Melting Glaciers and Ice Sheets Take Center Stage at COP-15
By Brooks B. Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
The world’s snow and ice took center stage at the Copenhagen climate conference today, as former Vice President Al Gore joined Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr-Store to raise the troubling specter of a world in which mountain glaciers are a distant memory and the Greenland ice sheet’s outlet glaciers have become giant ice rivers into the sea.
The Gore event was oversubscribed, with a big jostling crowd outside, as Gore events are these days. Two reports were released: “Melting Snow and Ice: A Call for Action” on behalf of Gore and Gahr-Store, and the drier, but equally disturbing “The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate,” the so-called SWIPA report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an arm of the Arctic Council.
The “Melting Ice” Report warns of the consequences of subjecting the world’s snow and ice to the kinds of global temperature increases predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), noting that “hundreds of millions of people… may lose their homes due to rising sea levels,” and that millions more “may be affected by freshwater availability decreases due to changes in snow and glacier reservoirs.”
The SWIPA report couches its warning in the neutral style of a scientific monograph, but it is equally chilling: “Recent projections for global sea level rise by 2100 that include the contributions from thermal expansion of the oceans and the rest of the world’s ice masses, in addition to meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet, are as high as 1.0 (+ or – 0.5) m.” In other words, somewhere between 2 and 5 feet, which is what Clean Air-Cool Planet has been telling people along the Eastern Seaboard this fall in our Hip-Boot Tour.
A little earlier in the day, Assistant Secretary Tom Strickland of the U.S. Interior Department showed maps prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey detailing the peculiar vulnerability to sea level rise of the eastern coast of the United States, which is also subsiding as a result of tectonic forces. He also discussed the unique vulnerability of communities in the U.S. Arctic, and showed a picture of a home in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, falling into the sea. That home used to be protected against the storms of the Chukchi Sea by shorefast ice. But now the ice is gone, and so, soon, will be the village.
Meanwhile, the people most directly affected by the changes in the Arctic, the Inuits of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, have joined with other northern peoples to set up an “Arctic venue” at which dozens of exhibits celebrate the sustainable life of the Arctic and also document the threats to it. I had dinner two nights ago with a number of the Arctic folks, including Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Canada and Patricia Cochran of Alaska. Sheila was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that was eventually given to Gore and Rajendra Pauchari, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Patricia has been a lead spokesperson for the Inuit at the Arctic Council and elsewhere. It was a joyous dinner, with lots of jokes aimed in the general direction of Paul Crowley, an attorney and long-time aide to Sheila, who lived for many years in Iqualuit but has now moved to Rome for work. Iqualuit, in the far north of the Nunavut First Nation of Canada, won’t soon have a climate like Rome. But its climate isn’t any longer like the Iqualuit of old, either.
Tags: Arctic, arctic policy, arctic warming, COP-15, copenhagen, snow
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