Yereth RosenAlaska Dispatch News

This image shows the July 13-19, 2015, sea surface temperature departure from the 1981-2010 average. The warmer temperatures, indicated in red, are thought to be related to a strong El Nino event. NOAA

Monday, 02 November 2015 00:00
Written by 
Dahr Jamail By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

Justin Sullivan

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/drought-pushes-endangered-california-salmon-to-the-brink/ar-BBmDzNb?ocid=sf

Unpleasant Surprise on HealthCare.gov: Higher Rates

© Provided by AFP Fingerling Chinook salmon are dumped into a holding pen as they are transfered from a truck into the Mare Island Strait on April 22, 2014 in Vallejo, California Chinook salmon were already endangered in California’s Sacramento River, but the record drought parching the western United States has brought the iconic fish even closer to extinction.Chinook, also known as king salmon, need very cold water for their eggs to develop.

If everything goes right, the young salmon hatch and eventually make their way downstream toward the ocean, before later returning to the rivers to spawn and die.

But the migration has dropped off in recent years.

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There were 4.4 million juvenile Chinook in 2009 — half the number of four years earlier.

Last year, the number of juveniles passing by the dam in Red Bluff, at the northern end of California’s Central Valley, was just 411,000.

Approximately 95 percent of these winter-run Chinook eggs and juveniles did not survive, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“Last year was very difficult for these Sacramento River fish because of the drought and heat,” NOAA spokesman Michael Milstein told AFP.

“This year we had hoped would be better.”

It wasn’t. Although there were more adult fish spawning this year, so far there have been 22 percent fewer juveniles coming downriver, Milstein said.

To date, only 217,000 juveniles have been counted passing through Red Bluff in 2015, versus 280,000 over the same period last year.

The Sacramento Chinook, designated an endangered species in 1994, have been struggling for years, for a number of reasons, but the drought has only exacerbated the problems.

Access to the historical spawning habitat of winter-run Chinook salmon on the Sacramento is cut off by the Shasta and Keswick dams, built in the 1940s.

– ‘Too warm for spawning’ –

© Provided by AFP Fingerling Chinook salmon swim in a holding pen after they were transfered from a truck into the Mare Island Strait on April 22, 2014 in Vallejo, California The remaining habitat, below the dams, is too warm for spawning, so managers release dam water to bring down the temperature and allow the population to reproduce.

“But the drought has reduced the amount (of water) available, both for fish and for other uses,” explained Milstein.

He said rising air temperatures also raise the temperature of the water that remains.

The migration numbers are only preliminary, Milstein said, “but right now the news for these salmon is not good.”

The drought and its impacts are “the type of things we expect to see more often with global warming,” he said.  [Sorry, but this is global warming!]

Some species, like sturgeon in the same rivers, might be able to adapt to the type of temperature changes projected with global climate change, Milstein said.

But other aquatic species up and down the US west coast are facing a fate similar to Sacramento Chinook salmon.

Milstein said many sockeye salmon in Oregon and Washington also did not survive this year due to the warmer waters.

Washington’s long summer of fire and smoke

https://www.hcn.org/articles/washingtons-long-summer-of-fire-and-smoke

On Spokane’s west side, the Houston Fire was growing fast. If a wind were to come up and whip flames across a field of weeds, the gate that keeps the world at bay at the entrance to Erika and Andrea Zaman’s lane would do no good. Just in time, Andrea blasted back from the airport, scooped up her sitter and the two kids. The sitter’s mom took them in while firefighters worked hard to turn the blaze away.

This past summer was tense. I live just four miles from what became known as the Houston Fire, and I speculated that its flames might gallop along our street, leaving me little to do but climb a ladder to the roof with a garden hose, wet down the house and hope for the best.

Back in 1902, a wildfire near Yacolt, Washington, ravaged 370 square miles. That fire reigned as the largest in state history until 2014, when the Carlton Complex Fire assailed Brewster and Pateros in the north-central part of the state. At 391 square miles, the Carlton out-burned the Yacolt Fire, destroying 353 homes and causing $100 million in damage.

This year, in yet another symptom of the impacts of climate change, the Okanogan Complex of fires surpassed them both by growing to 400 square miles. Some climate skeptics — the deniers — claim that warming and turmoil are natural. They are willing to finger anything else — oceanic oscillations, volcanic eruptions, even sunspots — as probable triggers. They cite anything outside of human-brewed pollution as a cause. Those who deny we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change want to damn all contradictory opinions, even the newest research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Meanwhile, every year wildfires in the West start earlier, burn hotter, grow in acreage and last longer. Spent fuels heat the planet, drive regional droughts and cause vaster fires to destroy more trees. The causes are reciprocal. Pollution begets wildfires, which in turn beget more pollution. And yet, ironically, global forests are ideal carbon sinks for renegade carbon. I like to call them absorption organs. Instead of doing their job of “sinking” or absorbing CO2, though, our forests are turning rapidly into ash.

Climate disruption is a kind of ice age in reverse. As the planet warms and polar ice caps melt at hastening rates, weird weather increasingly becomes the norm.

The anthropogenic argument on climate change holds that petrochemicals generate planetary grief — that carbon pollution spreads misery beyond the rural-urban interface where wildfires do most damage. We mine oil and gas under the planet’s surface, we eradicate the cleansing vegetation that surrounds the mines, we refine crude to make ever more-flammable stuff in districts known as cancer alleys, we contaminate the environment in unsustainable ways when we combust that stuff. We are the “weather-makers,” the “future eaters,” in the fine phrases of writer and scientist Tim Flannery.

Aware Americans would like to curtail carbon generation in every way. They would put the brakes on the coal being transported by trains and burnt to make electricity, slow the highly combustible oil being pumped from Midwest fields, limit the homes popping up so far from urban cores and thereby necessitating long commutes, create incentives for carmakers to manufacture models that exceed miles-per-gallon averages in the low 20s.

For weeks on end this summer, assailed by wildfire smoke, we residents of the inland Northwest kept hoping for rain. When at last a summer shower arrived, raindrops atomized the dust and made every parched thing pungent. People fairly spun with bliss; it had been so long, they did not know what they’d been missing.

In the shadow of the Houston Fire, residents returned home the same day. They were luckier than many people have been these last two years. No houses or lives were lost. Andrea, Erika and their children breathed relief, thanked the brave firefighters, kept the windows closed and ran the AC.

A week later, I biked the road that had split the 60-acre burn site. The scent of ash and chemicals tainted the air. One barn had been leveled, another scorched. Bulldozers had punched roads through the forest to give the firefighters access, and barbed wire slumped where posts once held it. On both sides of rural Grove Road, blackened trees and grasslands spread as far as the eye could see, and on the asphalt and the pastures lay red stains from the fire repellant — battle scars from a battle we’ve yet to acknowledge we’re fighting.

Paul Lindholdt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He lives and bikes in Spokane, Washington, and is a professor of English at Eastern Washington University. His latest book is Explorations in Ecocriticism.

Been there, done that—for about 20 years. Oh, I had a motor car, but for 5 or 6 months of winter, I couldn’t get all the way to the cabin with it. Of course, I didn’t mind cross country skiing for the last mile or two.

The verse, “No phone, no lights, no motor car” has been going through my head, ever since hurricane Patricia: https://exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/will-gilligan-and-other-distractions-save-us-from-the-reality-of-climate-change/

At first I thought the media was just trying to distract its readers with a link to Gilligan’s Island trivia. But perhaps it was a reminder to potential storm evacuees what they’d have to do without for a while if they stayed for the 200mph winds and torrential rains.

No one in this fully-modern world wants to be left without the essentials, or even “a single luxury.” But at some point in history, people are going to have to learn to live without again. The thought of it should come easier when one considers what a mess all the lights and motor cars have gotten us into so far.

Chances are, the Patricias, Katrinas or Sandys of the future will be no laughing matter. How funny will it be when Gilligan has to add the line, “No hospitals, police, no freeways, no Walmarts” to his theme song next time Nature tries to take us down a couple of notches?

– See more at: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/#sthash.cXU28tOf.qzFmPulZ.dpuf

Dr. Richard Dewey, Associate Director, Science

Updated: September 1, 2015

The surface waters of the Northeast Pacific started warming in 2013 and now, in mid 2015, remain significantly warmer than at any time over the last few decades. By January 2014, the area and intensity of this warm anomaly had reached its maximum. Howard Freeland (Institute of Ocean Sciences) constructed a map of sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTa) for January 2014 (using the Reynolds SST data set) showing a region of warm temperature anomalies exceeding 4 standard deviations above the mean. He achieved the same result when using independent Argo float data. The area exceeding 3 standard deviations covered an area of more than 1000 km². To put this in perspective, such an anomalous event would be expected less than once per millennium (<0.1%)! By the fall of 2014 this warm pool of surface water had shifted eastward from the central Gulf of Alaska, and by late 2014 and into early 2015, was blanketing the entire west coast of North America (Figure 1, shown above). Although the extent and the mechanisms and dynamics responsible are still being assessed, there is a growing consensus as to some of the contributing factors that may have led to the development of these warm Northeast Pacific conditions, and a growing awareness of the significance (see for example Chris Mooney’s piece in the Washington Post).

By the spring of 2015 the NOAA El Nino prediction center announced that we are finally (after nearly a year of speculation) entering into an El Nino cycle. Although El Nino is now considered a rather global phenomina, it has a nucleus and primary signals in the western and central equatorial Pacific. The dynamics of an El Nino are related to a strong coupling between the atmosphere and upper ocean in the western equatorial Pacific. When the easterly trade winds slacken, the elevated warm surface waters in the western equatorial Pacific can surge eastward along the equator

– See more at: http://www.oceannetworks.ca/warm-northeast-pacific-ocean-conditions-continue-2015#sthash.tQq1itd7.dpuf