THE BLACK JEWISH EXPERIENCE: Town Falls Into Sea Because of Global Warming

What people forget about Global Warming is how costly in human cost and financial cost it will be.

In this town in Alaska, the island is actually falling back into the sea. For the first time in hundreds of years the Arctic passage is completely open for a full year.

Permafrost in this town is no longer frosting over in the winter. And the town is falling back into the sea.

All over the continent, poor people are struggling as their communities change or evaporate. When you are poor, you wonder where money for tomorrows meal will come from you can’t begin to imagine what you will do if your house disappears into the sea, or your water dries up because of Global warming.

Mother Jones photographers Julia Whitty and Robert Knoth and reporter Getty Images documented Shishmaref Village falling into the sea.

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Get used to it: real estate falling into the sea. And not just beach houses and seaside time-shares. Think towns and cities. These images of Shishmaref village on Alaska's remote west coast reveal the tip of a terrain melting so fast it will carry whole cultures away with it—rich and poor, polluters and nonpolluters, all vulnerable to the great leveler, the ocean.

You think South Pacific island nations and remote Arctic outposts will be the only victims? Wrong. Because no matter what we do on the carbon emissions front in the coming decades, the world ocean is forecast to warm and rise for the next millennium or more. Pictures like these will soon be commonplace.

In Shishmaref, calamity has already arrived. The village of 600 Inupiaq lies on the fragile barrier island of Sarichef, where sea ice forms later each year, exposing the land to autumn storms that carve away 50 feet or more of shoreline a season.

…Ten million dollars has been spent on seawalls, to no avail. Residents have concluded permanent resettlement is their only option. But considering America has yet to seriously tackle New Orleans' sea-level problems, no one on this distant edge of the Chukchi Sea imagines the $180 million needed to relocate Shishmaref will be easy to come by.

And Shishmaref is not alone. A 2004 Government Accountability Office report found that of Alaska's 213 Native villages, 184 are battling floods and erosion, while another assessment foresees that in the coming decades, Alaska will require $6.1 billion to repair global warming's domino effect of fallen bridges, burst sewer pipes, and disintegrating roads. Worldwide, the situation is more dire, more expensive: Oxfam suggests the United States owes $22 billion, or 44 percent—our polluting share—of the $50 billion needed each year for poor nations to adapt to climate change.