Obama to see effects of warming in Alaska

Global warming is carving measurable changes into Alaska, and President Barack Obama is about to see it.

Obama leaves today for a three-day visit to the 49th state in which he will speak at a State Department climate change conference and become the first president to visit the Alaska Arctic. There, and in the sub-Arctic part of the state, he will see the damage caused by warming.

More than 3.5 trillion tons of water have melted off of Alaska’s glaciers since 1959, when Alaska became a state, studies show — enough to fill more than 1 billion Olympic-sized pools.

The crucial, coast-hugging sea ice that protects villages from storms and makes hunting easier is dwindling in summer and is now absent each year a month longer than it was in the 1970s, other studies find. The Army Corps of Engineers identified 26 villages where erosion linked to sea ice loss threatens the communities’ very existence.

Permafrost is thawing more often as the ground warms, so as the ground oozes, roads, pipelines and houses’ foundations tilt and shift — sometimes enough to cause homes to be abandoned. Scientists fear the thawing permafrost will unleash large amounts of greenhouse gases and speed up worldwide warming.

So far this year, more than 5.1 million acres in Alaska have burned in wildfires. In the first 10 years of statehood, Alaska averaged barely a quarter million acres of wildfires yearly. The last 10 years averaged 1.2 million acres.

“The state is changing and changing rapidly,” said Fran Ulmer, chairwoman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and Alaska’s former lieutenant governor.

Scientists say those things are happening — at least partly and probably mostly — because of Alaska’s temperature. Alaska’s yearly average temperature has jumped 3.3 degrees since 1959, and the winter average has spiked 5 degrees since statehood, according to federal records. Last year was the hottest on record, and so far this year Alaska is a full degree warmer than last year.

Weather changes in the Arctic trigger changes in the jet stream and reverberate down south, including the dreaded polar vortex escape that has brought subfreezing temperatures to great expanses of North America in recent winters, said Martin Jeffries, an Arctic scientist for the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Warming’s effects seem to be speeding up. From 1959 to 1993, Alaska’s glaciers lost 57 billion tons of ice a year, but that jumped to almost 83 billion tons a year since 1994, according to Anthony Arendt, who co-authored a study on the subject in July.