"The town of Kivalina is bordered by the Chukchi Sea to the left and a lagoon to the right.
... 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."
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.”
... 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 TRUE STORY:
... indigenous people were intimately aware of Alaska’s everchanging environments long before the theory of CO2-induced-climate-change would be proposed.
... 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 ... the federal government built a school on the island.
Parents were threatened with jail time or losing their kids all together if they didn't send them to school.”
Just 6 years after its creation, Kivalina’s schoolteacher Clinton Replogle warned in 1911, Kivalina should be relocated due to flooding from ocean storms.
... As Tribal Administrator Millie Hawley recently stated, Kivalina was always eroding. We’re on a small spit of land that has diminished in size over the last century.”
... Kivalina’s highest point is a mere 13 feet, and decades ago the high tide mark came within 1 to 2 feet of the town.
... geological surveys have now revealed flooding from waves that had overtopped Kivalina happened at least twice between1905 and 1990.
... Inupiaq residents initiated a study in 1994 to relocate ...
Using photographs dating back to 1952, the study surprisingly found no conclusive proof of any erosion occurring on the ocean-side of the island.
However, the study did reveal substantial erosion on Kivalina’s lagoon side by the Wulik and Kivalina Rivers.
... Still Kivalina’s population grew from 188 to over 400 since 1970.
Despite residents voting 5 times to relocate to safety in the past 3 decades, an airplane runway that brings needed supplies and a medical clinic operated by the non-profit Maniilaq Association remained an attraction.
... funding for relocation was scant with an economy based primarily on subsistence harvesting of seals, walrus, whale, salmon, and caribou.
... state and federal governments offered little support.
... when government reports began blaming global warming, in 2011 the residents opted to file a lawsuit against the major oil companies arguing “Kivalina must be relocated due to global warming” and sought funds to cover an estimated cost of $95 million to $400 million.
Although their lawsuit failed, Kivalina’ ... was championed by proponents of catastrophic climate change and opponents of Big Oil, ... as an icon of the “climate crisis”.
... an unholy alliance between ... media outlets, scientists from the “chicken little school of thought”, and politicians who use every crisis to gain political control) repeats daily that we are all threatened by an “existential climate crisis.”
... As determined in the peer-reviewed paper Arctic Ocean Sea Level Record from the Complete Radar Altimetry Era: 1991–2018 , sea level across the Arctic varies because winds remove water from one region and pile it up in another.
Along the Siberian-Russian coasts and the southern Chukchi Sea bordering Kivalina ... sea level has not risen, despite sea level strongly rising along the Beaufort Sea ...
... it’s summer winds that push warmer Pacific waters through the Bering Strait and initiates sea ice melt and the warming in the frozen Chukchi Sea.
During the last few decades, the amount of warm Pacific water passing through the Bering Strait has nearly doubled, melting more sea ice and expanding open waters.
... Although more open waters have also enhanced photosynthesis and increased Arctic marine food web by 30%, bewilderingly, the associated rise in temperature is trumpeted as a crisis.
... Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s general circulation model, researchers determined inflows of warm water through the Bering Strait are controlled primarily by wind stress, with shifting winds explaining 90% or more of the changes.
... Unfortunately, increased thinning and loss of sea ice has shortened the Inupiaq’s season for hunting seals and whales, forcing them to hunt and fish elsewhere."