North to Alaska: America’s Climate Warning
Guest article by Jay Inslee, former governor of Washington State
In August 2025, just north of Juneau, I stepped aboard the ship Hanse Explorer at the foot of the Sawyer Glacier. We were bound for the Arctic to see, with our own eyes, what climate change is doing to Alaska—and what it may soon do to the rest of America.
When I was young, a hit song urged us to go “North to Alaska,” celebrating the gold rush that once defined this rugged state. Today the riches of Alaska are different. They are not nuggets pulled from the ground but glimpses into our shared future—a future scarred by climate change. Over six days at sea, Alaska revealed how warming temperatures are reshaping its waters, its glaciers, and the lives that depend on them.
Only an hour out of port, with the Alaska Range towering beside us, we spotted orcas slicing through the water. Their black fins caught the sun as they hunted salmon. It was thrilling. But the joy didn’t last. Our whale expert, Andy Szabo of the Alaska Whale Foundation, delivered the hard truth: several species of whale’s numbers are in serious decline with nearly fifty grey whales washing up dead on Alaska’s shores this year alone. Meanwhile, Puget Sound’s orcas are barely hanging on. His blunt assessment—“they’re starving”—hung in the air.
The cause is invisible but devastating. Whales depend on tiny krill and copepods that flourish only when cold surface waters sink and pull nutrients up from the deep. Warmer seas are breaking that cycle. Without it, the ocean becomes a desert. Too many smokestacks and tailpipes here on land translate into too few whales in the sea. It’s a simple, brutal chain: no krill, no whales. And when we lose whales, we lose more than a species—we lose a part of ourselves.
The next day we watched humpbacks perform their astonishing “bubble-feed.” Working in sync, a group of them spiraled beneath a school of herring, releasing curtains of bubbles to corral the fish before lunging upward, mouths agape. It was one of the most extraordinary displays of teamwork on the planet. Yet even that spectacle was overshadowed by what came next.
At Tracy Arm fjord, the thunder of ice calving off the glacier echoed against the granite walls. The sight was dramatic—but it was no celebration of renewal. These were death knells, proof of a glacier retreating mile by mile. Glaciers that took millennia to form are vanishing in mere decades. I’ve seen the same in my home state of Washington, where Mount Rainier has lost 40 percent of its glacier area and more than a hundred Cascade glaciers have disappeared. To watch a glacier collapse is to feel the full weight of climate change—it’s not an abstract graph or statistic, but an event that roils the water beneath you.
Alaska shows us climate change at double speed. Because snow and ice reflect sunlight, their disappearance accelerates warming: the more ice that melts, the faster the land and sea heat up. This week, we’re seeing the consequences firsthand. Hundreds of people are being airlifted from coastal villages after the remnants of Typhoon Halong brought deadly flooding over the weekend. While the danger grows, the Trump administration is stripping away support for tribal villages — who have stewarded the land for thousands of years — to protect themselves.
The paradox of Alaska is that it is achingly beautiful and heartbreakingly fragile at the same time. For me, this journey was both a gift and a warning. The whales, the glaciers, the fisheries, the communities—they are all telling us the same story. What happens here is not confined to Alaska. It is a preview of what awaits the rest of us.
We owe it to Alaska, and to ourselves, to act on that warning. To cut the pollution that is driving these changes. To speak up against oil and gas drilling that poisons our air, water and land. To protect what we still have. And to ensure that future generations can still marvel at a breaching whale or a valley carved by living ice.
Jay Inslee served from 2013 to 2025 as the 23rd governor of Washington State, passing and defending the state’s landmark Climate Commitment Act.
My heart broke reading this. Years ago I lived on Cape Cod and saw many whales. They are so beautiful. I wish our current administration understood climate change. We can't even have clean energy with this crappy president.
The orange regime does not believe in climate change. They want to drill baby drill and are planning to do so in Alaska. Magat republicans are the dumbest people on the planet. The orange regime will not be satisfied until America is destroyed from top to bottom. Remove them from office.