We are the "poster state" for Global warming? Cool!

Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Drought is stressing and killing spruce, aspen and birch trees.

Alaska has emerged as the poster state for global warming, the climate effect attributed to higher concentrations of "greenhouse" gases — mostly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels — that capture the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

But higher temperatures are shrinking that snow and ice cover. In the Arctic, summer sea ice has shrunk 15% to 20% in the past 30 years, according to 2005's Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report.

And as the snow and ice recede, the sun's rays are hitting more dark ground and water, which absorb most of the heat, reflecting just 20% of the energy away, says Matthew Sturm, a research scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Fairbanks.

Lakes and ponds are disappearing as the permafrost, permanently frozen ground that underlies much of Alaska north of Fairbanks, melts.

"It's like pulling the plug in a bathtub," says Peter Schweitzer, an anthropologist who works with the Arctic peoples in Alaska and Russia.

In some areas, as much as 40% of surface water has disappeared, taking with it vital habitat for ducks and other waterfowl, says Juday.

The permafrost that underlies much of the central and north of the state is a relic of the last Ice Age. Some of the frozen ground under Fairbanks is 100,000 years old, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at Fairbanks. And it's now starting to get "slushy."

Not to be a trouble maker or anything, but most of us are really digging the climate changes up here. Having lived here my whole life I have endured more then my share of disappointing summers where the temperature never made it past the high sixties or low seventies, and rarely at that. Now we have temperatures that are in the high seventies and mid-eighties. It is like taking a vacation without leaving our homes.

And the winters have been somewhat more mild as well. The freezing temperatures that usually make it impossible to get outside were few and far between this winter.

But this is not about me. This is about us. And the impact that global warming is having around the world is devastating, and for that we certainly need to put a stop to it as soon as possible.

But can we get Alaska's temperatures up just another five degrees before we start?

No?

Fine, we can start now.