Where are the changes happening?

The answer to that, all around us, everyday we are now seeing the changes brought about by climate change.

But to look at an obvious change, that is so easy for all to see, we take a look at Fairbanks.

In 1920, following the end of the gold rush, this town’s population had dwindled to a thousand, the Town has always been a boom-and-bust town.

Another boom came during World War II, when several large military bases were established to counter the Japanese threat. The army and air force stayed on during the cold war and Fairbanks began to prosper as a military town.

The biggest boom of all has proved to be oil. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs right past Fairbanks and the town was the centre of the pipeline-construction effort in the mid-1970. Much of the entire states economy, not to mention its politics, revolves around the oil industry.

Dale Curtis (Resident of Fairbanks):

“What really struck me was watching the ducks swimming on the river all winter. It was Christmas time, January even, and they were still swimming around. They’re not supposed to be here at that time, they’re supposed to be south already.”

Kilometres shy of the artic circle; in mid December the town receives only three hours of sunlight. The sun doesn’t really come out at all, it just skirts along the horizon, as if entangled in the icy peaks if the Alaska Range., before plunging back down south leaving Fairbanks in frigid night.

            Temperatures regularly plummet to - 40°c . It’s so cold that the air behaves differently: distant sounds become eerily close, and the smoke from home fires lies horizontally across the rooftops.

Or at lease it used to be that cold. In recent winters temperatures in Fairbanks have reached - 30°c for only a couple of days, whilst in previous decades they had remained for months at a time.

The reason for this is simple: Alaska is baking. Temperatures in the state – as in much of the Artic – are rising ten times faster that the rest of the world. And the effects are so dramatic that entire ecosystems are beginning to unravel, as are the lifestyles of the people – many of them Native Americans – who depend on them.

In many ways Alaska is the canary in the coalmine, showing the rest of the world what lies ahead as global warming accelerates.

In Fairbanks the rising temperatures were having a dramatic impact. Much of the area is underlain by permafrost (permanently frozen ground) which now, for the first time in thousands of years is beginning to thaw.

The man who has done more than perhaps any other to highlight this, is a quietly spoken scientist based at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Professor Gunter Weller:

“In Alaska we’re seeing great changes in climate, there’s no doubt about it. This year we had extreme high temperatures and in fact it’s been the second warmest year on record”

“I think it’s clearly understood and clearly accepted by the scientific community that this is in part due to the human-induced global green-house effect”