Alaska's changing climate: warmer weather brings opportunity for innovation.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's been 19 years, but Bob Collins still vividly remembers catching his first king salmon.

"I went out on the Kenai River with my cousin and my first king was 66 pounds," said Collins, a retired State prosecutor. "I enjoyed the whole experience being out like that--the wild, free-flowing water, the scenery, watching eagles catch fish, seeing bears."

Fishing has been radically different this year, Collins said in a June interview.

"My brother was up last week, and we hit it pretty hard for a long time," he said. "I personally saw seven fish landed, and of those seven, four were those young jacks, early returners. Seven fish in 800 fishing hours in peak season is less than one an hour."

Scientists say global climate change might be one reason why fewer, smaller salmon are emerging from the warmer streams where they were spawned. Warmer oceans replete with new potential predators moving up from the south also hamper a salmon's chance of surviving long enough to make its way back to its spawning ground.

Alaska is showing to the world the earliest indicators of how climate change is ravaging glaciers and Arctic-region ocean ice, evaporating bodies of waters, killing or stunting polar bears and other animals, thawing permafrost and stressing vegetation.

Climate change is a reason why Alaska's wildland fires ignite, beetles infest and kill spruce trees, roads on formerly solid permafrost collapse, furious storms scour away shorelines of coastal villages like Shishmaref, flooding rivers wreck villages and why people like Collins are catching fewer or smaller fish than they once did.

GLOBAL WARMING

The earth has warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last 50 years, according to the National Assessment Synthesis Team, an advisory committee chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Alaska has warmed approximately 4 degrees in that same period.

In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," available online at www.globalchange.gov/usimpacts. The report has an Alaska chapter with updated facts and figures connected with permafrost, coastal vulnerability and the state's lengthening summers.

"That report was a year or two in the works," said John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change organized under the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Walsh, along with fellow UAF scientist A. David McGuire, was part of a consortium of experts that produced the report.

ALASKA WARMING

Over the past 50 years, Alaska has warmed at more than twice the rate of the rest of the United States average, the report stated, and Alaska's annual average temperature has increased 3.4 degrees, while winters have warmed 6.3 degrees. Average annual temperatures in Alaska are projected to rise 3.5 degrees to 7 degrees by 2050...