Burning of fossil fuels threatens to overwhelm Arctic environment
It's a problem now, new study concludes
By Bruce Lieberman
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
November 9, 2004
The burning of fossil fuels has contributed to warming in the Arctic that is much faster and more dramatic than scientists previously believed at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world, a new international report concludes.
Melting sea ice and thawing permafrost is rapidly altering the Arctic environment. The changes could drive seals, polar bears and other animals toward extinction, said the report issued yesterday.
Warming in the north will be felt worldwide, as global sea levels rise from melting ice in Greenland and elsewhere and inundate low-lying areas from Florida to Bangladesh.
Arctic warming even has the potential to slow or shut down ocean currents that bring warm, tropical water into the North Atlantic. That shift that could freeze Great Britain and Northern Europe, scientists said.
The study, based on moderate estimates of future emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, predicts that by 2090 average winter temperatures in the Arctic will rise 7 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit over land and 13 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit over the ocean.
"Climate warming (in the Arctic) is occurring right now and has been doing so for the last 30 years and at rates that exceed anywhere else on the planet," said Robert Corell, an American scientist and chairman of the international team of 300 scientists who worked on the report.
"Instead of climate being a future problem, it's a now problem."
Scientists based in San Diego said the report is largely a synthesis of the latest climate studies on Arctic warming, documenting what they have seen personally.
Jeff Severinghaus, a climate scientist at University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, said the glacier under his field camp on the western edge of Greenland has fallen one meter per year since 2001.
"It's clear that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass by melting," Severinghaus said. "That's no surprise. That fits with what large-scale regional studies have shown."
Meanwhile, sea ice in many areas of the Arctic has still not recovered from the 1997-98 El Niño, which carried warm water from the tropical Pacific far north and thinned huge swaths of the Arctic sea ice, said Scripps' Robert Pinkel.
"What's happening in the Arctic isn't subtle," said Pinkel, a physical oceanographer who studies deep ocean currents in the Arctic.
"It's happening very fast, and . . . it's fairly convincing that on the scale of our lifetimes very dramatic things will be happening."
The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment is the most comprehensive study to date of how the globe's warming climate is changing, and is expected to change, a single region.
The four-year study was commissioned by the Arctic Council, which includes representatives from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United States and six indigenous peoples who live in the Arctic.
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