Alaska Ground Zero For Climate Breakdown - Winter Temps Up 6F Since 1950

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Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Drought is stressing and killing spruce, aspen and birch trees. Alaska has emerged as the poster state for global warming, the climate effect attributed to higher concentrations of "greenhouse" gases - mostly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels - that capture the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

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Alaska is ahead of the climate-change curve because polar regions warm the fastest. They had long been kept frigid by vast regions of snow and ice that reflect 70% of the sun's energy back out to space. But higher temperatures are shrinking that snow and ice cover. In the Arctic, summer sea ice has shrunk 15% to 20% in the past 30 years, according to 2005's Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. And as the snow and ice recede, the sun's rays are hitting more dark ground and water, which absorb most of the heat, reflecting just 20% of the energy away, says Matthew Sturm, a research scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Fairbanks.

Lakes and ponds are disappearing as the permafrost, permanently frozen ground that underlies much of Alaska north of Fairbanks, melts. "It's like pulling the plug in a bathtub," says Peter Schweitzer, an anthropologist who works with the Arctic peoples in Alaska and Russia. In some areas, as much as 40% of surface water has disappeared, taking with it vital habitat for ducks and other waterfowl, says Juday.

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More heat means longer summers. The growing season in Fairbanks has gone from 80 to 120 days since records were first kept in the 1900s, says John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. But those summer days haven't come with any more rain, so plants and trees adapted to short, cool summers grow quickly but then dry out while it's still warm. That's one reason forest fires have become such a problem, he says.

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http://www.alaskareport.com/science10022.htm