Early Warming. Nancy Lord

by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska estimated that the changing climate will make it between 10 and 20 percent more expensive to build and maintain public infrastructure in Alaska over the next couple of decades.¹¹ These additional costs (billions of dollars) are mostly associated with the effects on roads, runways, and water systems of thawing permafrost, erosion, and flooding. Analyses show generally, though, that the costs and difficulties of adapting will be much greater if action is delayed. Other adaptation strategies that have been discussed include things like more flexible and more conservative management of fish and wildlife resources, protection of key lands and waters, technological assistance, and training for new jobs. Adaptation, for some living in coastal areas, will also involve building seawalls and/or moving to higher ground.

      In a perfect world, climate change adaptation in the north might be integrated into broader objectives to solve additional social, economic, and cultural problems while acting as a proving ground for particular strategies.

      One way or another, the early-warming north will be a proving ground. The north is where we’ll find out just how creative and responsible humans can be. Maybe, we’ll show how to turn a crisis into stronger communities and a more sustainable future. Or maybe the lessons will be quite different; maybe what we’ll learn is how hard it is to lose homes and livelihoods, the costs of ignoring risk and peril, what it means to suffer.

      My homeplace, Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, depends for its life on salmon. Salmon have fed people here since the first Pacific Eskimos showed up, salmon kept the early homesteaders going, and salmon today support families engaged in commercial and sport fishing. For twenty-five years I fished commercially for salmon in Cook Inlet, and I love this place in all its weathers and sea conditions but especially in its bounty. The nutrients that spawning salmon deliver upstream feed bears, birds, other fish, plants, the entire ecosystem. To the degree that climate change alters rainfall, evaporation rates, plant cover, stream temperatures, and ocean conditions, salmon may find themselves living in an environment quite different than in the past. Or not living—not surviving, at least not as well or in the same places as they do now.

      I set out, first, to learn in my own neighborhood about streams and salmon. I wanted to know what was happening relative to climate, and I wanted to understand how science—so much of it scaled globally and so bound in scientific conservatism and jargon—could be explained and made useful on a local level. I would start at home, and then I would head northward, to see how people elsewhere were responding to their own climate change challenges. My inquiry would be, by necessity, more opportunistic than comprehensive—based on visits to a scattering of communities, with their disturbing climate news and the occasional example of promising innovation. I wanted to see if people in the forefront of so much change were getting information and the assistance they needed, and how their expertise was informing others. Even as I knew that in North America—with our collective wealth and privilege—we have so many more options than most of the planet’s people, I wanted to catch a glimpse of what the future might hold for us all, the world over.

       PART ONE

       MY SALMON HOME: KENAI PENINSULA

      On a mid-May Friday, the Ninilchik River on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula was running high, fast, and dark. Sue Mauger, stream ecologist for the nonprofit Cook Inletkeeper, and I stood on the muddy bank, among piles of moose turds, willow bushes close-cropped by those same moose and just beginning to tint into green, and a crushed pop can. A pair of harlequin ducks beat past us, low over the water and heading upriver, the male in its colorful clown plumage, the duller female sporting white cheek patches like silver dollars.

      Somewhere in that muddy water whipping past us, the first king salmon of the year were likely forcing their way upstream. In another week, Memorial Day weekend would launch the sport fishery on the Ninilchik and neighboring rivers, and barbecue grills throughout the region would be put back to work. The economy of the Kenai Peninsula, in fact, largely runs on salmon—not just the sportfishing that occurs along the rivers and in the inlet, but also commercial fishing by seiners, drifters, and setnetters and the subsistence and personal use fishing that nets Alaskans food for their freezers. The early king salmon would be followed by the big push of red salmon in the rivers that lead to lakes, then late-run kings, pinks, and silver salmon later in the summer.

      We had driven north from Homer for forty miles in an effort to collect a “TidbiT,” a temperature data logger, left in the Ninilchik River since the previous October, and replace it with a new one to begin to record the spring and summer water temperatures. Mauger pointed toward the middle of the river, where the logger, an item not much larger than a quarter, was housed in a piece of PVC pipe and anchored to the river bottom with rebar. The whole apparatus was well out of sight below the surface, in a low spot behind a rock, where fishermen should not have snagged it and, Mauger hoped, where ice and logjams should not have scraped against it. This was her first visit to the river since fall, and she was eager to get the logger back to the Homer lab to download its winter’s worth of temperature data.

      In chest waders and long plastic gloves, Mauger stepped off the bank and braced herself against the current. A slight and athletic woman who has run marathons and had just been telling me about a triathlon she was entering in Anchorage the next day, Mauger worked her way over the mud-and-gravel bottom, careful not to lose her footing in the swift current. The tannin-brown water reached her knees, then her waist, and she was nowhere near the logger’s location. She turned and shuffled back to the bank. “This is what they call ‘bankful,’” she said. Indeed, the river filled its banks from one side to the other, about forty-five feet away. On both sides the willows were hung with grasses and other debris, deposits from even higher water levels a few weeks earlier.

      Spring that year—2008—had been late and cool, and a surprise snowstorm in April had left snowpack still melting in the hills. There were even late snow patches in the shadowy places along this lower stretch of the river, just a mile from where it emptied into Cook Inlet. The morning was overcast and cool—thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit when we’d left Homer—and rain during the night had swelled the river.

      The late spring and cooler temperatures had local people saying things like, “There goes the global warming theory.” I was also used to seeing a popular bumper sticker that read ALASKANS FOR GLOBAL WARMING and knew there were plenty of Alaskans who were suspicious of the underlying climate change science but also thought that warmer temperatures could be a good thing—more shorts-and-sandals weather, a longer gardening season, lower winter fuel bills. Certainly the difference between weather and climate had more than a few people confused, and erratic weather events—even sometimes involving colder temperatures and more snow—were hard for many to connect to a warming planet.

      Besides the climate change effects of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we needed to contend with natural cycles, including what scientists call the “El Niño Southern Oscillation.” The shifting in the equatorial Pacific from warmer masses of water to cooler ones, and back again, affects the wind patterns that carry warmer or cooler air to Alaska. We were just coming off of a strong La Niña, which, according to the models, should be followed by an El Niño and warmer than average winters.

      If air and water temperatures were not alarming all Alaskans, there was one thing almost everyone cared about passionately—our wild salmon. Salmon evolved as cold-water animals, and Alaska today supports tremendous runs of five species. In some recent years the commercial fisheries have caught upward of two hundred million salmon valued at hundreds of millions of dollars at the dock. The sport fishing industry, which claims twelve thousand jobs, boasts hundreds of millions of dollars of additional value to the state’s economy.

      And salmon are anadromous, meaning they travel up rivers and streams, and sometimes into lakes, to spawn, and are thus sensitive to both marine and freshwater conditions.

      Cook Inletkeeper