Alaska-Bound: President Obama Visits Our Nation's Climate Change Frontier, Where Wildlife Face Serious Threats

President Obama flew to Alaska today and will be the first sitting president to visit an Arctic Alaskan community. Why? Because Alaska and the Arctic are on the front lines of the single greatest challenge our planet faces: climate change.

As the president points out in his video announcing his trip, climate change isn't just affecting Alaska. It's contributing to extreme drought in California and the Northwest, intensifying storms, like the three major hurricanes currently moving across the the Pacific Ocean, and melting glaciers across the Arctic. But Alaska is facing unique challenges this year: wildfires are raging across the state, and a shocking 30 humpback and fin whales have died recently in the Gulf of Alaska. Both disasters are likely tied to climate change: unusually warm temperatures and lack of rain have made it all too easy for fires to rage out of control, and a large mass of warm water in the North Pacific dubbed the "warm blob" has made conditions perfect for toxic algal blooms, a leading suspect in the deaths of the whales. As climate change continues to change the world around us, events like these could become more common.

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