Science & the Public: Sarah’s tale of Arctic warming

Observations from one remote village as its climate changesWeb edition : Thursday, October 20th, 2011 Recalling cooler timesSarah James brings stories of change affecting her Caribou People in Alaska.J. Raloff

MIAMI Sarah James remembers playing outdoors as a child even in the dead of winter. It often hit -70 degrees Fahrenheit, although not for prolonged periods. But she and the other kids, tired of being house-bound, just bundled up in snow suits and boots made from caribou skins. Even such frigid temps never put life — or play — on hold, recalls this 67-year-old resident of Arctic Village, Alaska.

Today, winter cold snaps seldom dip below -40 degrees, she says. And snows, that used to begin falling in August or September, now typically arrive in late October or November.

Over a half-century or so, her town of some 150 Athabascan Indians has watched as the formerly extreme but fairly predictable climate in this amazingly remote region of inland Alaska has become warmer and more erratic. Overall, that’s definitely not been a change for the better, James says.

She ventured to South Florida this week — and the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual meeting — to describe what it’s like to weather life on the frontlines of climate change.

James grew up on a flat tundra range above the Arctic Circle. In her youth, the local vegetation was several inches to a few feet tall. And just inches down, the soil was permanently frozen. No more. Cottonwoods and willows have migrated in, sending up trunks 10 feet high or more. Understory shrubs followed. With the taller, woodier vegetation came an influx of bears and beavers.

That at least has brought some benefits, James claims. Like more meat. In her community with no running water, no agriculture to speak of and no roads, people still largely live off of the land. That means eating caribou, moose, ducks, fish and small mammals. Including beaver.

The villagers catch game whenever it’s available, then smoke it or freeze it for meals throughout the rest of the year. Arctic Village built a huge solar-powered municipal walk-in freezer during the 1970s, about 24 feet on a side. It circulated a fluid that was chilled as it ran through the frozen soil and then released that cold to keep the stored meats rock solid. But after two decades this cold locker had to be abandoned. The melting permafrost wasn’t keeping the chiller chilly enough. Today, James says, people use diesel-powered electricity to run home freezers. And it’s expensive, since that diesel fuel all arrives by plane.

Another byproduct of the melting permafrost: erosion of shorelines along lakes and creeks.

Always fairly drought-ridden, inland Alaska increasingly has also been plagued by fires — especially now that the invasion of trees had added extra tinder. Smoke associated with the fires can shut down air traffic through the area. And that can delay deliveries of fresh produce and fuel — or medical evacuations of the sick or injured. Arctic Village is one of the most remote spots in North America, James says. And the closest hospital, she notes, is in Fairbanks, a two-hour flight away.

For decades, scientists have been explaining that any global warming will be exaggerated in the polar regions, especially the Arctic. But reading about that in dry research papers and reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are quite different from listening to a woman describe how the norms of climate in her part of the world have been turned topsy turvy. “Sometimes in rains in January,” James says, “or snows in July. We just don’t know what to expect from one day to another,” she told me across the breakfast table this morning.

“We’re people of the caribou,” the quiet-voiced woman explains. “We believe our people were put on this Earth to protect our caribou.” And to date, she maintains, her Gwich’in tribe of some 8,000 individuals  —  spread across 15 villages in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada — think they’ve been managing pretty well.

In 1988, “our tribal elders came together to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the birthing ground of our caribou,” she says. Even back then, she says, “they were concerned about the many changes that were happening. They were talking about climate change and warming — and that’s one reason they organized against oil and gas development.”

Her community is still arguing against it. It’s also one themes James plans to talk about during an October 21 session, here, at the SEJ meeting about climate impacts on indigenous communities.

Found in: Climate Change, Environment and Science & Society

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Warming dents corn and wheat yields

CEREAL KILLERBetween 1980 and 2008, climbing global temperatures took millions of tons of wheat off the dinner table, scientists say. Some countries experienced big losses due to weather (red), while in others, wheat production held steady (blue).Images courtesy of Science/AAAS

Set a place at the table for climate change; hotter weather may have already taken a bite out of food crops worldwide.

Farms across the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have between 1980 and 2008 thanks to rising temperatures, a new analysis estimates. These wilting yields may have contributed to the current sky-high price of food, a team of U.S. researchers reports online May 5 in Science. Climate-induced losses could have driven up prices of corn by 6.4 percent and wheat by 18.9 percent since 1980.

The researchers tracked country-by-country yields of these common foodstuffs over nearly three decades. Harvests of corn and wheat have climbed steadily since 1980 due in part to technological advancements, says David Lobell, a land-use scientist at Stanford University. But based on the team’s statistical analysis, farmers could have produced a lot more food if the weather had been cooler. For corn, global losses amount to millions of tons — about equal to Mexico’s yearly production of the crop. “For every decade of climate change, it sets you back a year,” Lobell says.

CORN ON THE RUN Corn is feeling the heat from climate change, with yields dropping close to 4 percent due to weather-related factors between 1980 and 2008.Images courtesy of Science/AAAS

For reasons still up for debate, temperatures largely held steady in the U.S. over the study period. So Iowa, by and large, doesn’t seem to have lost out. Rice and soybean yields have also proved resilient to rising temperatures so far, the team discovered.

This analysis of the past three decades largely falls in line with what other studies have projected for the coming century, says Andy Challinor of the University of Leeds in England, who studies the impacts of climate on agriculture. With enough complementary analyses, scientists may start to feel more certain about predicting the future of food. Still, when it comes to agriculture, researchers rely on a very murky crystal ball. Humans can, and probably will, adapt to warmer temperatures, switching to hardier crops or developing new technology to keep harvests high.

While it’s far from a prediction, Lobell says his study identifies a number of problem areas that do need attention — not later but now. “If we really invest a lot in the development of crops that can withstand really high temperatures,” he says, “that would potentially change things a lot.”

Even today, food scarcity is a pressing problem, says Navin Ramankutty, a geographer at McGill University in Montreal. As populations climb steeply, putting added pressure on agricultural production, an estimated one in seven people go hungry across the globe.

Found in: Climate Change, Earth, Earth Science, Ecology and Environment

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Salt clouds relieve some Arctic warming

Sea spray creates a diffuse filter for the sun’s warming rays Web edition : Friday, April 22nd, 2011

Earth’s warming in recent years has had an exaggerated impact in the Arctic. There, temperatures have soared relative to temperate areas, resulting in an increased summer melting of sea ice. But new research indicates that the local warming would be even more dramatic if it weren’t for salt sprays kicked up by whitecaps from the Arctic’s increasingly open waters.

Snow and sea ice reflect much of the sun’s warming rays back into space. As an increasing share of the Arctic Ocean’s year-round cover of sea ice has disappeared, the sea surface has darkened — or reduced its albedo — and become an increasingly better absorber of solar energy. The open water starts to develop in spring and doesn’t ice over again until fall. Year-round ice is ice that survives the summer.

Clouds can deflect incoming solar rays. And climate scientists have realized that some of the salt from sea spray could enter the lower atmosphere, forming diffuse filtering clouds of tiny particles. The question had been how effectively these clouds might offset warming due to the Arctic Ocean’s diminishing summer albedo.

The majority of sea-salt particles emitted into the air are well under a micrometer in diameter, notes climate scientist Hamish Struthers of Stockholm University. These tiny particles, known as aerosols, can persist in the air for days or even weeks, he says, and rise to altitudes of a kilometer or more. For the new study, he and his colleagues input into a computer program satellite measurements of seasonal changes in the Arctic albedo and surface measurements of a host of features including temperatures, ice cover and sea salt kicked up by waves on the ocean surface.

As expected, the salt clouds can exert a subtle cooling of the Arctic, the team reports online April 13 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Struthers says his group’s new calculations indicate that “the size of this [salt] aerosol effect is most likely 10 percent or less of the albedo [warming] effect” due to sea-ice melting. The effect is small, he acknowledges, but not negligible.

“Natural feedbacks in the climate system, such as the one described here, are potentially very important,” says Natalie Mahowald, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University. “This is the first time I have seen this feedback mechanism discussed or quantified,” she says, making it “an interesting paper that describes a new mechanism for modulating climate in the Arctic region.”

Found in: Earth, Environment and Matter & Energy

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