Schoolchildren play on melting ice at Yupik Eskimo village on the Yukon Delta in Alaska on April 19, 2019. MARK RALSTON Getty Images

For those Chinese climate hoaxsters, it's all fun and games until people start dying, which is happening in a lot of places around the world, and which will keep happening as the hoax gets deeper and more serious and affects more and more of the world. For example, as Smithsonian informs us, Alaska. In March, when it is still supposed to be the dead of winter there, Alaska experienced temperatures that were 11 degrees Celsius above normal. There were consequences.

On April 15, three people, including an 11-year-old girl, died after their snowmobiles plunged through thin ice on the Noatak River in far northwestern Alaska. Earlier in the winter, 700 kilometers south, on the lower Kuskokwim River, at least five people perished in separate incidents when their snowmobiles or four-wheelers broke through thin ice. There were close calls too, including the rescue of three miners who spent hours hopping between disintegrating ice floes in the Bering Sea near Nome. Farther south, people skating on the popular Portage Lake near Anchorage also fell through thin ice. Varying factors contributed to these and other mishaps, but abnormally thin ice was a common denominator.



In Alaska, ice is infrastructure. For example, the Kuskokwim River, which runs over 1,100 kilometers across southwestern Alaska, freezes so solid that it becomes a marked ice road connecting dozens of communities spread over 300 kilometers. In sparsely populated interior Alaska, frozen rivers are indispensable for transporting goods, visiting family and delivering kids to school basketball games. Along Alaska’s west coast, the frozen waters of the Bering Sea also act as infrastructure. Each winter, frigid air transforms much of the Bering between Russia and Alaska into sea ice. As it fastens to shore, the ice provides platforms for fishing and hunting, and safe routes between communities. It also prevents wave action and storm surges from eroding the shores of coastal villages.

The ripple effects of this don't stop. The warmer ocean makes for storms more and more heavy with rain. It also upsets the ecological balance that keeps Alaska's economy rolling and keeps many of Alaska's Native population alive. As Smithsonian points out, nobody really knows what the effect of the warming of the Gulf of Alaska will have on the salmon population, but nobody's speculation is good.

For many, including Rob Campbell, a biological oceanographer with the Prince William Sound Science Center, it stirs unpleasant memories of the Blob, an enormous patch of warm water that formed in the Gulf of Alaska in 2013. It lasted over two years and upset ecological norms across our region. “Today we don’t see as much heat in the gulf as we had beginning in 2013,” says Campbell. “But in general, the northern gulf is 1.5 degrees Celsius above average. It’s a big anomaly heading into summer.” Campbell finds the conditions worrisome. “Continued warmth like this has cascading effects,” he says. “And we may not understand the consequences for species like salmon for years to come.”

Elsewhere in the Arctic and the sub-Arctic, things are no better. On Friday morning, a number of people attending a policy conference in Upper Michigan leapt to the electric Twitter machine to share photos of the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets that they were experiencing.

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Arctic warming has supported an early wildfire season in Canada; the smoke is creating red red sunrises and sunsets at Mackinac Island, where Michigan's political leadership is focused on....making is easier to drive cars. #mpc19 https://t.co/LgFSQtNBNl — Murph (@murphmonkey) May 31, 2019

The reason these are so striking is because the forests in upper Alberta are burning down right now in one of the earliest starts to wildfire season that Canada ever has seen. Smoke from those fires already has ridden the weather systems south as far as Iowa. Some 10,000 people have been evacuated in Alberta, but the fires do make for a nice photo or two thousands of miles away, so there's that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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