impacts makes it difficult in many instances to determine the precise
impacts of climate change from other human activities, or from long-
term natural climatic fluxes. Opponents of measures to counteract
global warming seize on those difficulties as arguments for inaction,
but in fact the opposite is true. It can take relatively little for a popula-
tion or ecosystem to feel the impacts of warming temperatures—as the
examples of the Brünnich’s guillemots on Coats Islands, Peary caribou
on Bathurst Island, and short-tailed shearwaters in the Bering Sea
demonstrate clearly. In an ecosystem that is already stressed or in flux,
the effects of any such change are only likely to be magnified, with
unanticipated consequences. And in the meantime, while the debate
about global warming continues, there are, as we have seen, several
instances in Alaska and the Arctic where its reality is becoming only
too clear—and that is something that Alaska Natives, in particular,
know only too well.
OMINOUSINCREASES
Global warming in Alaska is not uniform; indeed, portions of the east-
ern Arctic are undergoing a slight cooling. But in the western Arctic,
and particularly in Alaska and the Bering Sea region, the changes are
pronounced.
According to the Alaska Climate Research Center, annual average
temperatures in Alaska increased by 2.69°F between 1971 and 2000;
spring temperatures across the state during that period increased by
4.23°F and in Barrow on the northern Arctic coast by 6.97°. In
Fairbanks, Alaska, the fall and winter of 2002 to 2003 were the
warmest ever recorded, with temperatures 3° above normal in
September, 8° above normal in October, 14° above normal in
November, and 11° above normal in December; for the year, tempera-
tures were 2.9° above the 1971 to 2000 average. The start of the 2003
Iditarod sled dog race was moved several hundred miles north of its
usual site outside Anchorage because of a lack of snow.
A 1998 report by the Center for Global Change and Arctic System
Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks argued that in the past
decade, climate change in Alaska has resulted in, among other things,
106 Kieran Mulvaney