In Alaska, there has been widespread mass extinction of seabirds and other marine animals for five years.
This year, the NOAA fishery detected an unusually high number of dead gray whales and sea lions. More than 120 gray whales have been washed ashore, about 300 dead seals have been registered, and thousands of dead seabirds have been washed ashore on Alaska’s beaches this year.
Although the autopsies are ongoing, their death is due to emaciation and hunger. The most obvious explanation, according to the scientists, for the mass extinction of marine animals since 2015 is the warmer sea temperatures.
In Alaska, global warming is particularly fast and intense. The ice cover around Alaska usually lasts until the end of May. This year it disappeared in March. Alaska recorded a record high of 32.2 degrees this summer. It was the highest ever recorded in Alaska since the beginning of the registration of weather record.
The NOAA fishery has also reported “unusual deaths” this year among gray whales and sea lions after more than 120 gray whales washed ashore on the west coast of North America, including the Alaskan coast, and by September this year, 282 dead seals were registered, almost five times the average reported strandings. All showed signs of severe emaciation.
The consequences of climate change are already having an impact on the regions along the Alaskan coast. Many communities, as well as the indigenous people, are suffering the consequences of erosion. In addition, dissolves due to global warming of permafrost. As a result, buildings collapse and ecosystems are destroyed.
“It was as if we didn’t have March this year,” said Martin Stuefer, state climatologist and an associate research professor with the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “We had April instead.”
The ice cover around Alaska usually lasts until the end of May. This year it disappeared in March!
Researchers don’t make climate conclusions based on a month’s data, but Alaska’s warm March reflects an upward warming climate trend in America’s largest state, Stuefer said.
“We see the last several years were way warm. There’s a clear climate-induced warming. There’s no doubt about it,” he said.
The picture went around the world. In Greenland, dogs pull a sled through ankle-high water. Since records began, it has never been so hot in Greenland and Alaska as this year. Photo: dpa / Steffen M. Olsen
Warmer water contains less dissolved oxygen, and the plankton and tiny crustaceans that grow there are less nutritious than those in colder water. This means that migratory species such for example, seabirds may arrive at locations where they normally seek food and find that their food is lacking.
There are immediate local and economic impacts along the western and northern shores of the state, with birds and marine life dead and sea temperatures promoting algal blooms that can poison water for wildlife.
This crisis is spreading to many of Alaska’s coastal cities, which depend on fisheries because their economies and local diets depend on them.
“Much of what people eat there during the year comes from foods they harvest themselves,” says climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the International Arctic Research Center. “If people can not get out on the ice to hunt seals or whales, it will affect their food security. It is a human crisis of survivability. “
Events such as these – if the weather patterns align themselves so that they have extreme consequences – are also evidence of the growing climate crisis, say scientists.
“What happens on Alaska’s shores basically affects each of us, “ Brettschneider told CNN. “Most people feel the effects of climate change, even if they do not know or want to downplay it. Dramatic changes happen and they increase. “
My comment: We lost a lot of time talking and thinking about climate rescue.
We urgently need committed professionals with a clear plan to solve the real problems on this planet, rather than any climate prophets, such as the media product of Greta Thunberg, for example, wich de recognized and acclaimed by politicians, rulers, mass media, industrialists, etc., as the deus ex macina of climate salvation.
Everyone is currently living from the maded panic, everyone claims we do not have time, but everyone takes the time to chatter and do nothing.
Abolition of factory farming, control over population growth, high taxation of meat, state subsidization of vegan products, punishment of plastic waste, fair trade promotion and so much more would probably do more than the media theater of schoolchildren’s panic making.
In order to save climate, animals and nature we need an effective and not an elitist activism.
Best reegards to all, Venus
Friedrich Mülln, SOKO Tierschutz (SOKO Animal Protection Society)
World Animals Voice 