September 13, 2003
Baked Alaska on the Menu?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
AKTOVIK, Alaska
Skeptics of global warming should come to this Eskimo
village on the Arctic Ocean, roughly 250 miles north of the
Arctic Circle. It's hard to be complacent about climate
change when you're in an area that normally is home to
animals like polar bears and wolverines, but is now
attracting robins.
A robin even built its nest in town this year (there is no
word in the local Inupiat Eskimo language for robins). And
last year a (presumably shivering) porcupine arrived.
The Okpilak River valley was historically too cold and dry
for willows, and in the Inupiat language "Okpilak" means
"river with no willows." Yet a warmer, wetter climate means
that now it's crowded with willows.
The warming ocean is also bringing salmon, three kinds now,
to waters here. The Eskimos say there were almost no salmon
a generation ago.
"The weather is different, really different," said
92-year-old Nora Agiak, speaking in the Inupiat language
and wearing moose-skin moccasins and a jacket with
wolverine fur. "We're not getting as many icebergs as we
used to. Maybe the world moved because it's getting
warmer."
In the past, I've been skeptical about costly steps (like
those in the Kyoto accord) to confront climate change. But
I'm changing my mind. The evidence, while still somewhat
incomplete, is steadily mounting that our carbon emissions
are causing an accelerating global warming that amounts to
a major threat to the world in which we live.
Alaska has warmed by eight degrees, on average, in the
winter, over the last three decades, according to
meteorological records. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission
says that today's Arctic temperatures are the highest in
the last 400 years, and perhaps much longer.
The U.S. Navy reports that in areas traversed by its
submarines, Arctic ice volume decreased 42 percent over the
last 35 years, and the average thickness of ice below water
declined 4.3 feet. The Office of Naval Research warns that
"one plausible outcome" is that the summer Arctic ice cap
will disappear completely by 2050.
"We've got climate change," Robert Thompson, a native
guide, says flatly. He notes that pack ice, which always
used to hover offshore, providing a home for polar bears,
now sometimes retreats hundreds of miles north of Kaktovik.
That has caused some bears to drown and leaves others
stranded on land.
(After a polar bear was spotted outside Kaktovik's post
office one snowy morning, the locals explained what to do
if you bump into a famished polar bear: Yell and throw
stones, and above all, don't run!)
For hundreds of years, the Eskimos here used ice cellars in
the permafrost. But now the permafrost is melting, and
these ice cellars are filling with water and becoming
useless.
Kaktovik's airstrip, 50 years old, has begun to flood
because of higher seas, so it may be moved upland. Another
native village, Shishmaref, has voted to abandon its
location entirely because of rising seas.
In the hamlet of Deadhorse, I ran into an Arctic native
named Jackson Snyder, who said that winters were getting "a
lot warmer — doesn't get much below 50 below anymore."
That may not seem so bad. But while there will be benefits
to a warmer Alaska (a longer growing season, ice-free
ports), climate change can also lead to crop failures,
spread tropical diseases and turn Bangladesh into tidal
pools. The pace of warming may be far too fast for animals,
humans or ecosystems to adjust. My advice is that if you're
planning a dream home in New Orleans or on the Chesapeake,
put it on stilts.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reflecting a
consensus of scientists, concluded that human activity had
probably caused most global warming in recent decades. It
predicted that in this century, the seas will rise 4 to 35
inches.
Some 14,000 years ago, a warming trend apparently raised
the sea level by 70 feet in just a few hundred years.
Today's computer models don't foresee a repeat of that, but
they also can't explain why it happened then.
That's why I'm changing my mind about the need for major
steps to address carbon emissions. Global warming is still
an uncertain threat, but it may well become one of the
major challenges of this century. Certainly our government
should do more about it than censor discussions of climate
change in E.P.A. reports.
Unless we act soon, we may find waves lapping the beaches
of Ohio. |
