Community News
Alaska Natives Say Warming Trend Imperils Villages
by Yereth Rosen
Published on Friday, July 2, 2004 by Reuters
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A warming climate is bringing expensive and potentially dangerous erosion and floods to Native Alaskan villages, representatives of those communities told federal officials this week.
Storms tear off chunks of beach once shielded by permafrost or Arctic pack ice. Buildings are in danger of toppling into the sea, and many have already been moved, at great expense.
Airstrips are swamped and ice cellars that once stored food in the permafrost are filling with water, residents say.
"As the calming hand of the ice on the Arctic Ocean grows more fragile, so does our coastline," Barrow Mayor Edith Vorderstrasse told members of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee during a two-day field hearing in Anchorage. "We are at a crossroads. Is it practical to stand and fight our mother ocean? Or do we surrender and move?"
Fixing the problems by expanding seawalls or relocating entire towns could cost hundreds of millions of dollars for each village, according to General Accounting Office estimates presented at the hearing.
Of the 213 Native Alaskan villages, 184 face flooding and erosion problems, with very serious problems in about 20, the GAO says.
Glimpse Vanishing Glaciers
Attention Turns To Alaska Where Climate
Change Is Transforming The Landscape
By Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
The Guardian - UK
8-22-5From Rense.com http://www.rense.com/general67/glimpse.htm
The four distinguished visitors looked on in awe at the sight before them. Exit Glacier in Alaska's Kenai Fjords national park is one of continental America's most imposing monuments, and last week it was at its most impressive - a hulk of ice and snow imperceptibly making its way toward the sea.
But lately that movement has quickened, a fact that will not have been lost on visitors. One of the most popular tourist attractions in Alaska, Exit Glacier has receded 300 metres (1,000ft) in the past 10 years. The movement means that the viewing platform from which the group of dignitaries surveyed the glacier would have been under several feet of ice just a few years ago. Today it is on dry land.
The four VIPs included an unlikely couple, both probable presidential candidates in 2008, both plausible winners, and from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
One was John McCain, Vietnam veteran and republican senator from Arizona. The other was Hillary Rodham Clinton, White House veteran and New York senator. That they should choose to visit Alaska together in order to investigate climate change raised a few eyebrows. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News even hinted, in jest, that the two were having an affair.
But, despite the political barbs, the senators had a serious purpose. Soon the issue of climate change - often code for global warming - was back on the national political agenda.
Mr McCain, who has sponsored a climate stewardship bill with the Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, said: "The question is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action. Go up to places like we just came from. It's a little scary."
Melting glaciers is only one of Alaska's problems. As Kate Troll, an environmentalist writing in the Anchorage Daily News, put it earlier this month: "Besides retreating glaciers, insect infestations and more intense forest fires, Alaska is experiencing melting permafrost, flooded villages, warming oceans, coastal erosion, shifts in bird and wildlife populations, and shorter seasons for ice roads. And there is more to come, as Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the world."
Last year was the warmest summer on record for much of Alaska. An Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report published in November 2004 said Alaska's average annual temperature rose 3.3C between 1949 and 2003. Some areas have risen twice that much.
A further report published in March noted that the average temperature in the Arctic had risen by 0.4C a decade since the mid-1960s. The study reported that the last decade was the warmest since records began, and that the current warming in the Arctic was without precedent since the last ice age.
All of which has prompted a mini tourist boom, a "catch-it-while-you-can" attitude among visitors eager to see the glaciers while they are still there. This year, Alaska is set to beat the 1.45 million tourists of 2004.
Many tourist centres are making the most of the bad news, regaling visitors with video presentations bearing titles such as Glimpses of an Ice Age Past.
One of the best known and most visited Alaskan glaciers, Muir Glacier, named after the pioneering environmentalist John Muir, has retreated five miles in the past 30 years. Another, Portage Glacier, is retreating at a rate of 50 metres a year and is no longer visible from its visitor centre.
See the whole story at: http://www.rense.com/general67/glimpse.htm
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