Headline: Opinion: Is Alaska melting?

Source: Ed Hunt, Christian Science Monitor, 12 June 2001

URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/06/12/fp9s1-csm.shtml

GRAYS RIVER, WASH.

Surveys over the past four years confirm that Alaska's hundreds of glaciers are melting at a rapid pace. The Columbia glacier now melts at half a mile a year, and has retreated eight miles in the past 16 years. The permafrost - ground that has been frozen for thousands of years - is frozen no longer. As underground ice melts, roads are cracked and broken, or twisted out of shape; buildings and telephone poles tilt as if dislodged by an earthquake.

Is this the face of global warming?

Atmospheric scientists have predicted that a global warming of our climate would show its face early in the Northern regions. What they are finding only confirms their fears. While the average global temperature has risen 1 degree F. in the past 100 years, in Alaska, Siberia, and Northwest Canada it has gone up 5 degrees F. in 30 years.

While Anchorage saw little snow this winter, other parts of the state had plenty. More snow may fall in winter as the climate warms, because warmer air holds more moisture - which means more rain and more snow. Yet for the past several years, the summers have been longer and drier, melting whatever snow added to the glaciers during the winter - and more besides.

Further north, at places like Sachs Harbour, the changes are even more evident. The western Arctic is warming at a rate approximately three to five times the global average. Temperatures are so much warmer - at times 25 degrees F. higher than normal - that barn swallows have appeared, and, for the first time in memory, salmon are found in sea. Mosquitoes now survive in the polar desert. Arctic sea ice is an estimated 40 percent thinner and has shrunk in area by 14 percent. Something is happening.

Yet there is more going on here than just the melting of millennial ice. The taiga, an ancient forest, is dying. Environmental stresses have weakened it: heavy snows in winter have damaged the trees. Warm, dry summers have stunted their growth; spruce bark beetles are finishing the job. The beetles are thriving in the new warmer Alaska. Their territory is spreading, and the vast forest is dying because of them.

Scientists estimate that a third to half of all the white spruce in Alaska has been killed in just 15 years. Researchers have discovered that shrubs are growing larger and spreading across areas of tundra that have been heretofore barren. Something is happening.

Talk to climatologists, and they'll tell you something happened around 1976. Since then, glaciers have been melting more quickly, El Niños have happened more frequently, and Alaska, Northwest Canada, and Siberia have become 5 degrees F. warmer. Given the layers and complexity of our atmospheric machinery, these revelations may seem hard to sort out. Are the changes natural or man-made?

Techniques that allow us to sample ancient climate indicators from lake bottoms and arctic ice show that before human civilization rose, our climate varied wildly, rising and falling in average global temperature within a few years' time. Human civilization has risen in a period of relative calm and stability during the last 11,000 years. Human civilization might not survive a period of renewed volatility, whatever the cause. Yet this natural ability of the earth's climate to fluctuate doesn't get us off the hook, as some would hope. Instead, this new evidence shows we are playing with fire - poking a dangerous animal with a stick. By pumping gases into the atmosphere at levels far above what they should be, we are tampering with a system that is capable of possibly disastrous fluctuations.

That was the message the National Academy of Science delivered to the Bush administration last week. The scientists told President Bush that while it is impossible to determine how much of global warming can be attributed to human influence, there's no doubt that it is happening, no doubt that humans are playing a role, and no doubt that it will have profound consequences for people and the planet. The Bush administration has changed its tone; the president was to make a statement on global warming yesterday.

Here, Bush has an opportunity to establish himself, and the US, as a world leader. Should he commit this country's resources to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the US economy would benefit through the manufacture and export of clean energy technology that private industry has already developed. New energy technology is poised to become a booming international market as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. The US can position itself to be a leading maker and seller of that technology, or simply another buyer.

We can deny that we've created global warming single-handedly. We can say this is a natural fluctuation in the earth's climate. We can follow the example of tobacco executives and Exxon Corporation and deny the obvious - deny what our own research tells us.

What we cannot deny is that we are in a period of significant climate change. We cannot deny that the damage is already being done. Three years ago, science writer William K. Stevens called what is happening in Alaska an "ecological holocaust" - a term both fitting and ironic, given that when the Holocaust of World War II was occurring, so many tried to look the other way.

As in the Second World War, the world's great nations are preparing - uniting - to fight a battle that the US has yet to join. Perhaps this nation will prove itself a leader in the end. I have little doubt we will soon join the fight. We can't deny it any longer.

Something is happening.

*** Ed Hunt is the editor of Tidepool.org news service. ***

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), June 12, 2001

Answers

Headline: Warming Threat Requires Action Now, Scientists Say

Source: New York Times, 12 June 2001

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/12/science/12CLIM.html

In his speech on climate yesterday, President Bush said that a basic problem with the Kyoto Protocol, the proposed international pact for curtailing global warming, was that it laid out a timetable for cutting releases of heat-trapping gases before the threat posed by a buildup of those gases was clearly understood.

But while many scientists and experts on risk management agreed in interviews yesterday that much remained unknown about the potential impact of rising temperatures, they took issue with the idea that this uncertainty justified further delay in acting to limit climate change.

"There will be deep uncertainty in the climatic future for a long time," said Dr. Michael E. Schlesinger, who directs climate research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But if you wait until it's diminished to some threshold that you assign and then learn that the problem is severe, it may be too late to do anything about it."

Indeed, to many experts embroiled in the climate debate, the question of how much warming is too much — which has been at the center of international climate negotiations for a decade — now constitutes a red herring. They say it is more important to start from the point of widest agreement — that rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases are warming the atmosphere, and that adding a lot more is probably a bad idea. The next step, they say, is to adopt policies that will soon flatten the rising arc on graphs of global emissions while also pursuing more research to clarify the risks.

Many note that recent studies suggest a fairly high risk of significant ecological harm from a global temperature rise of less than 1 degree Fahrenheit and of substantial coastal flooding and agricultural disruption if temperatures rise more than 4 or 5 degrees in the new century.

Global temperatures have risen 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years; since the last Ice Age, they have risen about 9 degrees.

The risks are clear enough to justify some investments now in emissions controls, they say.

They say that the general quandary is no different from the kind faced by town officials who must judge how much road salt to buy based on uncertain long-term winter weather forecasts, or by countries deciding whether to invest in a missile defense system that might not ever have to shoot down a missile.

"It's silly to expect that we can resolve what the future is going to be," said Dr. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a mathematician and political scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "That's like trying to do economic policy by asking competing economists what level the stock market is going to be at 20 years from now."

World leaders, he and other experts say, would do better to embrace the notion that the future holds a murky mix of risks, both environmental and economic, but both can be lessened by actions taken now.

Increasingly, experts with diverse viewpoints on the extent of the climate risk agree on a general solution: policies that reduce emissions, coupled with intensified climate research and monitoring, and policies created with sufficient flexibility that they can be intensified or relaxed as the warming trend's causes and consequences become clearer.

"This is such a big problem, it's so long-term, with uncertainties that are so substantial, that at every stage you have to learn and adjust," said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist for Environmental Defense, a private conservation group.

A similar view is held by Dr. Robert J. Lempert, a senior scientist and expert in risk analysis at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute based in Santa Monica, Calif., that has for decades studied risk strategies for the Pentagon and other government institutions.

"Scientists aren't any time soon going to give politicians some magic answer," he said. "Policy makers for a long, long time are going to have to deal with a situation where it's not clear what the costs and benefits are, where lots of people disagree about them, and they can't wait until everything is resolved."

There is plenty to study in the meantime about aspects of the dizzyingly complex puzzle that is the atmosphere, many scientists said.

They said Mr. Bush was correct to allude in his speech to the idea that atmospheric temperatures might have been altered because of efforts to reduce pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes, most notably particles of sulfur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain, and of soot.

"We're clearly interfering with climate in a variety of ways, with aerosols on the one hand and gases on the other," said Dr. James E. Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a climate modeling center in Manhattan run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dr. Hansen has briefed the Bush administration twice on the issue, focusing on the possibility of cleaning up releases of soot and methane, which both have a warming influence on the atmosphere, first, and moving to cuts in carbon dioxide, which is released by burning oil and coal, when technological advances make that change cheaper.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), June 12, 2001.

In anticipation of the coming naysayers
I'd like to say that I agree with them.

We should wait till it's too late to do
anything about it before we act :::;-§

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), June 12, 2001.