World News Korner

Alaska is ground zero for climate change, and its effects on the state are profound.

Courtesy of the Des Moines Register:The nation's last frontier is - in many ways - its ground zero for climate change. Alaska's temperatures are rising twice as fast as those in the lower 48, prompting more sea ice to disappear in summer. While this may eventually open the Northwest Passage to sought-after tourism, oil exploration and trade, it also spells trouble as wildfires increase, roads buckle and tribal villages sink into the sea.

USA TODAY traveled to the Fairbanks area, where workers were busy insulating thaw-damaged roads this summer amid a record number of 80-degree (or hotter) days, as the eighth stop in a year-long series to explore how climate change is changing lives.

The pace of permafrost thawing is "accelerating," says Vladimir Romanovsky, who runs the University of Alaska's Permafrost Laboratory in Fairbanks. He expects widespread degradation will start in a decade or two. By mid-century, his models suggest, permafrost could thaw in at least a third of Alaska and by 2100, in two-thirds of the state.

"This rapid thawing is unprecedented" and is largely due to fossil-fuel emissions, says Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. He says it's already emitting its own heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane, but the amount will skyrocket in the next 20 to 30 years. "Once the emissions start, they can't be turned off."

Alaska's "drunken forests."

Telltale signs are common - from huge potholes in parking lots to collapsed hill slopes and leaning trees in what are called "drunken forests" in Denali National Park, home of the majestic Mount McKinley - North America's tallest peak.

It is hard to find an Alaska native who is not aware of the effects of global warming on their state.

They live out in the middle of some of the most inhospitable country on the continent, and until fairly recently they believed they were one with their ancestral home. However today they are seeing villages that have existed for a thousand years suddenly stolen away by a relentless sea that used to be hundreds of yards away, migrating patterns of caribou suddenly shifted to miles away from their traditional hunting grounds, and the very ground beneath their feet giving way as the permafrost melts for the first time in eons.

Sadly this awareness is not reflected in our politicians who often side with developers and support their continued exploration and attempts to rip as much fossil fuel out of the ground as possible before releasing it into the atmosphere to speed up the warming process. A warming process that is accelerated further by the fact that the once it melts it begins emitting its own heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane.

Neither Lisa Murkowski, Don Young, or even Democrat Mark Begich, has done a damn thing to fight climate change, nor will they if they want to keep getting elected.

And of course our most recognized and thankfully now ex-politician Sarah Palin is well known for pimping the continued exploration for, and use of, fossil fuels with her famous "Drill, baby, drill" statements.

You might think that the people in the position to actually do something to protect this state and its indigenous people might make the effort to do so, but then you would have no idea of the stranglehold that the oil company has on our politicians, and how little they care about those without the funds to finance their campaigns or the voices to embarrass them into action.

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