Global warming and its impact on the Arctic is generating a fresh round of heat among scientists and politicians, amid claims that the region is seeing temperatures climb at twice the rate of elsewhere on the planet.
The most comprehensive study ever done of the region’s climate prompted the Arctic Council, including the United States and Canada, to agree Nov. 24 that governments must work with northern peoples to protect northern ecosystems and limit greenhouse gas emissions.
All eight nations on the council, meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, endorsed the policy recommendations of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report released earlier in November.
The report was the result of four years of work by 250 scientists and warned that Arctic sea ice could almost disappear within 100 years because of global warming.
While that would facilitate expanded oil and natural gas operations, melting permafrost could wreak havoc in the Arctic.
Summer sea ice will shrink by 50 percent this century
The scientists said summer sea ice has already declined rapidly and will shrink by 50 percent this century; substantial melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet could raise global sea levels by 23 feet, threatening Arctic coastal towns and facilities; climate change poses a threat to the health and food security of indigenous people; and polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species if sea ice melts.
Backing up the findings, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, said Inuit elders have “intimate knowledge of the land, sea and ice and have observed disturbing changes to the climate and wildlife.”
The ministers who make up the Arctic Council agreed that strategies to mitigate climate change are essential.
“These strategies should address net greenhouse gas emissions and limit them in the long term,” said documents backing up the council’s communiqué.
Watt-Cloutier described the statement as a “modest breakthrough.”
She and Samantha Smith, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, agreed that the council’s stance fell short of their greatest hopes.
Smith said the eight nations “had an opportunity to show real leadership ... they missed this opportunity.”
But she said that the Bush administration, through the policy document, has “acknowledged what the scientists and the people in the Arctic have been telling us.”
Explaining the absence of specific recommendations, Canada’s Environment Minister Stephane Dion said in a statement from Reykavik that the council has no role in directing governments and telling them what to do.
U.S. experts recommend more studies
In the United States, 11 climate experts sent a letter to Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, noting that sediment and ice core samples show that the Arctic has experienced past warming that cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions. They called for advances in Arctic climate science to provide a more complete picture of Arctic climate understanding.
The scientists said that a comprehensive study of Arctic temperatures over 1951-1990 found “no tangible manifestations of the greenhouse effect,” although a large rise in air temperatures during the mid-1990s showed the temperature for the entire Arctic was 1 degree Centigrade higher in the last five years of the 20th Century than for the 1951-1990 average.
Richard Lindzen, a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told McCain the priority should go to supporting and encouraging science “while removing incentives to promote alarmism.”
Debate triggered in Canada
What the impact assessment report has triggered in Canada is a heavy-hitting debate, with critics arguing the findings either lack scientific data or use selected information.
Ken Green, director of the Risk and Environment Centre at the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, said only three of 140 pages in the summary report discuss observed changes in the Arctic climate and that data reveals a “startling contradiction.”
The study shows that although sea ice has declined since 1950, the average temperature for the period of 1957 to 1978 was below average.
Writing in the Financial Post, Green said the report is an excellent example of the “favored scare technique of the anti-energy activists: pumping largely unjustifiable assumptions about the future into simplified computer models to conjure up a laundry list of scary projections” that Arctic communities face disaster.