“Barley”
That’s diagnostic of soil salinity. Barley survives in high salinity soils where wheat doesn’t. Just ask a Sumerian.
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I have observed how the changes in ocean temperatures and oxygen levels have effected fish populations in the Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific. The so-called “blobs’ of oxygen depleted ocean are growing pretty much every year.
Commercial fisheries in both there and the Bering Seas are crashing bit by bit. Even fisheries like the Copper River salmon fishery, which is very well managed are showing population crashes and smaller fish, leading to extended closures, which are generally a new feature for Cordova.
I am far less optimistic about the future of Alaska than is the author of this article.
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What about methane? Isn’t the release of methane one of the principal problems when permafrost melts?
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Have a young friend who got her Masters in Botany investigating the encroachment of shrubs and trees into the North Slope of the Brooks Range. Plants are moving up in latitude and altitude. And yes a couple of degrees is all it takes for major changes to accrue. Too many 33 degree days and rain/freeze rather than 31 degrees with snow turns a normally wonderful winter scene into an icy bone breaking daily ordeal. This winter has been lovely but we are warming without doubt. I live on an enormous lake that for the first time in old timers memories did not freeze in 1976. Since then it has remained open another 9 winters. That first warm winter in '76 allowed the Spruce Bark beetles to live and breed through the winter. Over the next several years they ate and killed vast acreage of Spruce over the entire Kenai Peninsula. This year they are spreading north into the Matanuska valley.
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Good lord the enormous sunlight(growing degree days) hours of summer is an advantage to plant life. You can almost see plants growing from a few hours ago in the Interior of Alaska in the summer.
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The Alaska North Slope and the Yukon Delta are the only parts of Alaska that are significantly threatened by sea level rise in the next 100 years. Most of Southern Alaska is well above sea level.
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California is not going to be the global economy it currently is if we continue to go without rainfall and our snowpack keeps dwindling.
Housing is already ridiculously expensive but now fire insurance is insane…
It’s heartbreaking and frightening that those in power are asleep at the wheel.
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It’s probably pretty spotty in most places I would imagine. Hearkening back to some of my old geography classes, I recall a lot of Alaskan and Canadian top soil was scraped off and dumped in the lower 48 states by glaciers during the ice ages and top soil depth and structure has only partially recovered even over some thousands of years intervening due to a very low decomposition rate (peat bogs and permafrost), extreme frost heaving, soil chemistry, and other factors.
I’m sure there’s more recent research and the article alludes to some but the issue is not just how Alaska is going to feed itself because increasingly the demand is going to come from the rest of the country and the kind of intense production required to meet that demand is likely to require a helluva lot more additional infrastructure including water and power than the article suggests.
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The University had experimented with and recommended a hardy Siberian strand of Barley. The entire Tanana valley soil system has been geologically documented and available I’m sure if you google it.
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I have noticed the differences over five decades of gardening in northern Vermont. Our growing season is now four to six weeks longer than it was in the 80’s. Not every summer is frost free for all of that additional time, but many are. I harvest raspberries until mid to late October, and plant early vegetables as soon as mid March some years. We’re still in zone 4 but we’re nudging into zone 5.
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Quite fertile, for the most part. There are tons of composted materials in the ground that have been digesting for centuries. What that means, unfortunately, is as the permafrost melts, catastrophic volumes of methane gas are released into our atmosphere. Methane, as you know, is 10x worse than CO2 for global warming.
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Given the wide array of places on this globe where our Neolithic ancestors managed to survive, I have little doubt that humanity will survive global warming.
But I have the feeling it won’t be pretty, and I’m glad I won’t be around to see it. I fully expect that things will ultimately break down to the extent that a much smaller human population - two, really, separated by a too-hot-to-live tropical band around the globe - will be reduced to subsistence farming and hunter-gathering.
Our children and grandchildren will pay the price of our leaders refusing to deal with this impending catastrophe.
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I was talking to my landscape guy last year about global warming. He said that warm weather plants he couldn’t get to grow in our region are easy to grow now and some native plants are no longer viable. He doesn’t have to believe in airy fairy scientists. All he has to do is look at his records of plants replaced from year to year to realize the climate is getting warmer.
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Survival doesn’t necessarily mean living in comfort. Our Neolithic ancestors were a lot tougher and better equipped to live in the elements with a lot less than the average human has today. There will be a significant population crash because we’ve overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity by several billion people. What goes up must come down.
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