This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The slow-moving disaster being visited on the village of Newtok is a familiar one in Alaska. People are losing the ground beneath their feet, because of erosion.

Climate change has accelerated the normal process of erosion along Alaska’s rivers and coasts — especially near the shores of the Bering and Arctic seas.

Warmer temperatures melt the permafrost, or frozen sub-surface layers which helped bind together the soil. Heavier rains produce more floods, and swollen rivers which wash away the soil. Waves break higher, because of sea-level rise, clawing at beaches.

Meanwhile, the sea ice that provided a barrier against intense storms has thinned and retreated, exposing coastal areas to tsunami-sized waves and 100 mph winds that are not uncommon in storms coming off the Bering Sea.

Alaskans have already begun exploring how to find the way back to solid ground. Some small communities may be able to reinforce coastlines by building broad, sloping rock walls known as revetments. But bringing heavy equipment, building materials and skilled labour to remote locations is prohibitively expensive — three or four times more than a comparable project anywhere else. The construction season is also short, further adding to the cost.

“Coastal erosion is a really, really expensive problem to deal with in an engineering mode,” said Orson Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “It costs $10,000 to build one linear foot on a shoreline in a remote area, and you have thousands and thousands of feet of shoreline.”

Then there’s the matter of how the structures would stand up to the harsh Alaskan environment.

Shishmaref, a native Alaskan village located on a barrier island, has gone through an entire array of engineering projects — concrete blocks, wire mesh baskets, a broad sea wall made or gravel and rock. “A museum of erosion control,” Smith said.

Some of the early versions failed on deployment, and it’s not clear how the other structures will stand up over the years.

It’s also far from clear where Alaska will get the money for such ambitious engineering works, especially for small and remote communities.

Climate change is already adding billions to the bill every year just for maintaining existing infrastructure. A state government report estimated that erosion, flooding and other effects of climate change would add up to 20 percent to those costs over the next 20 years.

Then there is the issue of assigning priorities. About 90 percent of Alaska’s population lives within 20 kilometers of a coast, and the state’s most valuable resources — oil, fishing, minerals — are also in close proximity.

“There just isn’t enough money to go around to build a $50 or $100 million revetment for a village of a few hundred people that has other problems,” Smith said. “The money that is spent on those kinds of structures to save a village could be applied to move the families to somewhere else.”

There are other remedies for villages that want to protect against erosion. Communities are now looking at how to plan for a slow retreat to higher ground, gradually replacing old buildings by new raised structures, or moving buildings to higher elevations. But many communities have no higher ground or room to retreat.

Others, like Newtok, are situated on low-lying, wetlands that simply can not support the large engineering projects that would be needed to make them safe. They have no choice but to move.

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1, 2, and 3.

One afternoon in the waning days of winter, the most powerful man in Newtok, Alaska, hopped on a plane and flew 1,000 miles to plead for the survival of his village. Stanley Tom, Newtok’s administrator, had a clear purpose for his trip: find the money to move the village on the shores of the Bering Sea out of the way of an approaching disaster caused by climate change.

Newtok was rapidly losing ground to erosion. The land beneath the village was falling into the river. Tom needed money for bulldozers to begin preparing a new site for the village on higher ground. He needed funds for an airstrip. He came back from his meetings in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, with expressions of sympathy — but nothing in the way of the cash he desperately needed. “It’s really complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of obstacles.”

Those obstacles — financial, legal, and a supremely frustrating bureaucratic process — had slowed down the move for so long that some in Newtok, which is about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the U.S. from Russia, feared they would be stuck as the village went down around them, houses swallowed up by the river.

“It’s really alarming,” said Tom, slumped in an armchair a few hours after his return to the village. “I have a hard time sleeping, and I’m getting up early in the morning. I am worried about it every day.”

The uncertainty was tearing the village apart. It also began to turn the village against Tom.

Over the winter, a large group of villagers decided that their administrator was not up to the job. By the time he returned from this particular trip, the dissidents had voted to replace the village council and to sack Tom — a vote that he ignored.

“The way I see it, we need someone who knows how to do the work,” said Katherine Charles, one of Tom’s most vocal critics. “I feel like we are being neglected. We are still standing here and we don’t know when we are going to move. For years now we have been frustrated. I have to ask myself: Why are we even still here?”

It’s been more than a decade since Tom took charge of running Newtok, and leading the village out of climate disaster to higher ground.

The ground beneath Newtok is disappearing. Natural erosion has accelerated due to climate change, with large areas of land lost to the Ninglick River each year. A study by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF] found the highest point in the village would be below water level by 2017. The proximity of the threat to Newtok means that its villages are likely to be America’s first climate refugees.

Officials in Anchorage say Tom has worked tirelessly to move the village out of the way of a rampaging river. Among the relatively small circle of bureaucrats and lawyers who concern themselves with the problems of small and remote indigenous Alaskan villages, the Newtok administrator has a stellar reputation. He has won leadership awards from Native American groups in the rest of the country.

Tom said he hoped to make a big push this summer, acquiring heavy equipment that locals could use to begin moving some of the existing houses over to the new village site at Mertarvik nine miles to the south.

“It’s really happening right now. The village is sinking and flooding and eroding,” he said. He said he was planning to move his own belongings to the new village site this summer — and that villagers should start doing the same.

But Tom, despite his lobbying missions to Juneau and strong reputation with government officials, has failed to inject federal and state officials with that same sense of urgency.

Melting permafrost, sea-level rise, erosion — these are some of the worst consequences of climate change for Alaska. But none of those elements in Newtok’s slow destruction are recognized as disasters under existing legislation.

That means there is no designated pot of money set aside for those affected communities — unlike cities or towns destroyed by floods or tornadoes.

“We weren’t thinking of climate change when federal disaster relief legislation was passed,” said Robin Bronen, a human rights lawyer in Anchorage who has made a dozen visits to Newtok. “Our legal system is not set up. The institutions that we have created to respond to disasters are not up to the task of responding to climate change.”

In Bronen’s view, Congress needed to rewrite existing disaster legislation to take account of climate change. Communities needed to be able to access those disaster funds — if not to rebuild in place, which is not feasible in Newtok’s case, then to move.

The authorities also had responsibility under the treaty agreements with indigenous Alaskan tribes to guarantee the safety and well-being of indigenous communities, she argued.

“This is completely a human rights issue,” Bronen said. “When you are talking about a people who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”

Until then, however, it was up to Tom to find new ways to prize funds out of an unresponsive bureaucracy. It turned out that he had a knack for it.

Government officials praised Tom for finding other sources of funds, such as development grants, and putting them to use for building the new village site. But it has been a laborious process for the remote village to find its way through the different funding agencies and a maze of competing regulations.

As Tom found out, each agency had its own set of rules. The state government would not build a school for fewer than 10 children. The federal government would not build an airstrip at a village without a post office. But the rules, from Newtok’s vantage point, appeared to have at least one point in common. They seemed to conspire against the village ever getting its move off the ground.

In 2011, Alaska’s government published a timetable for Newtok’s move [PDF], setting out dates for building an emergency center, housing, an airstrip — all items on Tom’s list. Two years later, the plan is already behind schedule and the official who oversaw that original timetable said there was little chance of getting back on track.

“Newtok is something that is probably going to play out over several decades unless it reaches a dire point where something has to be done immediately to keep the people safe,” said Larry Hartig, who heads Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Officially, the government of Alaska remains committed to helping Newtok and all the other indigenous Alaskan villages that are threatened by climate change.

Almost all of Alaska’s indigenous villages — more than 180 — are experiencing the effects of climate change, including severe flooding and erosion. Some may be able to hold back rivers and sea, but others will have to move. About half a dozen villages, including Newtok, face extreme risks.

“I am not going to tell any community that they are not going to survive. If the residents want to survive, we will help them,” said Mead Treadwell, the state’s lieutenant governor.

But the cost of relocating just one village — Newtok — could run as high as $130 million, according to an estimate by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF]. That’s more than $350,000 per villager. Multiply that by half a dozen, or several more times, and the cost of protecting indigenous Alaskan villages from climate change soon soars into the billions.

So far, Newtok has received a total of about $12 million in state funds over the past four years, according to George Owletuck, a consultant hired by Tom to help with the move. Much of that has already gone, to build a barge landing, a few new homes, and an emergency evacuation center — in case the village does not manage to move in time.

Officially, federal and state government agencies have spent some $27 million getting Mertarvik ready, although a considerable share of that figure, some $6 million, did not go directly to the relocation, said Sally Russell Cox, the state official overseeing the move. And there is still no major infrastructure completed at Mertarvik.

Would the government of Alaska commit to picking up the rest of the tab for Newtok and the other villages?

Alaska’s oil revenues have fallen off over the years. In 2012, the state slipped into second place for oil production behind North Dakota. Treadwell admitted the state government would not cover the entire cost of fortifying or moving all of the villages threatened by climate change.

“On the question of is there money to help them with one check? That is something there clearly is not,” he said.

Treadwell suggested some of the at-risk villages could raise funds by setting themselves up as hubs for oil companies hoping to drill in Arctic waters.

However, a number of oil companies have put their Arctic drilling plans on hold for 2013 and 2014. Treadwell admitted there was as yet no comprehensive climate change plan for Newtok and other villages. “I think it’s going to be piece by piece with each community and many different pots of money,” he said.

In the case of Newtok, Owletuck, the consultant, had big ideas for financing the move: growing fruit and vegetables hydroponically in greenhouses, or testing the possibilities of producing biofuels from algae.

He let it be known the village may even have found a mysterious benefactor. Owletuck said he’d had an approach from private individuals, whom he declined to name, wanting to donate $22 million to the move.

None of those propositions have materialized, however. And after more than a decade of uncertainty about the future under climate change, the basic infrastructure of Newtok is coming apart.

Snow covers up a lot of Newtok’s flaws: the open sewage pits, the broken boardwalk over mudflats, some of the abandoned snowmobile wrecks.

Newtok has for years been considered a “distressed village,” with average income of $16,000, well below the rest of the state. Fewer than half of adults in the village have paid work. But even within those dismal measures, conditions have sharply deteriorated in the years since the village has been planning to move.

Aside from the clinic and the school, most buildings are in a state of advanced dilapidation. The floor in the community hall sags like an old mattress. The community laundry is out of order.

In the cramped offices of the traditional council, where Tom works, the furniture dates from the 1970s or 1980s, mid-brown vinyl chairs where the casing has split open, revealing the dirty foam inside. It’s not unheard of to find families of 10 or 12 children living in houses of less than 800 square feet — and none of those homes have flush toilets or running water.

Early mornings find the men of the household trudging out of their homes with five-gallon buckets of waste, which get dumped at various spots on the edges of the village, including a small stream.

The diesel-powered generator was nearing the end of its life span. The water treatment plant was shut down last October after people began getting sick. Tom said there was contamination from leaking jet fuel at the airport.

For now, villagers are drawing water from the school, which had a separate system. But the school principal said he would have to cut that off in May to preserve the system for the schoolchildren.

Tom said there was nothing he could do. Government agencies would not fund improvements at the current village site, because of the plan to move. “There is no money to improve our community,” he said. “We are suspended from federal and state agencies and there is no way of improving our lives over here. The agencies do not want to work on both villages at once.”

By last October, frustration with the stalled move and conditions in the village exploded. Villagers accused their own council of failing to hold regular elections, and raised a petition to throw out the leaders and replace Tom.

Some accused him of presiding over a dictatorship in the village. Others speculated that he and the paid consultant, Owletuck, were plotting to rob the relocation funds.

One of the dissidents, a relative newcomer to the village, posted ferocious criticism of Tom on Facebook calling for rebellion.

The dissidents organized elections, voted out the old council, and installed their own leaders. Tom ignored the result. “Let them cry all they want,” he said. “I don’t care. They are not going to help my community. I am way ahead of these guys.”

The upheavals in Newtok are sadly familiar to those who have worked with indigenous Alaskan villages confronting climate change. “I don’t think you would find one community that says they are happy with the pace that’s gone on,” said Patricia Cochran, director of the Alaska Native Science Commission.

“To be honest with you, I think the state and the feds have done a terrible job, not only in assessing the conditions that communities are living within but in responding to them,” she said. “Because these communities are listed as threatened and may potentially be relocated, they are not able to get any funds now for infrastructure that is being damaged right now.”

That leaves communities stuck in a limbo that can carry for years or even decades.

That’s what has become of Newtok. The effects are devastating, said Charles. Beyond all her anger she admitted was an all-enveloping fear. “Sometimes I get scared. I’m scared for my own family. How will I take care of them if the relocation doesn’t start right away?”

She had been waiting for years to see the beginnings of any new settlement in rural Alaska rising up on the rocky hill of Mertarvik: the airport, the barge landing, the school, the houses. None of it was there yet, and Charles said she was coming close to despair.

“It’s been going on for I don’t know how long, and I am beginning to lose hope.”

Next: How climate change eats the Alaskan coast

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1 and 2.

In September 2007, a rising star of Alaskan politics dared to take on one of the toughest, most challenging issues for any leader: climate change. That summer, seasonal ice cover had fallen to its lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979, leaving much of the Arctic as open water. A few months earlier, Al Gore had won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth.

It seemed as if the timing was right to deal with climate change, and so the politician approached a group of high-level officials to develop a climate change strategy for Alaska.

Their leader was Sarah Palin, the then-governor of Alaska before her entry into national Republican party politics. “Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans,” said Palin, announcing two new working groups on climate change.

“As a result of this warming, coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans,” she went on.

The focus on climate was temporary. Once Palin joined the Republican ticket as the running mate to John McCain in the 2008 presidential elections, Palin dismissed climate science as “snake oil.” The causes of climate change — and its remedies — remain disputed territory in Alaska.

There is no disputing the real-time effects of climate change. Alaska is warming faster than anywhere else in America, setting off a circumpolar scramble for oil and other resources given up by the melting ice and threatening the livelihood of those who still live off the land and the sea.

“Up here in Alaska, I would say most people do not have an argument that climate change is happening because we see it,” said Douglas Causey, a wildlife biologist at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “The debate is not whether climate change is happening. The debate is over what’s causing it.”

But those debates, and the fierce politics surrounding climate change, compromise efforts to deal with the causes and protect the people who will bear a huge part of the consequences.

Palin in late 2007 was still in her first year as governor of Alaska, and climate change was not yet the defining issue it was to become for America’s conservative politicians.

She followed up her announcement of high-level climate change action groups by committing an even bigger conservative heresy, signing Alaska up as an observer to the regional cap-and-trade partnership, the Western Climate Initiative.

During Palin’s time as governor, high-level groups of officials brought in consultants to look at ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Alaska’s oil industry and other sectors of the economy. Another set of officials worked on trying to protect Alaska’s infrastructure from flooding and erosion, and the extreme storms along the coast.

The legislature sanctioned more than $12 million to help native Alaskan villages — like Newtok on the shores of the Bering Sea and 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the U.S. from Russia — trying to shore up their communities from erosion and other climate risks, or relocate.

But Palin’s efforts did not survive her brief tenure as governor. Her successor, Sean Parnell, quietly retired the cabinet and the “immediate action” working group. Neither group has met in at least two years.

The authorities in Alaska are still acutely aware of the changes underway in the polar region. State officials are working hard to position Alaska for an age in which shipping traffic across the pole doubles every year and international concerns compete to mine the vast oil, coal, zinc, and copper deposits beneath Arctic waters.

Alaska’s leaders are also realizing the costs of a warming Arctic. The state spends $10 million a year to repair roads that buckle with melting permafrost, said Larry Hartig, who heads Alaska’s Department of Environment.

But recognition of the opportunities — and costs — does not quite translate into explicit recognition of climate change and its impacts in real-time, or even on a human-time scale.

Alaska’s lieutenant governor, Mead Treadwell, likes to talk about climate change over a period of 10,000 years.

Larry Hartig, who oversaw the work of the climate change sub-cabinet established by Palin, now dismisses the original reasons for the body’s existence.

“I don’t look at climate change as a subject in and of itself,” he said. “Coastal erosion and flooding, well, we would have them even if we didn’t worry about climate change.”

He went on to explain that he would prefer to deal directly with the impacts, rather than be drawn into that “other debate.”

But from Tom John’s perspective, it is hard to separate the two. John, now in his 50s, was for years counted among the best hunters in Newtok. The status is confirmed by the dappled hide of a muskox stretched out to dry outside his home. Inside, his wife, Bernice, has taken out a whole halibut to defrost for dinner from a freezer chest that is full of frozen fish and meat from previous expeditions. “Our entire world is a grocery store,” said Bernice.

When John was a younger man, there was a rhythm to the days and seasons. April brought pike fish and white fish, seal and walrus. High summer on the Bering Sea brought herring, flounder and sometimes king salmon, and berries back on land. Winter brought mink, muskox, and otter, which John used to sell to a fur trader.

A hunter could strike out in almost any direction from Newtok and be assured of coming back with food. John’s favorite route was out towards the ocean, five or 10 miles south, to catch bearded seal. Those patterns have now been thrown off by the changing seasons, he said.

“It seems like during the fall time the freeze-up is getting late. I used to travel through the month of October, and I could travel through the snow without any problem, without jamming through ice,” he said. “But today winter is getting late. It comes late, probably November, and I also noticed the snow pack seems harder. When I try to shovel, it’s like cement. It’s really hard to dig.”

There are other changes on John’s calendar: shorter, warmer winters, earlier springs, and the floods and rising waters that, within the next decade, could make Newtok disappear entirely beneath the Ninglick River.

The river has been clawing away at the land, reducing Newtok into a small, and shrinking, island. The villagers are desperately trying to move to a new site, nine miles to the south, before the entire village is engulfed.

The Army Corps of Engineers estimates [PDF] that the highest point in the village — the school — could be under water by 2017.

The village where John has lived since he was a boy could disappear. His way of life, a subsistence economy which survived the arrival of snowmobiles, food stamps, and online shopping at Walmart, was also threatened.

The migration habits of the animals and fish on which the John family and others depend have changed over time. Some of the animals are scarce now on the Bering Coast.

Seals of all variety are still plentiful off the Bering Sea. Outside one house in Newtok, the bodies of seven seals are stacked up behind a snowmobile like frozen firewood.

But walrus have grown hard to find. “Twenty years ago, I could see walrus, and hardly see the end of them. There were lots of them, thousands, but today I don’t see that anymore,” said John.

Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the country, with a nearly 4-degrees-F increase in average statewide temperatures since 1949, according to the U.S. National Climate Assessment draft released last January [PDF]. Temperatures could rise by up to 22 degrees F by the end of the century unless there is bold action on climate change, the report said.

On land, the glaciers are melting, and at a faster rate than ever recorded. Land that had been shored up by frozen layers of permafrost has softened and sunk. The first snow now arrives on average two days later than it did a decade ago, and melts four to six days earlier in the spring. Rivers swollen by heavier rain and snow flood more often.

At sea, the summer sea ice has melted and thinned, leaving open waters. Last year saw the biggest loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic since satellite tracking began in the 1970s. At the height of summer, less than a quarter of the Arctic was under ice.

As the ice gives way, scientists have steadily been revising their estimates of when the Arctic would be entirely ice-free. Only a few years ago, most scientists put that date off until mid-century or beyond. Not any more — scientists are now converging around a date of 2030 for an entirely ice-free Arctic in the summer. A few outliers have even suggested an almost ice-free Arctic in the summer as early as 2020.

The Arctic will still freeze over every winter, long after the summer sea ice is gone. “I don’t think we can expect a year-round ice-free Arctic anytime soon,” said Wieslaw Maslowski, an oceanographer at the U.S. naval postgraduate school in Monterey, Calif.

But the remaining ice will be thinner, two meters or less, compared with the older ice layers that extend up to four meters deep. After several years of record melts, barely 5 percent of the ice in the Arctic has lasted for four or more summers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. The remaining ice, which is thinner, is more susceptible to melting.

The retreat of that ice has left large areas of coastline far more exposed to storms. Those shorelines no longer have ice barriers to blunt the impact of storm surges. And the larger areas of open water produce bigger waves.

Those changes have invaded native Alaskan villages as well. Flood waters engulf village boardwalks during spring break-up. Extreme storms make it unsafe to go out hunting or trapping. Nobody feels safe or secure.

And then there is the erosion that has made life so precarious in so many native Alaskan villages. Coastal erosion rates in the Arctic are among the highest in the world, because of increased wave action from the Bering Sea.

In some areas, erosion rates have doubled since the early 2000s, according to a report prepared by the Department of Interior [PDF] last month.

“The truth is that almost all of our communities will at some point or at some period of time experience some problems associated with climate change,” said Patricia Cochran, director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. “We are the first populations that are really seeing the immense changes that are occurring.”

“It certainly takes a toll … It’s in your face every day and it’s not something you can run away from,” she said.

Since the time Alaska’s governor decided the state no longer needed to plan for climate change, Bernice and Tom John have lived through two spring floods and two ferocious autumn storm seasons.

Their house, which sits relatively far from the Ninglick River, has had water lapping at the door.

In that time, Newtok has lost sewage lagoons and its water supply, which was contaminated by salt water and sewage. Boardwalks have sunk into the mud, because of melting permafrost.

A few families have scrapped their traditional ice cellars, buried in the permafrost, after melting made them unreliable as food stores. And the Johns watched the Ninglick River rip the land out from under them.

The couple hope the authorities, and their own village leadership, mobilize in time to complete Newtok’s move to the new village site at Mertarvik before it is too late.

Bernice has heard people talking; if the village does not move to the new site in time, the villagers will be moved to Fairbanks, hundreds of miles away.

The idea scares her. “That’s unknown territory,” she said. But whatever lies in store for Newtok, it won’t be long now, Bernice figures. “We’ve got about two years, that’s what I think,” she said. “Two years.”

Next: “It’s happening now … The village is sinking”

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s easy to see the appeal for Lisa and Jeff Charles of being at the forefront of the Alaskan village of Newtok’s move to a new location.

The couple, who have six young children, were allotted one of the first houses in Mertarvik — as the villagers call the chosen relocation site — nine miles south of Newtok on Nelson Island.

The house allotted to the Charles family was hardly palatial: 1,350 square feet on a single level with an open-plan kitchen and living area, four bedrooms, and one bathroom.

But it’s twice as big as the place Jeff built when he was 21, adding on two rooms after he married Lisa and their household grew to six children under the age of 12, a chihuahua, and a couple of puppies. There is no running water so the family use a big plastic barrel in the kitchen to store water.

The new house, fitted with wood panelling and new appliances, sits on a high ridge of volcanic rock and is flooded with light. It is supposed to have flush toilets when it is complete, unlike their current home. “This place feels maybe like a mansion compared to our other house,” said Lisa. “We can’t wait to move across.”

And they didn’t. The family began setting up home last summer before the work crews were done. The two older children chose their bedrooms, the first time they had rooms of their own. Lisa began thinking about where to set up a rack for drying fish in the summer time, and moved a television and futon sofa into the living room.

On sunny days, the family looked out the front window to watch seals bobbing in the water below. One day Lisa looked out the kitchen window, which faces the rear of the house, to see 14 muskox grazing among the willow trees. “It was pretty nice,” she said.

If she hadn’t had a newborn baby last summer, Lisa said she would have stayed in her new home throughout the past winter — despite the extreme isolation.

Once the river freezes, the island is accessible only by snowmobile. The family would have been virtually alone at the new site. A tribal elder did attempt to winter in Mertarvik, but he was forced to leave when he ran low on heating oil.

But Lisa was willing to entertain the idea of sticking it out. She even spoke with the school principal about bringing homework for the older children so they would not fall behind.

Their house was one of three that went up last summer — the first stage in a painfully slow process of finding the funds to move the 63 dwellings in the existing village.

Their house back in Newtok sits well back of the area most threatened by the river. But when the village floods, as it does most years during break-up, the water washes up to within 20 feet of their house, stinking of sewage and waste. The higher ground and hard rock of Mertarvik would be a lot cleaner, and a healthier place to live.

If she had her way, Lisa Charles would be back with her family as soon as the ice breaks this summer, maybe this time for good. “I’m not 100 percent sure but that would be nice, if we could maybe go back and forth,” she said.

The older children might miss their friends at school though. Her eldest daughter, Ashley, is in basketball and other teams that compete with nearby villages.

But Lisa said she is ready to leave Newtok behind. “I’ll miss the village when it’s gone,” she said. “But everyone will be living across there. It will look different, but it will still have the same people.”

Next: Can a baked Alaska deny climate change?

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son.

“I dream about the water coming in,” she said. The landscape in winter on the Bering Sea coast seems peaceful, the tidal wave of Warner’s nightmare trapped by snow and several feet of ice. But the calm is deceptive. Spring break-up will soon restore the Ninglick River to its full violent force.

In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. As the waters rise, she swims for higher ground: the village school which sits on 20-foot pilings.

Even that isn’t high enough. By the time Warner wakes, she is clinging to the roof of the school, desperate to be saved.

Warner’s vision is not far removed from a reality written by climate change. The people of Newtok, on the west coast of Alaska and about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the state from Russia, are living a slow-motion disaster that will end, very possibly within the next five years, with the entire village being washed away.

The Ninglick River coils around Newtok on three sides before emptying into the Bering Sea. It has steadily been eating away at the land, carrying off 100 feet or more some years, in a process moving at unusual speed because of climate change. Eventually all of the villagers will have to leave, becoming America’s first climate change refugees.

It is not a label or a future embraced by people living in Newtok. Yup’ik Eskimo have been fishing and hunting by the shores of the Bering Sea for centuries and the villagers reject the notion they will now be forced to run in chaos from ancestral lands.

But exile is undeniable. A report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers [PDF] predicted that the highest point in the village — the school of Warner’s nightmare — could be underwater by 2017. There was no possible way to protect the village in place, the report concluded.

If Newtok cannot move its people to the new site in time, the village will disappear. A community of 350 people, nearly all related to some degree and all intimately connected to the land, will cease to exist, its inhabitants scattered to the villages and towns of western Alaska, Anchorage, and beyond.

It’s a choice confronting more than 180 native communities in Alaska, which are flooding and losing land because of the ice melt that is part of the changing climate.

The Arctic Council, the group of countries that governs the polar regions, is gathering in Sweden Wednesday. But climate change refugees are not high on their agenda, and Obama administration officials told reporters on Friday there would be no additional money to help communities in the firing line.

On the other side of the continent, the cities and towns of the East Coast are waking up to their own version of Warner’s nightmare: the storm surges demonstrated by Hurricane Sandy. About half of America’s population lives within 50 miles of a coastline. Those numbers are projected to grow even more in the coming decades.

What chance do any of those communities, in Alaska or on the Atlantic coast, have of a fair and secure future under climate change, if a tiny community like Newtok — just 63 houses in all — cannot be assured of survival?

But as the villagers of Newtok are discovering, recognizing the gravity of the threat posed by climate change and responding in time are two very different matters.

Remote location

Newtok lies 480 miles due west of Anchorage. The closest town of any size, the closest doctor, gas station, or paved road, is almost 100 miles away.

The only year-round link to the outside world is via a small propeller plane from the regional hub of Bethel.

The seven-seater plane flies over a landscape that seems pancake flat under the snow: bright white for land, slightly translucent swirls for frozen rivers. There are no trees.

The village as seen from the air is a cluster of almost identical small houses, plopped down at random on the snow. The airport is a patch of ground newly swept of snow, marked off for the pilot by a circle of orange traffic cones. The airport manager runs the luggage into the center of the village on a yellow sledge attached to his snowmobile.

Like many if not most native Alaskan villages, Newtok owes its location to a distant bureaucrat. The Yup’iks, who had lived in these parts of Alaska for hundreds of years, had traditionally used the area around present-day Newtok as a seasonal stopping-off place, convenient for late summer berry picking.

Even then, their preferred encampment, when they passed through the area, was a cluster of sod houses called Kayalavik, some miles further up river. But over the years, the authorities began pushing native Alaskans to settle in fixed locations and to send their children to school.

It was difficult for supply barges to maneuver as far up river as Kayalavik. After 1959, when Alaska became a state, the new authorities ordered villagers to move to a more convenient docking point.

That became Newtok. Current state officials admit the location — on low-lying mud flats between the river and the Bering Sea — was far from perfect. It certainly wasn’t chosen with a view to future threats such as climate change.

“The places are often where they are because it was easy to unload the building materials and build the school and the post office there,” said Larry Hartig, who heads the state’s Commission on Environmental Conservation. “But they weren’t the ideal place to be in terms of long-term stability and it’s now creating a lot of problems that are exacerbated by melting permafrost and less of the seasonal sea ice that would form barriers between the winter storms and uplands.”

It became clear by the 1990s that Newtok — like dozens of other remote communities in Alaska — was losing land at a dangerous rate. Almost all native Alaskan villages are located along rivers and sea coasts, and almost all are facing similar peril.

A federal government report found more than 180 other native Alaskan villages — or 86 percent of all native communities — were at risk because of climate change. In the case of Newtok, those effects were potentially life threatening.

A study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers [PDF] on the effects of climate change on native Alaskan villages, the one that predicted the school would be underwater by 2017, found no remedies for the loss of land in Newtok.

The land was too fragile and low-lying to support sea walls or other structures that could keep the water out, the report said, adding that if the village did not move, the land would eventually be overrun with water. People could die.

It was a staggering verdict for Newtok. Some of the village elders remember the upheaval of that earlier move. The villagers were adamant that they take charge of the move this time and remain an intact community — not scatter to other towns.

And so after years of poring over reports, the entire community voted to relocate to higher ground across the river. The decision was endorsed by the state authorities. In December 2007, the village held the first public meeting to plan the move.

The proposed new site for Newtok, voted on by the villagers and approved by government planners, lies only nine miles away, atop a high ridge of dark volcanic rock across the river on Nelson Island. On a good day in winter, it’s a half-hour bone-shaking journey across the frozen Ninglick river by snowmobile.

But the cost of the move could run as high as $130 million, according to government estimates. For the villagers of Newtok, finding the cash, and finding their way through the government bureaucracy, is proving the challenge of their lives.

Five years on from that first public meeting, Newtok remains stuck where it was, the peeling tiles and the broken-down office furniture in the council office grown even shabbier, the dilapidated water treatment plant now shut down as a health hazard, an entire village tethered to a dangerous location by bureaucratic obstacles and lack of funds.

Village leaders hope that this coming summer, when conditions become warm enough for construction crews to get to work, could provide the big push Newtok needs by completing the first phase of basic infrastructure. And the effort needs a push. When the autumn storms blow in, the water rises fast.

Changing climate

Climate change remains a politically touchy subject in Alaska. The state owes its prosperity to the development of the vast Prudhoe Bay oil fields on the Arctic Coast.

Even in Newtok, there are some who believe climate change is caused by negative emotions, such as anger, hate, and envy. But while some dispute the overwhelming scientific view that climate change is caused primarily by human activities, there is little argument in Alaska about its effects.

The state has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the country over the past 60 years. Freeze-up occurs later, snow is wetter and heavier. Wildfires erupt on the tundra in the summer. Rivers rush out to the sea. Moose migrate north into caribou country. Grizzlies mate with polar bears as their ranges overlap.

Even people in their 20s, like Warner and her partner Nathan Tom, can track the changes in their own lifetimes. Tom said the seasons have changed. “The snow comes in a different timing now. The snow disappears way late. That is making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they are starting to lay their eggs when there is still snow and ice and we can’t go and pick them,” Tom said. “It’s changing a lot. It’s real, global warming, it’s real.”

On days when the clouds move in, and the only sound is the crunch of boots on snow and the distant buzzing of snowmobiles, it’s difficult to imagine a world beyond the village, let alone a threat.

But Warner has seen the river rip into land and carry off clumps of earth. “It’s scary thinking about summer coming,” she said. “I don’t know how much more is going to erode — hopefully not as much as last year.”

Warner was raised in Anchorage and Wasilla, mainly by her non-Yup’ik father. But she was introduced to Yup’ik food and Yupi’ik ways by her mother, and she has taken to village life since moving to Newtok in December 2011 to be with Tom.

Even in those short months, she said she can see the changes carved out on the land behind the family home. “When I first got here the land used to be way out there,” she said, pointing toward the west. “Now that doesn’t exist any more. There is no land there any more.”

The river claims more of the village every year. Warmer temperatures are thawing the permafrost on which Newtok is built, and the land surface is no longer stable. The sea ice that protected the village from winter storms is thinning and receding, exposing Newtok to winter storms with 100-mph winds and the waves of Warner’s nightmare.

When the wind blows from the east or south, the land falls away even faster. The patch of land where Warner picked last summer to practice shooting was gone, on the other side of a sharp drop-off to the river. “The summer came, 15 or 20 feet of land went just from melting, and then after we had those storms in September another 20 feet went,” she said. In an average year the river swallows 83 feet of land a year, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. Some years of course it’s more.

The reddish-brown house where Tom and Warner live with their son Tyson and elderly relatives is the closest in the village to the Ninglick.

Warner fears her house will soon be swallowed up by that hungry river. “Two more years, that’s what I’m guessing. About two more years until it’s right up to our house,” she said.

The house is now barely 200 paces away from the drop-off point. It’s become a sort of tourist stop for visitors to the village, and an educational aid for teachers at the local school. Last year, one of the teachers set out stakes to mark how fast the river was rising. At least one has already been washed away.

But it won’t be long before nobody in the village is safe. Other homes, once considered well back from the river, now regularly flood.

Over the years the river, in its attack on the land, engulfed a few small ponds — some fresh water, some used as raw sewage dumps — spewing human waste across the village. Last summer it almost carried off a few dumpsters filled with old fridges and computers. It swept away the barge landing, and infested the landfill.

Sometimes, though, the river gives up treasure: Villagers walking newly exposed banks have discovered mammoth tusks and fossil remains.

During one storm last autumn, Warner stayed up until 4 a.m., waiting to see if the waves would engulf the house. “I was scared because it looked so close because our window is right there. I was just looking out, and you can see these huge waves come at you,” she said.

It’s not easy living with that fear every day, she concedes. Anxious residents want to know that their future will be safe. They are exhausted by the years of uncertainty and fed up with a village left to decay, with leaders’ energy and every scrap of funding focused on the relocation.

“Considering that our house is the closest, I would like it if they would at least let us know if we are going to have a house over there [at the new site],” said Warner. Tom’s grandmother, who needs oxygen, lives with the couple. It would be tough to move her in the event of a disaster, although she claims she is not at all afraid.

The young couple go through times when they can’t deal with the talk of relocation. Tom bought a big tent some time ago and the couple have talked about camping out at the site chosen for the new village, just to get away — from the stress, from the drama of village politics — until things are settled.

But the relocation keeps being put off.

“A few years ago, they said next year. And then last year they said next year. And next year, they are probably going to say next year again,” said Tom. But he soon perks up. The village has sent local men, including Tom, for training as construction workers.

“It’s picking up,” he said. “I’m not afraid any more. The erosion is really fast. I know the state is going to deal with it pretty fast. They are not going to leave us hanging there.”

Next: One family’s great escape.

This feature originally appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The historic drought that laid waste to America’s grain and corn belt is unlikely to ease before the middle of this year, a government forecast warned on Thursday.

The annual spring outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted hotter, drier conditions across much of the U.S., including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where farmers have been fighting to hang on to crops of winter wheat.

The three-month forecast noted an additional hazard for the Midwest, with heavy, late snows setting up conditions for flooding along the Red and Souris rivers in North Dakota.

“It’s a mixed bag of flooding, drought, and warm weather,” Laura Furgione, the deputy director of NOAA’s weather service, told a conference call with reporters.

Last year produced the hottest year since record keeping began more than a century ago, with several weeks in a row of 100+ degree days. It also brought drought to close to 65 percent of the country by summer’s end.

The cost of the drought is estimated at above $50 billion, greater than the economic damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

The drought area has now fallen back somewhat to 51 percent of the country. But even the heavy snowfalls some parts of the country have seen were not enough to recharge the soil, the NOAA scientists said.

The agency was forecasting above-normal temperatures in the Southwest and other parts of the country, with only the Pacific Northwest expected to experience below-normal temperatures.

It said drought conditions were likely to remain in the central and western parts of the country, and could expand in California, the Southwest, the southern Rockies, and Texas. The Florida panhandle should also anticipate drought conditions, according to the forecast.

Scientists warned of an increased risk of wildfires, because of the dry conditions, for parts of Minnesota and Northern Iowa.

Other areas of the country however were in line for floods, with the most significant along the Red and Souris Rivers in North Dakota. NOAA said it was also expecting some 20,000 acres of farmland to be flooded in the Devil’s Lake area of North Dakota.

Some flooding was also expected along the upper Mississippi into Southern Wisconsin, Northern Missouri, and parts of South Dakota and Iowa.

Meanwhile, a poor snowpack suggests the drought will persist in the Rocky Mountain states and California.

“The drought that we accumulated over the last five or six years in the middle part of the country and also the Southwest is going to take a long time to remove,” said Furgione.

Farmers had been anticipating a poor start to the growing season, especially in the Southwest and areas such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where the drought has not relaxed its grip.

Farmers in some areas did not even bother to plant winter wheat this year.

The prospect of another dry year caused concern along the Mississippi where low levels held up barge traffic last year. A coalition of mayors from towns along the river visited Washington this week to press for funds to keep the waterway open.

“If the river is shut out, that’s $300 million a day that is affected by that in economic losses because you can not shift the traffic up and down the river,” said Hyram Copeland, mayor of Vidalia, La.

Communities across the wheat and corn-growing areas, that took the brunt of last year’s drought, had been looking for heavy snows and rains this winter to prime the land for the next planting season.

“The bottom line is we need a big spring because we do not have the buffer or carryover we did coming into 2012,” Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center, told a forum on Wednesday.

However, the forecast suggests that big spring will not materialize.

The scientists also note a growing demand for water — for cities, for agriculture – is leaving the country even more exposed to hotter, drier years like 2012.

“We have seen changes to our vulnerability to drought,” Svoboda said. “More straws in the drink is putting more demand on a finite water resource.”

This story first appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1 million or more.

Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust, told the Guardian that her organization assured wealthy donors that their funds would never be diverted to liberal causes.

“We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,” she said in an interview.

By definition that means none of the money is going to end up with groups like Greenpeace, she said. “It won’t be going to liberals.”

Ball won’t divulge names, but she said the stable of donors represents a wide range of opinion on the American right. Increasingly over the years, those conservative donors have been pushing funds towards organizations working to discredit climate science or block climate action.

Donors exhibit sharp differences of opinion on many issues, Ball said. They run the spectrum of conservative opinion, from social conservatives to libertarians. But in opposing mandatory cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, they found common ground.

“Are there both sides of an environmental issue? Probably not,” she went on. “Here is the thing. If you look at libertarians, you tend to have a lot of differences on things like defence, immigration, drugs, the war, things like that compared to conservatives. When it comes to issues like the environment, if there are differences, they are not nearly as pronounced.”

By 2010, the dark money amounted to $118 million distributed to 102 think tanks or action groups which have a record of denying the existence of a human factor in climate change, or opposing environmental regulations.

The money flowed to Washington think tanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore.

The ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama’s environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.

Those same groups are now mobilizing against Obama’s efforts to act on climate change in his second term. A top recipient of the secret funds on Wednesday put out a point-by-point critique of the climate content in the president’s state of the union address.

And it was all done with a guarantee of complete anonymity for the donors who wished to remain hidden.

“The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It’s also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records.

“These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable. There is no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them,” Davies said.

The trusts were established for the express purpose of managing donations to a host of conservative causes.

Such vehicles, called donor-advised funds, are not uncommon in America. They offer a number of advantages to wealthy donors. They are convenient, cheaper to run than a private foundation, offer tax breaks and are lawful.

That opposition hardened over the years, especially from the mid-2000s where the Greenpeace record shows a sharp spike in funds to the anti-climate cause.

In effect, the Donors Trust was bankrolling a movement, said Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who has extensively researched the networks of ultra-conservative donors.

“This is what I call the counter-movement, a large-scale effort that is an organized effort and that is part and parcel of the conservative movement in the United States,” Brulle said. “We don’t know where a lot of the money is coming from, but we do know that Donors Trust is just one example of the dark money flowing into this effort.”

In his view, Brulle said: “Donors Trust is just the tip of a very big iceberg.”

The rise of that movement is evident in the funding stream. In 2002, the two trusts raised less than $900,000 for the anti-climate cause. That was a fraction of what Exxon Mobil or the conservative oil billionaire Koch brothers donated to climate skeptic groups that year.

By 2010, the two Donor Trusts between them were channeling just under $30 million to a host of conservative organizations opposing climate action or science. That accounted to 46 percent of all their grants to conservative causes, according to the Greenpeace analysis.

The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of 6 to 1.

“There is plenty of money coming from elsewhere,” said John Mashey, a retired computer executive who has researched funding for climate contrarians. “Focusing on the Kochs gets things confused. You can not ignore the Kochs. They have their fingers in too many things, but they are not the only ones.”

It is also possible the Kochs continued to fund their favorite projects using the anonymity offered by Donor Trust.

But the records suggest many other wealthy conservatives opened up their wallets to the anti-climate cause — an impression Ball wishes to stick.

She argued the media had overblown the Kochs’ support for conservative causes like climate contrarianism over the years. “It’s so funny that on the right we think George Soros funds everything, and on the left you guys think it is the evil Koch brothers who are behind everything. It’s just not true. If the Koch brothers didn’t exist we would still have a very healthy organization,” Ball said.

This story first appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Future generations of Americans can expect to spend 25 days a year sweltering in temperatures above 100 degrees F (38 degrees C), with climate change on course to turn the country into a hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone place.

The National Climate Assessment, released in draft form on Friday, provided the fullest picture to date of the real-time effects of climate change on U.S. life, and the most likely consequences for the future.

The 1,000-page report, the work of the more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, was unequivocal on the human causes of climate change, and on the links between climate change and extreme weather.

“Climate change is already affecting the American people,” the draft report said. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense including heat waves, heavy downpours and in some regions floods and drought. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting.”

The report, which is not due for adoption until 2014, was produced to guide federal, state, and city governments in America in making long-term plans.

By the end of the 21st century, climate change is expected to result in increased risk of asthma and other public health emergencies, widespread power blackouts, mass transit shutdowns, and possibly shortages of food.

“Proactively preparing for climate change can reduce impacts, while also facilitating a more rapid and efficient response to changes as they happen,” said Katharine Jacobs, the director of the National Climate Assessment.

The report will be open for public comment on Monday.

Environmental groups said they hoped the report would provide Barack Obama with the scientific evidence to push for measures that would slow or halt the rate of climate change — sparing the country some of the worst effects.

The report states clearly that the steps taken by Obama so far to reduce emissions are “not close to sufficient” to prevent the most severe consequences of climate change.

“As climate change and its impacts are becoming more prevalent, Americans face choices,” the report said. “Beyond the next few decades, the amount of climate change will still largely be determined by the choices society makes about emissions. Lower emissions mean less future warming and less severe impacts. Higher emissions would mean more warming and more severe impacts.”

As the report made clear: No place in America had gone untouched by climate change. Nowhere would be entirely immune from the effects of future climate change.

Some of those changes are already evident: 2012 was by far the hottest year on record, fully a degree hotter than the last such record — an off-the-charts rate of increase.

Those high temperatures were on course to continue for the rest of the century, the draft report said. It noted that average U.S. temperatures had increased by about 1.5 degrees F since 1895, with more than 80 percent of this increase since 1980.

The rise will be even steeper in future, with the next few decades projected for temperatures 2 to 4 degrees warmer in most areas. By 2100, if climate change continues on its present course, the country can expect to see 25 days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees F.

Nighttime temperatures will also stay high, providing little respite from the heat.

Certain regions are projected to heat up even sooner. West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware can expect a doubling of days hotter than 95 degrees by the 2050s. In Texas and Oklahoma, the draft report doubled the probability of extreme heat events.

Those extreme temperatures would also exact a toll on public health, with worsening air pollution, and on infrastructure, increasing the load for aging power plants.

But nowhere will see changes as extreme as Alaska, the report said.

“The most dramatic evidence is in Alaska, where average temperatures have increased more than twice as fast as the rest of the country,” the draft report said. “Of all the climate-related changes in the U.S., the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice cover in the last decade may be the most striking of all.”

Other regions will face different extreme weather scenarios. The Northeast, in particular, is at risk of coastal flooding because of sea-level rise and storm surges, as well as river flooding, because of an increase in heavy downpours.

“The north-east has experienced a greater increase in extreme precipitation over the past few decades than any other region in the U.S.,” the report said. Between 1958 and 2010, the Northeast saw a 74 percent increase in heavy downpours.

The Midwest was projected to enjoy a longer growing season — but also an increased risk of extreme events like last year’s drought. By mid-century, the combination of temperature increases and heavy rainfall or drought were expected to pull down yields of major U.S. food crops, the report warned, threatening both American and global food security.

The report is the most ambitious scientific exercise ever undertaken to catalogue the real-time effects of climate change, and predict possible outcomes in the future.

It involved more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, compared to around 30 during the last such effort when George W. Bush was president. Its findings were also much broader in scope, Jacobs said.

There were still unknowns though, the report conceded, especially about how the loss of sea ice in Greenland and Antarctica will affect future sea-level rise.

Campaign groups said they hoped the report would spur Obama to act on climate change in his second term. “The draft assessment offers a perfect opportunity for President Obama at the outset of his second term,” said Lou Leonard, director of the climate change program for the World Wildlife Fund. “When a similar report was released in 2009, the administration largely swept it under the rug. This time, the president should use it to kick-start a national conversation on climate change.”

However, the White House was exceedingly cautious on the draft release, noting in a blog post: “The draft NCA is a scientific document — not a policy document — and does not make recommendations regarding actions that might be taken in response to climate change.”

This story first appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Mississippi as seen from Ed Drager’s tug boat is a river in retreat: A giant beached barge is stranded where the water dropped, with sand bars springing into view. The floating barge office where the tug boat captain reports for duty is tilted like a funhouse. One side now rests on the exposed shore. “I’ve never seen the river this low,” Drager said. “It’s weird.”

The worst drought in half a century has brought water levels in the Mississippi close to historic lows and could shut down all shipping in a matter of weeks — unless Barack Obama takes extraordinary measures.

It’s the second extreme event on the river in 18 months, after flooding in the spring of 2011 forced thousands to flee their homes.

Without rain, water levels on the Mississippi are projected to reach historic lows this month, the National Weather Service said in its latest four-week forecast.

“All the ingredients for us getting to an all-time record low are certainly in place,” said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in St. Louis. “I would be very surprised if we didn’t set a record this winter.”

The drought has already created a low-water choke point south of St. Louis, near the town of Thebes, where pinnacles of rock extend upwards from the river bottom, making passage treacherous.

Shipping companies are hauling 15 barges at a time instead of a typical string of 25, because the bigger runs are too big for current operating conditions.

Barges are being sent off with lighter loads, making for more traffic, with more delays and back-ups. Stretches of the river are now reduced to one-way traffic. A long cold spell could make navigation even trickier: Shallow, slow-moving water is more likely to get clogged up with ice.

Current projections suggest water levels could drop too low to send barges through Thebes before the new year — unless there is heavy rainfall.

Local television in St. Louis is already dispensing doom-laden warnings about rusting metal and hazardous materials exposed by the receding waters.

Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shut-down on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7 billion in vital commodities typically moves on the river at this time of year — including grain, coal, heating oil, and cement.

Cutting off the transport route would be a disaster that would resonate across the Midwest and beyond.

“There are so many issues at stake here,” said George Foster, owner of JB Marine Services. “There is so much that moves on the river, not just coal and grain products, but you’ve got cement, steel for construction, chemicals for manufacturing plants, petroleum plants, heating oil. All those things move on the waterways, so if it shuts down you’ve got a huge stop of commerce.”

Local companies which depend on the river to ship their goods are already talking about layoffs if the Mississippi closes to navigation. Those were just the first casualties, Foster said. “It is going to affect the people at the grocery store, at the gas pump, with home construction and so forth.”

And it’s going to fall especially hard on farmers, who took a heavy hit during the drought and who rely on the Mississippi to ship their grain to export markets.

Farmers in the area typically lost up to three-quarters of their corn and soy bean crops to this year’s drought. Old-timers say it was the worst year they can remember.

“We have been through some dry times. In 1954 when my dad and grandfather farmed here they pretty much had nothing because it was so dry,” said Paul McCormick, who farms with his son, Jack, in Ellis Grove, Ill., south of St. Louis. “But I think this was a topper for me this year.”

Now, however, farmers are facing the prospect of not being able to sell their grain at all because they can’t get it to market. The farmers may also struggle to find other bulk items, such as fertilizer, that are typically shipped by barge.

“Most of the grain produced on our farm ends up bound for export,” said Jack McCormick, who raises beef cattle and grain with his father. “It ends up going down the river. That is a very good market for us, and if you can’t move it that means a lower price, or you have to figure out a different way to move it. It all ends up as a lower price for the farmers.”

The shipping industry in St. Louis wants the White House to order the release of more water from the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi, to keep waters high enough for the long barges that float down the river to New Orleans.

Foster said the extra water would be for 60 days or so — time for the Army Corps of Engineers to blast and clear the series of rock pinnacles down river, near the town of Thebes, that threaten barges during this time of low water.

But sending out more water from the Missouri would doom states upstream, such as Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, which depend on water from the Missouri and are also caught in the drought.

“There are farmers and ranchers up there with livestock that don’t have water to stay alive. They don’t have enough fodder. They don’t have enough irrigation water,” said Robert Criss, a hydrologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has spent his career studying the Mississippi. “What a dumb way to use water during a drought.”

Elected officials from South Dakota and elsewhere have pushed back strenuously at the idea of sending their water downstream. Foster reckons there is at best a 50-50 chance Obama will agree to open the gates.

But such short-term measures ignore an even bigger problem. Climate scientists believe the Mississippi and other rivers are headed for an era of extremes, because of climate change.

This time last year, the Mississippi around St. Louis was 20 feet deeper because of heavy rain. In the spring of 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up two miles of levees to save the town of Cairo, Ill., and Missouri farmland, and deliberately flooded parts of rural Louisiana to make sure Baton Rouge and New Orleans stayed dry.

“It has kind of switched on us, and it switched pretty quick,” said Coast Guard Chief Ryan Christiansen. “It wasn’t that long ago that you had pretty high flooding, and now we are heading towards record lows.”

Others argue that the Mississippi is already over-engineered, after a century and a half of tampering with the river’s natural flow.

Over the decades, Congress funded a number of projects to deepen the shipping channel, doubling it in depth to nine feet, and building an elaborate system of locks and dams to keep the river in a confined space.

The Army Corps of Engineers is constantly dredging the river’s sandy bottom or building new levees to keep barges moving.

Those efforts to confine the river to a deep and narrow channel are believed to have made surrounding areas more vulnerable to extreme floods — like in 2011, when thousands were forced to flee their homes.

They may also not make sense in the long-term use of the river.

Criss argues the long barge trains floating on the Mississippi are just too big for the upper reaches of the river anyway, and that the industry is unfairly subsidized compared with other transport providers such as rail.

“The whole system around here has been entirely reconfigured to accommodate these monstrous barges,” he said.

“This is the whole problem. We want to run boats on the river with nine-foot drafts that are almost a quarter of a mile long. They are too big for the size of the river up here.”

The Mississippi, Criss said, needs smaller boats.

This story first appeared on the Guardian website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The former vice president and climate champion, Al Gore, has called on Barack Obama to seize the moment and use his reelection victory to push through bold action on climate change.

The president has faced rising public pressure in the wake of superstorm Sandy to deliver on his promise to act on global warming.

But none of those calling on Obama to act carries the moral authority of Gore, who has devoted his post-political career to building a climate movement.

Now, Gore said, it is the president’s turn. He urged Obama to immediately begin pushing for a carbon tax in negotiations over the “fiscal cliff” budget crisis.

The former vice president’s intervention for a carbon tax could give critical support to an idea that has gained currency since the election — at least among Washington think tanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute held an all-day seminar on the carbon tax on Tuesday.

“I think all who look at these circumstances should agree that president Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it,” Gore told the Guardian in a telephone interview.

“He has the mandate. He has the opportunity, and he has the inherent ability to provide the leadership needed. I really hope that he will, and I will respectfully ask him to do exactly that.”

Gore will ratchet up his own pressure on Wednesday evening when he hosts a 24-hour live online broadcast from New York City on the connections between climate change and extreme events such as Sandy.

The Dirty Weather Report, produced by his Climate Reality Project, will kick off with footage from New Jersey’s devastated shore and interviews with Govs. Chris Christie (R) and Andrew Cuomo (D). It begins at 8 p.m. Eastern.

In terms of policy specifics, Gore said he wanted the White House and Congress to start an immediate push for a carbon tax. “It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” he said. “One way is with a carbon tax.”

It would require a balancing act, but “the most direct policy solution to the climate crisis is a carbon tax, offset by reductions in taxes on wages,” Gore went on to explain. “By including the carbon tax in the solution to the fiscal cliff we can [get] away from the climate cliff.”

Gore’s endorsement of a carbon tax comes at a critical time, with less than 50 days left for Congress to work out a budget deal and avoid triggering a set of automatic tax increases and spending cuts.

A number of conservatives have also raised the possibility of a carbon tax — even before Obama’s reelection — giving hope to environmental campaigners.

In the view of Gore and others, Obama’s reelection in the wake of Sandy dramatically expanded the scope for action on climate change. So too did the endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which singled out Obama’s efforts on climate, such as raising fuel performance standards for cars.

American public opinion also shifted, after a summer of punishing drought and record high temperatures. Two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans now say climate change is real, compared to 57 percent in 2009, according to a poll last month from the Pew Research Center.

Then came last month’s superstorm. A sizable percentage of voters invoked Sandy as a factor in their vote, according to exit polls. The storm put climate change on the map after an election in which Obama and Mitt Romney went out of their way to avoid even mentioning the words, Gore said.

The president also signaled in his victory speech that he saw climate change as one of the top three priorities of his second term. “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” Obama said.

Gore said it was now up to the public to keep the pressure on.

“Many elected officials have been frightened of the reaction should they even talk about the climate crisis much less propose the obvious solution: We need to put a price on carbon,” he said. “It is just as plain as day. But the only way to give these elected officials more backbone is to ensure that they hear more from their constituents who are deeply and rightly concerned that they are not doing anything to stop this accelerating destruction of the global climate balance.”

Other environmental leaders are also trying to seize the moment. Activists have called a demonstration at the White House on Nov. 18. to demand Obama block the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to expand production from the Alberta tar sands by pumping crude to Texas refineries.

Gore said he supported their campaign. “I do agree with those who are trying to stop the Keystone pipeline. The tar sands are just the dirtiest source of liquid fuel you can imagine,” he said. “At a time when we are desperately trying to bend the emissions curve downwards it is quite literally insane to open up a whole new source that is much more carbon intensive and that makes the problem worse.”

But it is not his fight, he said. “For me, I believe that my efforts are best expended on the central challenge of building a sufficient support for action to solve the climate crisis. It’s not that complicated ultimately. We have to put a price on carbon.”

This story was produced by the Guardian as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.