Five top scientists have been traveling around Alaska with five evangelical Christian leaders this week, inspecting signs of climate change and talking to Alaskans who live on the front lines of Arctic warming.
There’s been coverage in the Anchorage Daily News, the Harvard Medical School PR machine and the Associated Press. Organized by Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the contingent visited the coastal village Shishmaref, held press conferences in Anchorage and Portage, spent time pondering the retreat of several Southcentral Alaska glaciers.
There’s good news here and, unfortunately, one of those climate change media goofs that so delights the deniers, liars and Far Right nimnos.
First the good. The people of Shishmaref, located on a sandy barrier island facing the Chukchi Sea, may be more threatened by Arctic climate change than any other Far North residents. Late forming sea ice leaves their community vulnerable to the surf and surge of fall storms, bringing waves that undercut banks, unbury already warmed permafrost, and ultimately consume land, houses and roads.
The record meltdown of Arctic ice this summer has now exposed Shishmaref and other barrier island villages like Kivalina to an unprecedented hazard come fall, with an extraordinary fetch of open water that will take a long time to freeze solid. Check out these photos from a particularly damaging storm in 2004.
So international attention gets properly focused on Alaska Native villages edging toward another fall erosion disaster.
But there’s a dark side to this publicity, one that could feed climate denier fodder.