyard.”

Twenty feet across, the fish wheels look like big windmills, with nets that would scoop fish out of the river as they swim upstream.

“You could tell they’re getting kind of old, and a little bit more fragile,” Englishoe said, picking through the tall grass growing up through the nets.

Standing on one of the toppled wheels, she imagined what it was like when fishing was allowed.

“You would probably sit right here and you would just watch the nets catch the fish,” Englishoe said. “I bet my grandpa was just smiling, watching it, knowing that he was going to be supplied for the winter.”

In Gwichyaa Zhee, salmon are more than just food — they’re culture and community.

Englishoe’s uncle Michael Peter is second chief of Gwichyaa Zhee. He said going to fish camp is how young people build a connection to their family and their heritage. It’s an essential part of passing on traditions.

“You take your kids out, teach them and show them what we were taught,” Peter said. “We were taught how to cut and preserve and smoke fish.”

Peter has kids of his own who haven’t been to fish camp in years. He worries that knowledge is being lost for the next generation, including young people like Englishoe.

“She’s still learning how to cut fish. And she hasn’t really been to fish camp,” Peter said.

“I wish I could go to fish camp,” Englishoe said.

As a kid, she wasn’t around enough to learn to use a fish wheel and catch salmon herself. And now that she’s finally here full time, Englishoe worries she never will.

Every generation of her family before her has fished on this river. And now it’s her turn and she can’t.

“It’s hard,” she said. “I almost feel like I’m missing a part of myself.”

This loss has fueled a sense of purpose. Englishoe said she feels a responsibility to help save her community from existential threats like climate change. She’s become an advocate for climate justice and Indigenous rights. She serves as an Arctic Youth Ambassador, a program through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that helps young Alaskans spread awareness about challenges in their communities. This spring she was chosen as an Emerging Leader for the Tanana Chiefs Conference.

She’s particularly focused on fighting for more Alaska Native control over fishery management.

It’s a lot of pressure: advocating for action on climate change and more tribal sovereignty. She’s considering putting her undergraduate studies on hold to take a position in the village mentoring youth.

“It’s overwhelming, but I’m happy to do it,” Englishoe said.“Because if our generation doesn’t do it, then there’s no one to be able to get that fish back for our future. It’s something that we have to do now.”

On a rainy September morning, Englishoe sat with her grandfather, Sonny Jonas, at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Photos of their family going back generations line the wood-paneled walls of his house.

For years, Jonas taught kids in Gwichyaa Zhee how to fish and make fish wheels. If Englishoe had grown up here, or if fishing were open now, he’s the one who would have taught her.

Jonas has watched climate change transform the Yukon Flats, just in his lifetime. It’s not just the salmon. Thawing permafrost has caused houses to cave in. He says summers are unrecognizably warm.

“There’s a lot of changes around here, I’ll tell you,” Jonas said.

The changes are alarming, he said. But he sees hope in his granddaughter.

“I’m glad for what she’s doing right now,” Jonas said. “She’s really trying to get into our culture. And I’m really proud of her for that.”

As for Englishoe, she’s still learning that culture — and she’s determined to keep it alive, for herself, and future generations.

“That’s why I moved back. Because I know this is where I’m meant to be and I’m meant to have my future family,” she said. “And try my best to give them a better life.”

Scientists know one thing for sure about the collapse of Yukon River king and chum salmon: there’s more than one culprit.

“It’s really hard and probably unrealistic to just point your finger at one thing and say that’s what’s doing it,” said Jayde Ferguson, a fish pathologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Researchers have identified many threats facing Yukon king and chum salmon, and those threats pop up at each stage of the salmon life cycle — when salmon hatch in freshwater streams, as they swim down the Yukon to the ocean, where they spend most of their lives and on their arduous journey back upriver to spawn and die.

Scientists think many of these threats are connected to climate change. Ferguson studies one of them, a parasite named ichthyophonus, at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lab in Anchorage.

Under a microscope, salmon tissue infected with ichthyophonus appears mottled with big white dots, each one a single parasite that will grow, draining the fish’s resources and causing cells to die.

The parasite can’t harm humans, but it does kill fish. As salmon are making their journey upstream, they’re especially vulnerable.

“Their immune system is not as good, their bodies are just breaking down,” Ferguson said. “And so the parasite actually starts replicating then within the fish.”

Many infected fish don’t survive long enough to lay eggs.

“It’s almost like an arms race,” he said. “Can they get to the spawning ground before they die prematurely?”

Often, infected fish look completely normal from the outside, but their flesh will have a spotted or patchy white pattern where the parasite is growing inside. Importantly, infected fish aren’t good to eat.

Researchers saw a big spike in king ichthyophonus levels in the early 2000’s, when around 30% of kings showed detectable levels. Levels dropped off for more than a decade. And then in 2020, the parasite was back. In recent years more than 40% of the Yukon king run has shown detectable levels of ichthyophonus.

It’s unclear what’s driving the spike. Other researchers have found that Yukon king salmon eggs are low in a vitamin called thiamine, which may cause weakened immune systems. Ferguson said warming river water might also play a role.

In fact, the Yukon is warming twice as fast as rivers further south as a result of climate change.

“It’s crazy to be at the northern-range extent of salmon and talking about it being too hot for them,” said Vanessa von Biela, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist.

Salmon are cold-blooded, meaning they can’t regulate their internal temperature. When the river gets above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s a problem.

When it’s too hot, Von Biela said, the proteins that keep salmon cells functioning normally start to lose their shape. Warm water also makes it harder for their hearts to pump oxygen to their bodies.

“Their whole physiology, their whole body is designed to be in cold water,” she said. “So when that water is warm, they just really hit these limits.”

In a 2020 study, von Biela found that in an average year half of all Yukon kings swimming upriver have heat stress.

And it’s not just the river that’s warming. The ocean is heating up too. Climate change is bringing on more marine heat waves, or periods of severe ocean warming.

Jim Murphy is a NOAA fisheries biologist who has studied salmon at sea for 20 years. He said marine heat waves are disrupting the availability of salmon prey species. It’s not totally clear what’s happening at sea, Murphy said, but when he examines fish, one thing is clear: all salmon — but especially chum — are not getting enough to eat.

“Their stomach contents, the amount of food that they have in their stomach has been declining with warming temperatures,” Murphy said. “They’re likely feeding less in these warm years than in cooler years.”

Scientists say all three of these factors — disease, heat waves, a lack of food — exacerbate each other. A fish that didn’t eat enough is already weaker as it starts its journey up the Yukon. Add a parasite and heat stress, and that fish is a lot less likely to make it to its spawning grounds to reproduce, which means fewer fish next year.

Yukon River fish also have the longest salmon migration paths on Earth, traveling as much as 2,000 miles to get to their spawning grounds.

On top of all this, people along the river have another frustration — commercial fishing. Many residents point to Bering Sea pollock trawlers and a commercial salmon fishery along the Aleutians known as “Area M” that they argue are intercepting salmon at sea that would otherwise be bound for the Yukon.

“It kind of pisses me off a little bit thinking about it. Because it’s the double standard,” said Basil Larson, a subsistence fisherman and resident of Russian Mission, on the lower Yukon. He spoke to a weekly Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association teleconference for river updates this summer.

Larson said it’s infuriating to see commercial fishermen pulling in hundreds of thousands of chum each season while Alaska Native communities like Russian Mission have gone four summers barely able to fish.

“We’ve been getting restricted and restricted and restricted, and it’s not even funny anymore,” he said.

In recent years, Western Alaska fisheries groups and residents of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers have clamored for tighter regulations at sea, like a cap on chum fishing in Area M and stricter chum bycatch limits in the Bering Sea — but so far, regulators haven’t taken much action.

Meanwhile, commercial fishers point to data that show only a small percentage of the Bering Sea bycatch salmon and Area M salmon are headed to Western Alaska rivers.

But Murphy, with NOAA, said even though environmental factors driven by climate change are probably the main culprit for the Yukon collapse, right now, commercial fishing is the one contributor we have control over.

“Most people recognize that [commercial fishing] is not what is causing the collapse of these runs, necessarily. But it is something that can be regulated to mitigate the effects of declining production,” Murphy said.

For now, Yukon River residents are in limbo, waiting to see if fish return. Murphy said it doesn’t look like kings will come back anytime soon. But he said there’s hope for chum.

A 2016-2019 Bering Sea heat wave hit chum salmon particularly hard, but since then, ocean temperatures have subsided and Murphy said, juvenile chum are starting to look healthier.

He said signs are good for a stronger chum run in 2024.