Global warming could put Alaskan village underwater

By Kim Murphy

Shishmaref, Alaska, July 8— As world leaders debate the possibility of global warming and its uncertain threat to the future, the reality of climate change has closed in on this small Eskimo village on the Chukchi Sea—to be precise, on a rusty fuel tank farm holding 80,000 gallons of gasoline and stove oil.

Several years ago, the tanks were more than 300 feet from the edge of a seaside bluff. But years of retreating sea ice have sent storm waters pounding, and today just 35 feet of fine sandy bluff stands between the tanks and disaster.

The airport runway — the only way to haul in wintertime food and supplies from Anchorage, 625 miles away — has seawater lapping near its flank. Seven houses have been relocated so far, three others have fallen into the water and engineers now say the entire village of 600 residents could disappear into the sea within the next few decades.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who is trying to get millions of dollars in federal aid to help, blames the problem on cyclical changes in ocean temperature. But in Alaska, where receding glaciers, melting permafrost and advancing forests have placed the state on the front lines of climate change, many scoff at that explanation.

Since the 1970s, Shishmaref residents have seen their drinking water inundated with advancing seawater, an ocean ice pack that melts earlier each year, unusual tides and difficulty hunting ice-bound sea creatures, such as seals and walruses.

At a time when the issue of global warming is sparking international conflicts for the Bush administration, towns such as Shishmaref and others on Alaska’s coast are dealing with what many believe are the early heralds of climate change.

The Malaspina and Seward glaciers, at the top of the Alaskan panhandle, melted at a rate that released 15 cubic miles of water over the last 30 years -- the equivalent of a month’s worth of water from Canada’s largest river system. The Harding Ice Field on the Kenai Peninsula has receded 85 feet over the last 40 years, along with many glaciers on Prince William Sound.

In many areas of interior Alaska, the permafrost has warmed to within 1 degree of freezing -- a phenomenon that could threaten everything from roads and houses to the trans-Alaska oil pipeline built atop it -- and residents near the Arctic Circle say spruce forests and shrubs have been steadily advancing northward into the once-frozen tundra, apparently affecting such things as caribou migration patterns.

Even the Northwest Passage -- the fabled Arctic sea route linking the Atlantic to the North Pacific across the top of Canada and Alaska -- has become somewhat passable in recent years, so much so that occasional ice-breaker cruise ships have made the transit over the last few summers.

Gunter Weller, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, said mean temperatures in the state have increased by 5 degrees in the summer and 10 degrees in the winter over the last 30 years. Moreover, the Arctic ice field has shrunk by 40% to 50% over the last few decades and lost 10% of its thickness, studies show.

“These are pretty large signals, and they’ve had an effect on the entire physical environment,” Weller said.

As the political debate over the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty unfolds in Washington, DC, Europe and Asia, rural residents in Alaska already are seeing the effects of a changing climate all around them.

Global warming is a phenomenon caused by increasing concentrations of certain gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and water vapor. The gases trap solar heat, causing surface temperatures to rise over time.

In 1998, former Greenpeace climate campaigner Dan Ritzman traveled to eight native villages on the Bering and Chukchi seas to interview residents about what they saw happening to the weather.

“The western Arctic is warming faster than any other place on the planet, so we wanted to look at the impacts. The feeling is that the people who live out there are the canary in the coal mine for global warming,” Ritzman said.

“In each village, I’d say between 40 and 60 people would come to these meetings. We’d give our presentation and ask for more information…They all reported changes in the sea ice, that it would come later and leave sooner and be more unstable all winter,” he said.

In Shishmaref and other villages along the Chukchi coast, in which villagers rely on sea mammals for survival, this is a substantial threat. Sea ice that is unstable all winter long and early to retreat in the spring means walrus and seal hunters can no longer rely on snowmobiles to hunt on the pack ice.

“This year the ice was thinner, and most of the year at least part of the ice was open. We don’t normally see open water in December,” said Edwin Weyiouanna, an artist who has lived most of his life on the Chukchi Sea.

The biggest effect has been the unusually brutal storms the Chukchi has been able to muster in the fall, when sea ice would normally halt wave action against the shore. Coastal villages up and down the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, including Barrow, Kivalina and Point Hope, all are experiencing serious erosion.

Shishmaref, built on a narrow barrier island off the Seward Peninsula, has experienced unusually high wave and tide action and the melting of permafrost that underlies its ocean bluffs.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Green group comes under right-wing attack

By Don Hazen

June 26— Inspired by a friendly Bush administration, a trio of anti-environmental groups and companies is launching a multi-tiered attack on the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Best known for its headline-grabbing campaigns to protect forests, RAN has a proven track record of altering corporate behavior through a range of pressure tactics.

A conservative group called the Frontier Freedom Foundation (FFF) — heavily supported by tobacco, oil and timber money — is lobbying the IRS to revoke RAN’s non-profit status. At the same time, logging company Boise Cascade has aggressively targeted RAN’s funders with threatening letters, trying to undermine the organization by drying up its cash flow. Both are working with the anti-green Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise to cripple RAN’s effectiveness.

RAN executes highly visible, aggressive campaigns primarily against corporations destroying old growth forests in North America and around the world. Its tactics include consumer boycotts and symbolic efforts designed to capture media attention, including rappelling down corporate buildings and unleashing giant banners. Along with Boise Cascade, RAN has also targeted Mitsubishi and Occidental Petroleum, among other corporate giants.

The first attack came from the FFF (founded by former Wyoming Senator Malcolm Wallup, a close associate of Vice President Dick Cheney), which charged in a letter to the IRS that RAN routinely engages in non-educational activity, violating the legal requirement that it be “operated exclusively for educational purposes.” The FFF’s executive director, George Landrith, called RAN “fundamentally radical, anti-capitalist and lawless.”

In response, RAN says that the FFF is using the tax codes to attack its First Amendment rights. As many have pointed out, civil rights groups like the NAACP wouldn’t have been able to organize sit-ins to fight segregation if such a standard was in place.

“We believe when laws are unjust, they can be broken in a symbolic way,” RAN Executive Director Christopher Hatch told the Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, some other groups are expressing anxiety about the IRS case. They fear a chilling effect on anti-corporate protests if the FFF is successful. Indeed, the FFF’s Landrith sees the RAN effort as a test case with many more to follow if successful. Thus far, the Bush administration hasn’t been shy about employing hardball tactics with its enemies, and the prospect of politicizing the IRS is not out of the question. Also, experts note that the IRS language in this arena is vague and the rulings on the books are close to 20 years old. New language could be more narrow and restrictive.

If the FFF is successful, RAN would not be out of business, but would have to raise what’s known as “hard money” from its donors and members. Put simply, donors wouldn’t be able to claim a tax deduction for supporting specific RAN activities, which could discourage them from giving. Michael Klein, a business entrepreneur and one of RAN’s key funders said, “I don’t think there is any merit in this case and feel confident that the IRS will rule in RAN’s favor. But I stand behind the RAN’s work in this area, and would be willing to more than make up whatever shortfall might result.”

Michael Shellenberger, a RAN spokesman, calls the whole effort with the IRS a canard. “The only activities that would result in revoking non-profit tax status are felonious activities, like embezzlement,” said Shellenberger. “The FFF is trying to scare our supporters, but they won’t be scared.”

“Let there be no doubt,” Hatch adds, “the work to protect our forests will not only continue, but escalate.”

For more information: www.ran.org

Source: AlterNet: www.alternet.org