- The four distinguished visitors looked on in awe at the
sight before them. Exit Glacier in Alaska's Kenai Fjords national park
is one of continental America's most imposing monuments, and last week
it was at its most impressive - a hulk of ice and snow imperceptibly making
its way toward the sea.
-
- But lately that movement has quickened, a fact that will
not have been lost on visitors. One of the most popular tourist attractions
in Alaska, Exit Glacier has receded 300 metres (1,000ft) in the past 10
years. The movement means that the viewing platform from which the group
of dignitaries surveyed the glacier would have been under several feet
of ice just a few years ago. Today it is on dry land.
-
- The four VIPs included an unlikely couple, both probable
presidential candidates in 2008, both plausible winners, and from opposite
ends of the political spectrum.
-
- One was John McCain, Vietnam veteran and republican senator
from Arizona. The other was Hillary Rodham Clinton, White House veteran
and New York senator. That they should choose to visit Alaska together
in order to investigate climate change raised a few eyebrows. Rupert Murdoch's
Fox News even hinted, in jest, that the two were having an affair.
-
- But, despite the political barbs, the senators had a
serious purpose. Soon the issue of climate change - often code for global
warming - was back on the national political agenda.
-
- Mr McCain, who has sponsored a climate stewardship bill
with the Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, said: "The question is
how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action. Go
up to places like we just came from. It's a little scary."
-
- Melting glaciers is only one of Alaska's problems. As
Kate Troll, an environmentalist writing in the Anchorage Daily News, put
it earlier this month: "Besides retreating glaciers, insect infestations
and more intense forest fires, Alaska is experiencing melting permafrost,
flooded villages, warming oceans, coastal erosion, shifts in bird and wildlife
populations, and shorter seasons for ice roads. And there is more to come,
as Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the world."
-
- Last year was the warmest summer on record for much of
Alaska. An Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report published in November
2004 said Alaska's average annual temperature rose 3.3C between 1949 and
2003. Some areas have risen twice that much.
-
- A further report published in March noted that the average
temperature in the Arctic had risen by 0.4C a decade since the mid-1960s.
The study reported that the last decade was the warmest since records began,
and that the current warming in the Arctic was without precedent since
the last ice age.
-
- All of which has prompted a mini tourist boom, a "catch-it-while-you-can"
attitude among visitors eager to see the glaciers while they are still
there. This year, Alaska is set to beat the 1.45 million tourists of 2004.
-
- Many tourist centres are making the most of the bad news,
regaling visitors with video presentations bearing titles such as Glimpses
of an Ice Age Past.
-
- One of the best known and most visited Alaskan glaciers,
Muir Glacier, named after the pioneering environmentalist John Muir, has
retreated five miles in the past 30 years. Another, Portage Glacier, is
retreating at a rate of 50 metres a year and is no longer visible from
its visitor centre.
-
- In December, a geologist with the US Geological Survey
presented a series of photographs of glaciers taken in the first four years
of this century, alongside pictures taken up to a century before.
-
- The result showed not just the retreat of glaciers but
the spread of vegetation where once there was merely ice.
-
- "You don't need science to prove the point,"
Matt Nolan of the University of Alaska told the American Geophysical Union,
where the pictures were unveiled.
-
- "This evidence is visual, and it's real. All the
glaciers in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are retreating from their
most extended positions thousands of years ago, and the only scientific
explanation for their retreat is a change in climate."
-
- The key question - preoccupying everyone from senators
with an eye on the White House, to tourists with an eye on their holiday
snaps - is what is to blame. Is it global warming or is it merely part
of the planet's climate cycle?
-
- The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the
VIP group visiting Alaska last week, called for politicians to put aside
their differences and deal with the problem.
-
- "Climate change is different when you come here,
because you see the faces of people experiencing it in Alaska," he
said. "If you can go to the native people and listen to their stories,
and walk away with any doubt that something's going on, I just think you're
not listening."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1553726,00.html
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