Far North Science

Modern gray wolf
Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Thus read the headline of the Jan. 26, 1950 edition of the Anchorage Daily News. Longtime Alaskan man of God Everett Bachelder had been driving a team of dogs from Palmer to the Copper Basin with a load of supplies and gifts for orphans and needy families when wolves surrounded his outfit stalled in deep snow near Sheep Mountain, near the headwaters of the Matanuska River.

“An Alaskan missionary today revealed how he made a harrowing escape from death when hungry wolves surrounded his dog team on a crosscountry trek from Wasilla to Chitina,” the story reads.

“His dogs were devoured, and he had to keep a campfire going throughout every night to save himself from the vicious beasts.”

Bachelder survived, of course, going on to serve many years as a missionary in Nome. And times have changed in the past half century — no longer do people cast wolves in absurdly purple terms like ‘vicious beasts.’

But it’d be an equally absurd mistake to see wolves — those magnificent, intelligent and socially sophisticated predators — as spiritual creatures guided by ecological action-plans that target only the infirm and weak. The animals have a mission from God: Eat meat. And that can mean killing dogs.

One of the four wolf packs known to roam Alaska’s largest municipality — animals that often prowl within sight of humans on Anchorage trails — has been stalking and attacking pets running lose near owners. In two of the four incidents reported this week by the Anchorage Daily News, dogs were actually consumed. Dogs have also been killed recently by wolves in Fairbanks.

Read on » » » »

Source: Into The Wild

Many Alaskans have long been exasperated or downright hostile over the mythologizing of Chris McCandless, the hapless college graduate who starved to death in a derelict bus a day’s walk up a mining access road on the north side of Denali National Park. Here is an essay by Alaska writer Craig Medred, with new reporting and insight into what really drove McCandless “into the wild.”

Already the Interior Alaska winter has locked the spruce forests along the Stampede Trail in its long, cold embrace. Gone back to the central-heating comfort of civilization are the pilgrims who made the summer trek out to the “Magic Bus.” And playing in movie theaters across America is the story of the hero who died out there.

It was on a fall day 15 years ago a trio of Alaskans hunting moose not far from the George Parks Highway north of Denali National Park found a disturbing note tacked to the old school bus long before abandoned along the rough, old mining road.

“SOS,” it said. “I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL LONE. THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME.”

Inside the rusting vehicle, the hunters found the starved and rotting remains of a young man. The body was later identified as that of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless, a continental wanderer originally from Annandale, Va. Death was attributed to starvation.

As McCandless’s story of suffering and failure on the fringe of the last great American wilderness emerged, Alaskans largely wrote him off of as yet another of those poor, unprepared fools fallen victim to Jack London’s Great White Silence.

Four years after his death, however, author Jon Krakauer elevated McCandless to iconic status in the best-selling book, “Into the Wild.” Krakauer saw in the cross-continent wanderings of McCandless and his final, tragic Alaska death the footprints of “the grip the wilderness has on American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated,highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons.”

The fact the journey ended early in an old bus with little left behind but some sketchy journals (not nearly enough for a book), Krakauer blamed on the seeds of the wild potato. The seeds, he theorized, poisoned McCandless.

That theory was quickly debunked. The seeds weren’t poisonous.

Read on » » » »

Source: Into The Wild

Thank God for the New Yorker, at least this week. While movie reviewers all over the country have gone weak in the ankles over Sean Penn’s new movie Into the Wild — apparently so beautiful and cinematic and inspirationally episodic that oil companies might use its clips to sell drilling rights in wildlife refuges to Al Gore — David Denby cannily senses the bogus within.

Many Alaskans have long been exasperated or downright hostile over the mythologizing of Chris McCandless, the hapless college graduate who walked “into the Wild” in 1992 and starved to death in a derelict bus a day’s walk up a mining access road on the north side of Denali National Park.

That the story illustrated an unnecessary outcome, one that provides no more spiritual insight than a flattened jaywalker, has long since become a cliche in Alaska. (As the father of a 21-year-old man who sometimes pursues ideals without an eye toward practicality, I also feel terribly for the kid’s parents.)

That first Jon Krakauer and now Sean Penn have transformed this senseless death — whether triggered by poison or insanity — into an irony-free celebration has become one of the most bizarre episodes in the portrayal of modern Alaska by the media. Many people from Outside seem to dismiss the Alaskans who criticize as cranky misanthropes who failed to see a new Christ among them. Yet that’s not it.

Denby, himself sounding nauseous over the breathless canonization of a camping accident, touches on one of our gripes.

“McCandless didn’t experience enough of life for his rejection of it to carry much weight, and Penn can’t see the egocentricity in a revolt that was as naïve as it was grandly self-destructive,” Denby writes in his review published in the Oct. 15 issue.

Read on » » » »

Syun-Ichi Akasofu

Many scientists have got the relationship between rising greenhouse gases and warming temperatures flat wrong, says Alaska’s Syun-Ichi Akasofu in an Wall Street Journal essay.

And is there legitimate consensus that human-generated emissions are the cause of the current bout of climate change?

Definitely not, Akasofu says.

“Definitive scientific proof that the present warming is mostly caused by the greenhouse effect … is simply an assumption that has morphed into a fact,” Akasofu wrote in an essay that appeared a few weeks ago. (It was based on an article from Far Eastern Economic Review, “Storm in a Teacup Over Climate Change.”)

As a reply, the climate change blog published by Nature took on Akasofu’s assertions one by one in Some climate change fallacies.

Akasofu, a pioneer in aurora research, seems to be “confused,” the blog argued.

“Akasofu immediately starts out on the wrong foot by claiming there are two sides, those of believers and non-believers,” wrote climate scientist Kevin Trenberth. “But it is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of scientific facts!”

Read on » » » »

Portage Glacier retreats, yes indeed.
But is it due to climate warming?
Source: USFS

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.

A Shishmaref house topples
Shismaref Relocation Committee

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.

Read on » » » »

Newtok is surrounded by water
Credit: Jennifer Payne

The New York Times has published another story on the impact of climate change on people in the Far North, this time calling attention to the slow-moving environmental catastrophe undercutting houses and boardwalks within the Yup’ik village of Newtok.

Unfortunately, once again, the NYTs has misstated some climate warming facts and missed completely a subtlety that makes the Newtok situation even more egregious.

The story, Victim of Climate Change, a Town Seeks a Lifeline, does a good job of describing some of the basic challenges facing the village in its quest to find resources to move to a new location on higher ground of Nelson Island.

But the NYT committed at least one major goof and leaves out details about the village’s progress. Let’s begin where reporter William Yardley trots out the old boiler-plate permafrost-is-melting factoid.

The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean.

What a well-crafted sentence! If only its premise were true. Unfortunately, widespread melting of permafrost has not occurred, and Newtok’s problem, while exceptionally dire, didn’t occur due to warming climate.

Read on » » » »

Captive Beluga looks around
Robyn Angliss / NMML

Say your mother weakens. Her heart beats erratically, her breathing grows shallow. She starts to collapse. So you rush her to the hospital, hoping for tests, oxygen and saline drips, maybe even life support.

But the doctor refuses to admit her.

“We can’t treat your mother because we don’t know what’s wrong,” he says. “There’s no point in spending any money until we have a diagnosis.”

This alarming little tale mirrors the reasoning floated last week by Henry Springer, executive director of the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, regarding the plight of the depleted beluga whales in Cook Inlet near Anchorage.

In an op-ed piece that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, Springer argues that people know too little about this unique, isolated population to justify protecting them under the Endangered Species Act. (Read a pro-action argument by Audubon Alaska senior scientist John Schoen.)

Springer wrote:

“Accurate, long-term data is needed, and it currently does not exist. … Until it is scientifically established that human activity in Cook Inlet is causing the decline of the belugas, an ESA designation will unnecessarily curtail human activity.”

Springer is a no-nonsense bridge engineer who has previously made on-target comments in public forums. He must know very well that his beluga facts are wrong and reasoning absurd. The white creature in danger here may be far more elephant than whale.

Read on » » » »

What’s in your climate change wallet?
USFWS

Here we go again. The rhetoric and disinformation surrounding climate change science continues to grow ever more shrill.

In any given week, one might read that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is “science fiction.” That the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change practices “junk science.” That the Earth was colder (warmer) in the Little Ice Age (when the dinosaurs roamed.) That polar bears are thriving. That the sunspot cycles drive climate. That Antarctica’s ice cap has thickened.

That scientists challenging global warming might get “assassinated.” That those wacky climate modelers once tried to warn us about the danger of a new ice age, and just can’t seem to get their story straight.

And there you are, a regular person watching the sky, wondering if the mosquito you just swatted carries West Nile virus. In between paying bills and commuting to work, you ponder: Do droughts and wildfires prove global warming? Or is it those mondo hurricanes with nine feet of precipitation?

Read on » » » »