Warming climate disrupts Alaska natives' lives

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Anyone who doubts the gravity of global warming should ask Alaska's Eskimo, Indian and Aleut elders about the dramatic changes to their land and the animals on which they depend.

Native leaders say that salmon are increasingly susceptible to warm-water parasites and suffer from lesions and strange behavior. Salmon and moose meat have developed odd tastes and the marrow in moose bones is weirdly runny, they say.

Arctic pack ice is disappearing, making food scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for the Natives who hunt them. It is feared that polar bears, to name one species, may disappear from the Northern hemisphere by mid-century.

As trees and bushes march north over what was once tundra, so do beavers, and they are damming new rivers and lakes to the detriment of water quality and possibly salmon eggs.

Still, to the frustration of Alaska Natives, many politicians in the lower 48 U.S. states deny that global warming is occurring or that a warmer climate could cause problems.

"They obviously don't live in the Arctic," said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. The Anchorage-based commission, funded by the National Science Foundation, has been gathering information for years on Alaska's thawing conditions.

The climate changes are disrupting traditional food gathering and cultures, said Larry Merculieff, an Aleut leader from the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

Indigenous residents of the far north are finding it increasingly difficult to explain the natural world to younger generations. "As species go down, the levels of connection between older and younger go down along with that," Merculieff said at a recent Anchorage conference.

Climate and weather changes even affect human safety, said Orville Huntington, vice chairman of the Alaska Native Science Commission.

"It looks like winter out there, but if you've really been around a long time like me, it's not winter," said Huntington, an Athabascan Indian from the interior Alaska village of Huslia. "If you travel that ice, it's not the ice that we traveled 40 years ago."

River ice, long used for travel in enterior Alaska, is thinner and less dependable than it used to be.

Global warming is believed to result from pollutants emitted into the atmosphere, which trap the Earth's radiant heat and create a greenhouse effect. The warming is more dramatic in polar latitudes because cold air is dry, allowing greenhouse gases to trap more solar radiation. Even a modest rise in temperature can thaw the glaciers and permafrost that cover much of Alaska.

There is no question that global warming is having pronounced effects in Alaska, said Gunter Weller, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research.

Average temperatures in Alaska are up about 5 degrees Fahrenheit from three decades ago, and about twice that during winter, said Weller, who also heads the Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the university.

That causes serious problems not only for rural Natives who live off the land but for major industries and for public structures, he said.

Most of Alaska's highways run over permafrost that is now rapidly thawing, meaning maintenance headaches for state officials. The thaw has already caused increased maintenance costs for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, which uses special vertical supports for suspension over the tundra.

If the plight of Alaska Natives does not get politicians' attention, then the economic toll should, Weller said.

He cited the cost — estimated at over $100 million — of moving Shishmaref, an Inupiat Eskimo village on Alaska's northwestern coastline, to more stable ground. The village of 600 is on the verge of tumbling into the Bering Sea because of severe erosion resulting from thawed permafrost and the absence of sea ice to protect the coastline from high storm waves.

Along with Shishmaref, there are about 20 Alaska villages that are candidates for relocation because of severe erosion, with similar costs, Weller said.

Alaska's economy has already suffered from the permafrost thaw, said Robert Corell, chairman of the international Arctic Climate Impact Assessment committee.

The hard-frozen conditions needed to support ice roads around the North Slope oil fields now exist for only about 100 days a year, he pointed out. Thirty years ago, oil companies could use ice roads for about 200 days of the year, he said.

The debate still remains, however as to whether it is human activity that is causing or contributing to the change.

There is no genuine "debate" of that issue. There is however agenda driven, politically motivated hype suggesting mankind has more effect than is physically possible.

Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Brief Introduction to the History of Climate
by Richard A. Muller

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle

Figure 1-1 Global warming

Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years

Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years

Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years

Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice

Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable
S. Fred Singer
EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999
http://www.sepp.org/scirsrch/EOS1999.html

" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "

Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal

Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect

Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)

Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics % of All Greenhouse Gases
% Natural

% Man-made

Water vapor 95.000%
94.999%
0.001%

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618%
3.502%
0.117%

Methane (CH4) 0.360%
0.294%
0.066%

Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.950%
0.903%
0.047%

Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) 0.072%
0.025%
0.047%

Total 100.00%
99.72
0.28%

The reality is a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration over current levels, that the UN/IPCC "story line" pretends, even if it were true, could not induce significant temperature change whatever its source.

Climate Catastrophe, A spectroscopic Artifact?

"It is hardly to be expected that for CO2 doubling an increment of IR absorption at the 15 µm edges by 0.17% can cause any significant global warming or even a climate catastrophe.
The radiative forcing for doubling can be calculated by using this figure. If we allocate an absorption of 32 W/m² [14] over 180º steradiant to the total integral (area) of the n3 band as observed from satellite measurements (Hanel et al., 1971) and applied to a standard atmosphere, and take an increment of 0.17%, the absorption is 0.054 W/m² - and not 4.3 W/m².
This is roughly 80 times less than IPCC's radiative forcing.
If we allocate 7.2 degC as greenhouse effect for the present CO2 (as asserted by Kondratjew and Moskalenko in J.T. Houghton's book The Global Climate [14]), the doubling effect should be 0.17% which is 0.012 degC only. If we take 1/80 of the 1.2 degC that result from Stefan-Boltzmann's law with a radiative forcing of 4.3 W/m², we get a similar value of 0.015 degC."

The basis of global warming models:

Ramanthan (Journal of Geophysical Review, vol. 84, pp. 4949-4958) states:

"the direct radiative effects of doubled CO2 can cause a maximum surface warming [at the equator] of about 0.2 K, and hence roughly 90% of the 2.0-2.5 K surface warming obtained by the GCM is caused by atmospheric feedback processes described above."

A Lukewarm Greenhouse
"The average warming predicted by the six methods for a doubling of CO2, is only +0.2 degC."

In otherwords, CHAOS, butterflies create hurricanes but dragonflies can't.

The UN/IPCC models achieve their results by selectively multiplying changes in heat balance for changes in CO2 concentration 10 times and more over that of any other mechanism of thermal variation. Where radiative forcing of CO2 is selectively multiplied by 10, other mechanisms of similar magnitude are not allowed to be enhanced by the same thermally driven "atmospheric feedback processes described".

The atmospheric "feedback processes described" are those implemented into UN/IPCC climate models. They constitute speculative and inadequate mechanisms at best, presumptive at worst, by which the atmosphere might respond to changes in radiative heat balance.

None of the "feedback processes" are based in any measured direct or parametric relationship selectively coupled to CO2 concentrations alone. This selective sensitivity (i.e. instability in the model) is inferred to be a cause of greater change than the initiating power input to the system.

A good read:

The Non-Science
of Global Warming
By Robert E. Stevenson, Ph.D. *
Published in 21^st Century Science & Technology magazine
(Winter 1996-97 edition, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 51-59)
http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES/ocean-1.html

Along with the Douglas V. Hoyt's(Senior Scientist with Raytheon/ITSS) essay on the subject:
http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/

I would say the risk of doing nothing outweighs that of taking action.

The alternative is collapse of world economies in the effort to effect change upon natural rythms of global weather, and subsequent consequence to living standards and well being of the worlds peoples:

France Worried About Heat-Wave Readiness

PARIS - The sun is out and the jonquils are in bloom. But as spring arrives in Paris, the warmer weather has raised questions about whether France is ready for another heat wave like last summer's sizzler that killed 15,000 in this country.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,95260,00.html

"France claims that the recent European heat wave (search) was responsible for the deaths of 3,000[now known to be 15k above] of its countrymen. But for most of the summer, it has been much hotter in the American West, and no one can find even one body attributable to the heat."
***
"My University of Virginia colleague Robert Davis and I looked into the issue of heat and mortality in American cities and published our findings in several academic journals. Given all those bodies in France and the big blackout, perhaps it's a good time to get these out of the dusty library stacks and tell what we found.
People who study mortality and climate have known for years that most temperate-zone cities have had some "threshold" temperature at which daily mortality suddenly begins to skyrocket. People who study economics will argue that this is a market ripe for adaptation.
How have Americans adapted to our warming cities? They stopped dying. Even though the local temperature keeps going up and up, the threshold at which deaths skyrocket has become higher and higher, and now is beyond the highest temperatures."
***
"European cities are virtually devoid of air conditioning in large part because the energy to run them is so expensive. And why is that? Pressured by vocal environmentalists, European governments have levied energy tax after energy tax, with the latest excuse being global warming.
The mathematics of this problem are terribly transparent. In order to meet their self-imposed targets from the Kyoto Protocol (search) on global warming, European nations already have taxed energy, but they have not done enough. Consequently, even more restrictions are being proposed, especially by the German government. Unaffordable air conditioning will become even more expensive, killing more and more Europeans the next time the temperature reaches what passes for a few degrees above what is normal in Dallas.
Europe has effectively imposed a continuous blackout on air conditioning, and now it is paying the price."

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Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics	% of All Greenhouse Gases	% Natural	% Man-made
Water vapor	95.000%	94.999%	0.001%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)	3.618%	3.502%	0.117%
Methane (CH4)	0.360%	0.294%	0.066%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)	0.950%	0.903%	0.047%
Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.)	0.072%	0.025%	0.047%
Total	100.00%	99.72	0.28%