This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1403796
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1403796
That’s one big fuckin’ cabbage you got there, Zeke!
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Please don’t let any increased fertility hit some citizens of Wasilla…
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This article perfectly illustrates how climate change is most noticable at the margins. Too many deniers scoff at projections of 2 or 3 C warmer as being a non-issue. But a few degrees either side of 32 F makes a huge difference. Using growing-degree days shows the non-linearity of climate change in a similar fashion. A decade or two ago researchers determined baseline climate conditions spanning centuries not through temperature records but journals of when plants first started sprouting or leaves falling from trees. These are frequency-modulation (FM) signals which - as we know from radio - are immune from interference. Temperature records are amplitude-modulation (AM) signals that are subject to noise due to the stochastic nature of daily / weekly / monthly temperature fluctuations. So while local Alaskans may see this as a bonus (I’m not opposed to food security), the flora and fauna that have evolved to live in this climate will not fare so well.
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Unless the effects of climate change on Bigfoot are addressed, these so-called researchers are just hacks!
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Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m looking forward to Pennsylvania oranges myself. Not to the roving bands of starving mutants so much, but you take the good with the bad, right?
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After Alaska, we can do Antarctica!
After Antarctica, we…
Oops.
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Well, good luck to agriculture in Alaska. (Seriously.) But they may come to regret all the soil and water contamination wreaked by their mining and drilling activities throughout the last century, though.
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Just imagine the trucking costs from Mars…
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I wonder what the soils are like.
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The matter-of-fact tone of this article is somewhat bracing. These are truly dramatic and seismic shifts. It’s scary that we’re pretty much past the point of reducing emissions to prevent this, and now are focused on how we are going to live with (almost unmitigated) climate change. IOW it’s time to buckle up, 'cuz it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. 
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The Arctic ice is the Northern hemisphere’s air conditioning. When it disappears so does the air conditioning.
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As the permafrost continues to melt the soil becomes more unstable. You couldn’t grow crops because there’s not enough sunlight and you can’t build permanent structures because they’ll sink in the mud. Also, I would imagine you’re going to have significant seismic events as the ground continues to shift. Otherwise it should be just peachy 
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I was an investor in the first Agricultural auction in Delta Junction in 1978. Wanted to acquire a large tract of land but the demand was so great because so many people were here due to the pipeline construction that my dreams of farming ended up being a 20 acre parcel. Later the huge parcels labeled the Delta Barley Project were let and the massive land clearing began. The climate was so fickle with late spring frosts and early snow that crushed the ripened Barley led to most of the land going back to alder/willow. A few hardy farmers still live there but damn it’s hard. At a time that farmers were going out of business on established farms all over the midwest the Delta Junction dreams just weren’t ready for fulfillment. Yes the climate is changing up here and seeds are becoming more adaptable for the fickle climate but we’e most definitely not there yet. Someday the Tanana River Valley will be an enormous bread basket but its’ a two steps forward and one step back reality as of now.
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Incidentally, humanity is marching towards extinction in the not too distant future. Food wars start between 3-4 degrees Celsius. Water wars will probably start before that as places like India, China and the Middle East dry up. Removing vegetation cuts off the water cycle and speeds up the process. Climate Change is a threat multiplier so mass migration will continue to get worse in countries that are already overpopulated and stressed. These trends are already evident btw.
Trump came to power because he promised to wall off Mexico and South America. I doubt he’ll be the last despot to take advantage of the situation.
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Just a Brussels sprout.
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There was a time when Greenland was actually green. Maybe is not a bad idea to buy the place, we will need a place to relocate Floridians and Louisianans and maybe even Arizonans.
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I find the series of maps illustrating this article a bit strange because throughout the series the land mass of Alaska remains unchanged. Yet a warming climate also means the glaciers and polar ice caps will disappear, water levels and water availability will change, and ocean currents will shift. While the article touches in its beginning on some of the problems that climate change may bring to Alaska and its communities (e.g., structural collapse as the permafrost layer disintegrates, increasing wildfires), those maps with their unchanging land mass seem to point to the upside of climate change only. Look Alaska will remain the same, but warmer! We will be able to grow more crops here in more parts of the state!
But will the land mass of Alaska remain the same? What happens to Alaska’s shorelines and its islands?
Will they rise because there is no longer the weight of glacier ice on them or will they be swamped by the rising oceans? Will freshwater rivers and lakes that currently exist still be there if glaciers that feed them disappear or shrink drastically (think of what is happening to the Colorado river)? River valleys are usually where valuable soil is found - but climate change could have huge impacts waterways and their surrounding deltas and valleys. Will rivers become saltier further up stream because of rising sea levels (as is happening in river delta areas in parts of the lower 48)? What micro-organisms will be released as the permafrost becomes a permabog and how will people and animals traverse this changing landscape (not to mention how much longer will the biting insect season be)?
I realize that it’s too late to undo some of the effects of the climate change caused by fossil fuels (and maybe even all of them unless world governments find real political will very quickly to make the necessary changes). So it’s necessary for us to figure out ways to adapt to the mess that we have created in all of the earth’s ecosystems if we want humans as a species to survive, but those maps trouble me because reduce the complexity climate change could bring to one very simple aspect (shifting of climate zones). It maybe true that Alaska will become warmer but how much food security will there be if fresh water is less available or the warmest zones are coastal areas that now are underwater or threatened by severe erosion or salt-water flooding?
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Nah.
A fair number of us will just be dead! The dead don’t need to worry about surviving, we just need to avoid wooden stakes or bullets to the head, depending on which way we decide to come back to punish the living.
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Alaska 's temps are often influenced by events in the Pacific. Like a warm water blob:
In late 2013, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water, roughly one-third the size of the contiguous United States, formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began to spread. A few months later, Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, dubbed it The Blob
Although much of Alaska was setting record warm temps in late December, November averaged 7 degrees colder for the entire month.
Mostly, warm weather is often attributed to events the Pacific:
The ongoing spate of warmth is tied to a sprawling dome of stagnant high pressure banked southeast of the Aleutians in the northeastern Pacific. Reinforced by unusually warm ocean waters north of Hawaii, that high-pressure “heat dome” is inducing sinking air. That brings about additional warming.
link https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/12/28/alaska-record-temperatures-climate/
I wouldn’t be financing any crop growing ventures up there just yet.
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