Kivalina: A Case Study of How Media & Politics Mangle Objective Climate Science!
By Jim Steele
What appears to be more failed alarmist predictions, the BBC’s 2013 headlines read Alaskan Village Set to Disappear Under Water in A Decade. “Gone, forever. Remembered – if at all – as the birthplace of America’s first climate change refugees. †(see Willis on “first refugeesâ€) The assumed cause? “Temperature records show the Arctic region of Alaska is warming twice as fast as the rest of the United States. Retreating ice, slowly rising sea levels and increased coastal erosion have left three Inuit settlements facing imminent destruction.†Similarly, in 2017 Huffington Post wrote, “It is disappearing. Fast. As one of the most apparent and shocking examples of coastal erosion, Kivalina could be uninhabitable by 2025, all thanks to climate change.†The Guardian and Mother Jones wrote, “31 Alaskan communities face “imminent†existential threats from coastline erosion, flooding and other consequences of temperatures that are rising twice as quickly in the state as the global average.†Sadly, media outlets and politicians ignored the objective science, but the truth is still out there.
The real problem for Alaska’s native communities has been past governments’ mis-guided attempts to enforce “permanence†in an everchanging landscape. The “settlements facing imminent destruction†are not places native people had freely chosen to settle. With their survival on the line, indigenous people were intimately aware of Alaska’s everchanging environments long before the theory of CO2‑induced‑climate‑change would be proposed. And so, they chose to be semi-nomadic. Kivalina was a good seasonal hunting camp, but never hosted a permanent settlement. Nonetheless the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) made it permanent in 1905.
https://co2coalition.org/2021/02/10/kivalina-a-case-study-of-how-media-politics-mangle-objective-climate-science/
