Lars soaks up some sun after a long, chilly winter/Craig Medred photo

Coming off the warmest year in Alaska history, the 49th state’s largest city has now racked up four months in a row with average temperatures below normal, according to National Weather Service data.

April, which saw clear days and sunshine break the back of the cold that settled over the north in late December, came close to moving temperatures back toward climate-change expectations, but came up 0.2 degrees short of normal.

That was, however, a big improvement on January’s near 11-degree departure from the 1981-2010 average the NWS defines as normal. It was the coldest January in years after a string of mild winters in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 that left residents of the state’s urban heartland believing a kinder, gentler, “new normal” might have arrived in the age of global warming.

The early spring of 2016.

May in April/Craig Medred photo

The snow-be-gone December of 2017.

Lars lamenting the lack Christmas-season skijoring/Craig Medred photo

The rainy January of 2018.

The slopes of the Alyeska Resort/Alyeska photo

The soggy end of 2019.

Global warming

No, this does not mean global warming is a fraud. Space technology has gotten very good at tracking the overall temperature of the planet in recent decades, and the broader evidence supports a global temperature increase of about 2 degrees since 1880.

But it’s easy to lose 2 degrees in the huge, annual variability of weather in the 49th state. Since 1930, the annual, average, Alaska tempratures have ranged from more than 5 degrees below the norm to more than 5 degrees above the norm.

Even if  the NWS readjusts temperature “normal” upward a degree or two in 2021 to reflect a new, warmer 1991-2020 norm, the climate record would indicate the state could still easily get a winter three to four degrees below the existing norm.

Global cooling

Anchorage witnessed its most frigid winters in late 1970s. The period is generally remembered as colder than hell.

The record annual temperature set last year was 42.5 degrees. The 1972 average was 31.9 degrees. A better than 10.5 degree annual swing is the difference between Minneapolis in the“Bold North”and Portland in the evergreen Pacific Northwest.

Reactions of Anchorage Metro residents to the warm and smoky summer of 2019 when forests were in flames north and south of the city appeared mixed. Some relished the warm, albeit smoky, lower-48 style weather. Others fretted over the the threat of climate change.

A record 49 days topped 70 degrees, the long time yardstick for a measuring warm summers in Anchorage. The average summer brings about a third as many. Some summer have had almost none.

Now, even if Anchorage were to go the year without hitting 70 degrees, the two-year average would remain well above the longterm average.

The national Climate Prediction Center is saying there is a high probability that Alaska, especially Southwest Alaska, will see above normal temperatures again this summer. Back in October, the Center was offering the same prediction for the first months of 2020.

That prediction missed badly. What will come to pass this summer only time will truly tell.

The state has been on nearly two-decade long run of warmth. The historical record would indicate the weather is due to cycle cold at some point though it is unclear in the moment how much anyone would notice.

Forgotten issue

The once hot subject of climate has largely fallen out of the news with the global pandemic raging, but over the longterm of human history climate has been as important to world events as disease.

The Medevial Warm Period launched the Viking Age that saw the Norsemen storming out of Scanadavia to terrorize much of Europe for centuries, launch forays into Asia and colonize Greeland and North America.

The Little Ice Age that followed centuries later reordered the world in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. As agricutlure collapsed, a centuries old, feudal order of lords and serfs “was overturned,” observed John Lanchester in the New Yorker. “At first, there were panics and uprisings, food riots and rebellions, and a spike in witch trials – because, in a pre-scientific world, the idea that witches were responsible for failing harvests made as much sense as any other explanation.

“Over time, however, larger structural shifts emerged. In the basic bargain of feudal life, a peasant kept one part of his harvest for himself, put one part back into the ground for the next year’s harvest, and gave the last part to his feudal lord. When peasants had no surplus grain, this system collapsed. If local crops were failing, trading at a distance, to bring goods from farther afield, was critical. Money, and the ability to buy and sell with cash or its equivalent, took on a larger role. Cities with a culture of trade especially benefitted from this shift.”

Thus began a shift from rural to urban life that has continued to this day despite periodic pandemcis that made clear the safety inherent in social distancing long before the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 evolved.

What SARS-CoV-2 will mean for the future of humanity is anyone’s guess. To date, as global economies stall and those still at work do so from home, emissions of hydrocarbon-linked greenhouse gases are plummeting.

The International Energy Agency is projecting global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions for the year will be “almost 8 percent lower than in 2019. This would be the lowest level since 2010. Such a reduction would be the largest ever, six times larger than the previous record reduction of 0.4 gigatons in 2009 due to the financial crisis and twice as large as the combined total of all previous reductions since the end of World War II.”

Whether that will continue is an unknown. It is possible the combination of the pandemic and the internet could reshape the world in ways in which climate has in the past by sparking an emmigration to smaller, more spaced out communities from which people can work remotely.

It is equally possible that humans, being social animals, figure out a way to live with SARS-CoV-2 the way they found a way to live with HIV and cling to their beehive ways.

Predicting the future decades in advance is even harder than forecasting the weather tomorrow, and despite the mountain of science that nows aids assists those forecasts, the meterologists still regularly get it wrong.

For the record, the official NWS forecast for today calls for partly sunny skies and a high in the mid- to low-50s. The normal value is 51.