In a land of extremes, nowhere in the Arctic does the temperature oscillate more wildly than the tiny settlement of Fort Yukon in north-eastern Alaska. This village — of a few hundred residents belonging to the indigenous Gwich’in community, and which is only accessible by air, boat or snowmobile, depending on the time of year — has the distinction of being both the coldest and warmest place in Alaska.
In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.
Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.
Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.
A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Further reading " author="Thomas Fazi"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/07/climate-hysteria-has-no-class/[/su_unherd_related]
Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”
Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.
China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”
As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”
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Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.
According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.
“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”
Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world's most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Nick Cater"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/08/the-hypocrisy-of-australias-net-zero-policy/[/su_unherd_related]
Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”
The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.
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SubscribeI’ve no idea why the author has to bring in climate change and “melting” of the arctiv when the artic ice extent is now back up to what it was in 2008. It strikes me that there is a lot of hysteria in this article about the emergence of old bacteria and viruses. For heaven’s sake, how about trying to come back to earth and present data in a calm and measured way.
Science and rationality is always a problem for deniers. You scream and wail in the face of facts, you listen to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump instead of scientists, and try to ignore the clear signs of climate change.
Fortunately nobody listens to you and you can be happily ignored while you throw your tantrums.
You’re risking turning Science into Religion, CS. It’s one thing to “trust science” if you define science as an aggregate system of indisputable facts repeatedly tested for bias. It’s another to put blind trust in credentialed “Experts” tasked with interpreting wide swaths of data and compiling it into a coherent narrative.
You’re a Socialist so you should know as well as any that if corporate interests are funding scientists to come to a particular conclusion than the data deserves skepticism. If a strong plurality of Scientists, aka a Consensus suddenly decides fracking is carbon neutral, would you just accept that argument because they’re declared “respectable” scientists? Or would you question the motives being tied to oil development?
It’s best to ignore obvious trolls. Just like they ignore scientific facts that are inconvenient, such as those Canadian pine trees are only able to reproduce when the pine cones open during fires. Why would they evolve like that if forest fires were not normal? And the fact that those roundworms and viruses got frozen in the ground many, many years ago, when the earth was warmer than today. These unfortunate souls apparently don’t realize that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and it continues to change like it has for 4.5 billion years. Whatever happens during a blink of the eye, which is how long we individuals exist, is meaningless.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/BOREASFire
I can’t recall the source now, but i vividly recall reading that at some point in the future, the entire fossil-fuelled industrial era (c.1770-2070) will be a dark layer one millimetre thick in a rock formation.
Compelling.
LOL!
Combusting, my dear chap.
LOL…
What was the source for this one, Steve? Or can’t you remember?!?!?
Daimler, old chap.
Are you sure? Did you just remember that all of a sudden?!?!?
The clue is in the name Fossil as in Fossil Fuels. The only way CO2 got to be Fossil carbon is because living organisms ‘fixed it’ – SO when ALL that CO2 was still in the atmosphere, the planet couldn’t have ‘burned’ and all life died could it?
I think people are too hard on CS. He’s singlehandedly united this board across the political spectrum.
His subversive message of unity could bring world peace!
You are being hard on me?!?!?
You’re not very good at it – I hadn’t even noticed! I just see all the lovely fanboys who feel can’t help but get all excited every time I post!
Anyone who hasn’t figuered out Anthropological Climate change is a scam is unlikely to notice anything very much.
There are too many folk bleating on about The Science (which pretty much tells you they aren’t actual scientists, despite their Social “Science” degrees).
However when the scientist is , for example, an experienced oil & gas engineer, they don’t want to listen.
Climate Science is ‘model based’ their correlation with reality makes the Doomsday Prof Ferguson’s models look accurate.
“Risking”? I’d say it’s more than a risk!
The only deniers of climate change are people like Ml Mann, with his ludicrously inaccurate hockey stick graph. Try reading the emails between him and the UEA, when they worry desperately about the problem of medieval warming and the little ice age, and the many writers who really believe that since the Holocene the climate has been unchanging and stable.
Scientific methodology doesn’t work in the way you seem to think it does. It can’t allow human beings to predict the future on a global scale. The empirical results for previous projections are in, and they were wrong. Any scientific consensus at any given point in time can always be proven wrong, because consensus isn’t what matters in science, so theres always room for skepticism and counter-argument. Yet again you project your own ignorance and tribalism onto others.
This is one of the stupidest, most ignorant comments I have ever read in these comment sections.
Eh? “Deniers?” – Science? ROFL – Here’s a Geologist and a Nobel Prize Winner on the Pseudo Science that is Climate Science. I expect you also think mRNA vaccines are safe and effective and COVID was the new Black Death?
https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1676156584169205760?s=12
So you support the embittered, obscure and unemployable Climate Scientists?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSfdpmEafGI
Then of course ‘Denier” is a devastating scientific response to the TSI evidence don’t you think? 😉
IF you don’t know anything about the recent TSI papers that Mann and Scmidt are trying to rubbish with the equivalent of ‘denier’ because they stuff the anthropological claim of CO2 driving Climate Change, look them up.
As for Climate changes, in the UK they have a beautiful area known as the Lake District – had Climate NOT change thousands of years pre-industrial revolution, it would be the Glacier District.
Get a grip, read more widely.
Exactly. We’re in a solar system within perhaps many solar systems. Our climate will change constantly, as it has over billions of years. The idea humans can change the earth’s climate is as vapid as it is pretentious.
Right, my lying eyes…
Are lying!
You can argue about the significance of climate change, but not that it is occurring, and making the lives of hundreds of millions far worse.
Actually it isn’t making lives far worse. What is making lives far worse is the myth that it is CO2 that is driving the change and the subsequent insanity of reducing the fossil fuel production and all the associated benefits of such fuels. Cheaper and more abundant fossil fuels increases wealth and enables engineers etc to adapt to the ‘non-anthropological’ TSI driven climate changes.
Nor have I any idea why they did, it is a Cult, so they may be motivated by promises of Heaven,
I do know that very soon, the Insanity that is Net Zero is going to spill over into UK politics and the “Uniparty” ‘Consensus’ (we all know that Science doesn’t progress on Consensus, if anything it stagnates and becomes corrupt then stinks. Michael Crichton did an excellent hatchet job of Consensus in science) will either explode, or some other party will feature.
Here are the following areas that are likely to hit first.
a) Gas Boiler ban
b) ICE car ban
c) The Energy Bill provisions that are designed to keep an increasingly unstable ‘windmill/solar panel” powered Grid from collapsing. That includes using smart meters to stop you using your ‘smart devices. – Put your washing machine on the Net and soon it will tell your when you can wash your clothes!
However, hunger and food shortages aren’t that many years away. And a cold spell this winter is going to see inflation take off as Gas heads for the stars again. Care of German and EU needs to keep the lights on at any cost. Mind you, once the Grid starts to fail, UK parties will have to decide where they stand on Net Zero insanity as well.
“the burning crucible of our climate crisis”
This is one of the most absurdly hyperbolic articles I’ve seen on UnHerd.
If current warming continues, there will be pros & cons.
If we keep our heads, we can adapt just fine.
I thought I was reading a Guardian article here!
Me too!
No wonder ‘Champagne Socialist’ loved it.
You must admit she’s a great WOKE GORGON.
Oh look, racist grandpa is up!
Do you even know what Gorgons are/were?
Do you really think there is anything worth knowing that you know and I don’t?!?!?
Go back to sleep, old timer…
Judging by your comments so far you are a rather juvenile, ill informed cretin.
However perhaps I am mistaken, and you suffer from an inferiority complex. Bad luck! But you’ll get over it I am sure.
The chances of me suffering from an inferiority complex in this company are approximately zero!
Correction! the chances of you knowing it or even admitting it should you know it is not approximately zero, it is zero.
Pretend the above is written in green ink, that way it should cause less stress than the red your teacher might use.
On the evidence of your posts, there is a vast amount worth knowing that you don’t know, though probably not so much worth knowing that the ‘old timer’ doesn’t know. You for one aren’t “Standing of the shoulders of Giants” that’s for sure.
Another of your devastating scientific refutations of those ‘denier’ beliefs. Are you Prof Mann?
In the 1930s Arctic ice was lower than today,and in the 1940 s to the late 1979 s it was thicker because the climate was colder. In the last 30 years it has been almost as ice free as in the 1930s. This has provoked interest in the northern passage, the agreement between Norway and Russia over the Bering sea,Russia’s claim in 2009 to the Lomonosov ridge, and a number of research ships getting stuck in ice that was supposed to have melted. The article. Is neither new nor accurate ( except for the admission that the Arctic was warm in 1915 and cold in 1947, and is weirdly hysterical.in tone.
delayed post
“In the 1930s Arctic ice was lower than today”
No. It was the lowest recorded up to that point in the 20th Century. The trend has all been downhill since then. See Walsh and Chapman who probably have the best consolidated data set :
“20th-century sea-ice variations from observational data”and
“A database for depicting Arctic sea ice variations back to 1850”
The latter paper (with the more dramatic graphs) is unfortunately behind a pay wall but you can get an idea of the trends they are pointing out at a climate change site here :
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-piecing-together-arctic-sea-ice-history-1850/
What these changes might mean to local and the wider weather systems, climate in general, ocean circulations, distribution of fish stocks, livelihoods in the Arctic, geo-political alarums and excursions, ecological knock on effects etc. are largely speculative at the moment.
However, isn’t it wonderful that these observations and concerns are fuelling all this great research into how our earth works ?
Doesn’t it show just a modicum of wisdom that people are now playing all these “what if” scenarios ?
Don’t you think this type of long term thinking and planning is a good discipline ?
Not when you bet the global economy on computer models that fail to reflect the reality. Or hasn’t the track record of the Doomsday Prof over the last 5 or 6 ‘pandemics’ with his mortality computer modelling not yet hit home?
Lock-down was a social, medical and economic disaster based on Ferguson’s ‘Stay home or we will all die’ modelling. Curiously the same message was ignored for the various other viral epidemics he’d have locked us down for. Though when it came to cows and sheep, Blair believed him and incinerated vast numbers of them. (What is it with Greens that they hate Cows and Sheep as much as they hate humans?)
I remember commuting up and down the M5 when Dante’s inferno was played out along the Welsh border farms. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since in my life. It appeared from the motorway that the whole of the Welsh border from Malvern down to near Gloucester was ablaze.
Come COVID then Johnson believed him! Curiously, when we were all threatened with £10,000 fines for breaking ‘lock-down’ assuming we didn’t die as predicted IF we broke it. The Prof decided he had a mistress to die for and he broke lock-down.
COVID,Anthropological Climate Change are but 2 instances of what happens when you let the Globalists, particularly the UN cess pits of the IPCC and WHO have power over Governments.
Climate Scientists were the ones who first applied the tactics we now see used so often. Use Computer models, fiddle the data by ‘adjusting it’ then latch on to politicians with an eye for power or a quick buck, after that lie, exaggerate, move on to another lie when the one you first started with is exposed. They led the way for the COVID spectacular.
The ONLY way to get back to reality is by carefully assessing facts. Here are 3 that are relevant this summer to disregard the Climate Science myths.
a) The record 48c temp in Greece. It was a ground temperature, NOT an air temperature. IF we get another hot sunny day take your shoes off on a section of grass, then step onto tarmac or concrete, and see what burns – the soles of your feet or your ears.
Ground temps are often 10c higher than air temps, which is why we don’t put weather station thermometers in the sun on the ground, but 2 metres high and enclosed.
b) Consider this. We have NOT anywhere near released back into the atmosphere all the Fossil held Carbon. SO IF we are reputedly about to burn the earth and kill ALL life already (According to Greta a famous scientist said we burn last June) how come, when ALL that CO2 was in the atmosphere, there were abundant plants and animals to sequester it in the first place?
c) Climate isn’t Weather – so we are repeatedly told when weather doesn’t conform to the Green agenda. Well this summer all we hear on the news of the weather is claimed to be Climate. Now, historically we know what happened for some years after Krakatoa erupted with the weather disruptions across the world. Yet in January last year we got another ‘Krakatoa’ sized eruption in the Pacific. Though unlike Krakatoa, because this was underwater, the ‘debris’ didn’t make it into the upper atmosphere. But vast amounts of one of the most potent and badly modeled Green house gases did. Water. So much got up there that NASA initially thought their instruments were faulty. Yet has anyone heard one Climate Scientists or their shills pointing out that the ‘weather’ is related to this eruption? Nope! You haven’t because it doesn’t FIT their political agenda.
The BBC, that propaganda arm of everything w0ke, still sometimes lets reality through. Here’s how it was when the world was 7c hotter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/385SHpTG5M25Xr6G3FSMJTG/seven-things-that-happened-when-the-planet-got-really-really-hot
We didn’t all burn and Mammals evolved!
another delayed post
Yes, you can read writings from sealers in the early 1900s mentioning the lack of sea ice they were used to encountering in the artic.
Where can we read these writings?
Read some Farley Mowat and his research material
“but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw”
White Walkers!
I’ve seen Fortitude; I know what happens next.
An acquaintance of mine, eminent sea ice expert from the Scott Polar research institute in Cambridge in 2012 made the famous prediction that the Arctic ocean would be ice-free by 2020.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wadhams#:~:text=Attempting%20to%20estimate%20when%20the,conservative%20regarding%20sea%20ice%20decline.
Well, how’s that for “The Science”, then?
Why has he not been stripped of his Polar Medal?
Why would he be stripped of his polar medal, racist grandpa?
Bingo! “Racist” is sooo yesterday’s insult. A bit like ‘denier’. Haven’t you been attending branch meetings or do you fall asleep at the back and miss the “insult of the month’?
The new Cold War.
“In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties.”
Gosh. Soon the all time record of 1915 will be broken by the so-called unprecedented climate change we’re seeing now.
And until about 30 years ago, you saw the sun only intermittently in Britain, and the need to water the lawn was rare.
Sorry, I can see the change in the last 20 years–in my water bills.
Not true. 67 years ago my family would spend most of our summer holidays on Formby beach near Liverpool. My father a lorry driver, would drop us off (illegal now packing 3 families and a dog into the back of a 18 ton van!) work, then come and pick us up 12 or 13 hours later (No law requiring timer tachos then either)
My mother was always receiving compliments on the little brown boy who she returned home with. Those summers lasted from when I was 7 until I was 11, and then intermittently until 13 as my dad was moved to long haul from local. Very rarely did we have to shelter in the pine woods to avoid rain.
But on a more scientifict note, that ain’t climate, that’s weather. Have you ever thought that removing ‘smog’ ‘particulate matter’ ‘Sulphur compounds’ might affect the TSI striking the earth as clouds & fogs were formed by ‘condensation’ around minute particulate matter and that has reduced considerably?
The recent removal of heavy sulphur fuels in maritime shipping has had a noticeable effect on TSI too. Though Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai’s eruption has helped, tho’ the Greens curiously say little about that in my experience.
Very concerning, and promising – this has been on my mind for years