Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems

Alaska in March is supposed to be cold. Along the north and west coasts, the ocean should be frozen farther than the eye can see. In the state’s interior, rivers should be locked in ice so thick that they double as roads for snowmobiles and trucks. And where I live, near Anchorage in south-central Alaska, the snowpack should be deep enough to support skiing for weeks to come. But this year, a record-breaking heatwave upended norms and had us basking in comfortable—but often unsettling—warmth.

This spring, temperatures in Alaska and northern Canada
 have been significantly higher than usual. Red indicates
 areas warmer than average while blue indicates colder
 than average. The darker the red, or blue, the greater
the deviation from average.

Across Alaska, March temperatures averaged 11 degrees Celsius above normal. The deviation was most extreme in the Arctic where, on March 30, thermometers rose almost 22 degrees Celsius above normal—to 3 degrees. That still sounds cold, but it was comparatively hot.

“It’s hard to characterize that anomaly, it’s just pretty darn remarkable for that part of the world,” says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy in Fairbanks. The state’s wave of warmth was part of a weeks-long weather pattern that shattered temperature records across our immense state, contributing to losses of both property and life. “When you have a slow grind of warming like that, lasting weeks or months, it affects people’s lives,” Thoman says.

Read the Smithsonian story by Tim Lydon - “Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems.”

Climate Change Will Bring Major Flooding to New York Every 5 Years

New York is a city on the water. For hundreds of years, its rivers and harbor have worked to its advantage, bringing it speedy transportation and pleasant temperatures.

Joseph Leader, the vice president of the New York
MTA, inspects a flooded escalator down to a
                                  subway platform in the days after Hurricane Sandy.s after Hurricane Sandy.

The next couple hundred years may not be as smooth sailing. Global warming, caused by the release of carbon-dioxide pollution into the atmosphere, will cause the seas to rise and the storms to intensify around the city. A new study from an all-star list of climate scientists attempts to estimate how a few of climate change’s symptoms—higher seas, large storm surge, and more intense hurricanes—will intersect in New York over the next 300 years.

It isn’t pretty. Sea-level rise will make every tropical cyclone that hits New York more likely to release damaging floods. For instance, storm floods of nearly seven-and-a-half feet once occurred only a couple times per millennium. In today’s somewhat warmed climate, 7.5-foot floods are projected to happen every 25 years. By 2030, these floods will occur every five years.

Read The Atlantic story by Robinson Meyer - “Climate Change Will Bring Major Flooding to New York Every 5 Years.”

Will giving the Himalayas the rights as people protect their future?

Himalayan glaciers, rivers, streams, lakes, air, meadows and forests now have the same legal rights as people after the Uttarakhand High Court in India granted these natural treasures this new status as a way to protect them from pollution and environmental destruction.

View from Kalindi Peak of Himalayas located
at Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, India.

The ruling, made on 30 March 2017, aims to ‘preserve and conserve’ the ‘Glaciers including Gangotri and Yamunotri, rivers, streams, rivulets, lakes, air, meadows, dales, jungles, forests wetlands, grasslands, springs and waterfalls’ of the Himalayas.

This ground-breaking ruling came ten days after the same court ruled India’s sacred Ganges and Yamuna rivers were also legal persons. At the same time, the New Zealand Government passed legislation recognising Whanganui River as a legal person. Collectively, the establishment of these new legal persons represents the most significant creation of new legal rights for nature since 2010, when Bolivia passed the Law of Mother Earth.

Read the University of Melbourne Pursuit story - “Will giving the Himalayas the rights as people protect their future?”

Wondering about the health of your river? Ask a waterrbug

A

ngus Webb wonders about the health of our rivers.

The Senior Research Fellow and quantitative ecologist at the University of Melbourne poses that question on The Conversation and then suggests we answer it by asking a waterbug.

Read his story - “How healthy is your river? Ask a waterbug”.