While most of the lower 48 states are shivering their way into 2015, in much of Alaska the concern is persistent warmth.

Fourth graders at the Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat school in Quinhagak recently caught the attention of some news outlets and climate scientists with a clever video bemoaning a warm and snowless December. The town of about 660 residents, mostly Yup’ik Eskimos, is a mile from the Bering Sea coast.

The video was shot by James Barthelman, a teacher who had a YouTube hit with his class four years ago — Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus featuring students flipping cards with the lyrics.

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Much of southern Alaska has been unusually warm, with Anchorage poised to record its warmest year on record. But efforts to tease out the impact of human-driven global warming in the region are complicated by the big influence around the Bering Sea of natural variations in ocean conditions, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

I saw the video after Mike MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute, brought it to the attention of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Effective Communication of Weather and Climate Information (I’m one of several journalist members).

He described the student video as a “powerful way of communicating how the climate is changing.” I expressed some doubts, noting how much variability there is in Alaskan conditions, so I asked him for a bit more. In his reply, MacCracken (whom I’ve sought out on climate science since 1985) stressed he’s talking about the value of the video in conveying how long-term trends will play out in Alaska:

While winter (or other seasonal) conditions typically vary from year to year, the first effect of climate change is to raise the baseline around which the variations occur. For regions that have winter conditions below normal, the increase in the baseline will more and more often lead to variations taking the temperature to above freezing. This is happening along the coast of Alaska, especially as the sea ice forms later and later each year, creating a situation where the waves from winter storms are no longer being held down by the sea ice, but not actively eroding the shoreline. The second aspect of climate change that is likely affecting Alaska more and more is the apparent tendency of warming in the Arctic and warmer sea surface temperatures in the Pacific to contribute to larger waves in the jet stream. The resulting larger waves, which also seem to persist for longer because they move more slowly west to east, tend to push warm air into the Arctic (e.g., over Alaska) later and later into the year, leading to very warm conditions and the later and later freezing of the land surface and later accumulation of snow. While this may initially seem beneficial, transportation and movement of wildlife across the tundra is made much easier when the land surface (and rivers) are frozen over. Such large variations of the climate likely won’t occur every year over the next few decades given the limited global warming to date, but it would seem likely such conditions will occur more and more frequently as global warming continues, disrupting both social systems and ecosystems.

For more on Alaska’s variable, but warming climate, scan “Climate of Alaska: Past, Present and Future,” a recent presentation by Uma S. Bhatt, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Here are her takeaway points:

– Alaska has warmed but not in a simple manner. – Alaska represents a complex location climatologically, impacted by various circulations. – Climate research results are not always easy to explain in a simple way. We usually add many caveats!! – Conclusions based on the preponderance of evidence suggest humans have impacted the climate. Controversy arises as people translate the science into policy change?

Quinhagak, interestingly, is the site of a prototype octagonal, foam-insulated home designed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. (Winter in the area is plenty cold, even if December hasn’t been.)

For more on Quinhagak and climate change, you can read an interesting 2011 article by two University of Alaska, Fairbanks, researchers working with locals to map changes in permafrost, coastlines and other landscape features.

Update, 12:45 p.m. | Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, sent this helpful note: