July 2019 now stands as Alaska's hottest month on record, the latest benchmark in a long-term warming trend with ominous repercussions ranging from rapidly vanishing summer sea ice and melting glaciers to raging wildfires and deadly chaos for marine life. July's statewide average temperature rose to 58.1 degrees Fahrenheit (14.5 degrees Celsius), a level that for denizens of the Lower 48 states might seem cool enough but is actually 5.4 degrees above normal and nearly a full degree higher than Alaska's previous record-hot month. The new high was officially declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in its monthly climate report, released on Wednesday. More significantly, July was the 12th consecutive month in which average temperatures were above normal nearly every day, said Brian Brettschneider, a scientist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Of Alaska's 10 warmest months on record, seven have now occurred since 2004. "You can always have a random kind of warm month, season or even year," Brettschneider said. "But when it happens year after year after year after year after year, then statistically it fails the test of randomness and it then becomes a trend." Alaska, like other parts of the far north, is warming at least twice as fast as the planet as a whole, research shows. And over the past 12 months, Brettschneder said, that warming has crossed a threshold - shifting Alaska from an environment with average temperatures below freezing to above freezing. It used to be that Alaska was generally a frozen state, he said, adding, "Now we're an unfrozen state." Runoff from accelerated melting of glaciers and high-altitude snowfields sent some rivers to near or above flood stage in early July, despite a drought gripping much of the state, including the world's largest temperate rain forest in southeastern Alaska. Sea ice, which has been running at record or near-record lows since spring across the Arctic, completely vanished from waters off Alaska by the start of August. The nearest stretch of ice this summer, said ACCAP climate scientist Rick Thoman, lies about 150 miles north of Kaktovik, a village above the Arctic Circle on the northeastern edge of Alaska. -Reuters
