By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2004 (IPS)

Global warming threatens to devastate the Arctic, which is already facing temperature increases up to 10 times greater than other parts of the world, says a study co-sponsored by eight governments and scheduled to be released one week after Tuesday’s U.S. election.

The 144-page report says the accelerated warming of the globe – which it blames mostly on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by the industrial age – is transforming the Arctic region dramatically.

The Arctic "is now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth," according to the report, which was obtained by the ‘New York Times’ and the ‘Washington Post’ last weekend, apparently from European sources who wanted to publicise its findings before Tuesday’s vote.

The European Union (EU), some of whose member states co-sponsored the study, strongly supports the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse emissions, while U.S. President George W Bush has rejected the accord. His Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, has called for Washington to rejoin negotiations on the treaty’s terms.

"Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun," the report states, adding that greenhouse gas emissions have clearly become "the dominant factor" in the Arctic’s changing climate.

The study, whose conclusions were disclosed as the Russian government – another co-sponsor – completes its ratification of the Kyoto Protocol this week, was based on the work of nearly 300 scientists, as well as elders from indigenous – mainly Inuit – communities living in the Arctic regions of North America and Eurasia over the past four years.

It confirms earlier studies’ findings that the Arctic has warmed and is warming at a much faster rate than the Earth as a whole. While the planet’s temperature has risen by roughly one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, temperature increases in the Arctic area have been as much as 110 times greater.

That warming has produced dramatic, across-the-board effects on both the climate and the land. Once solid tundra or permafrost has turned ever soggier, while animal, fish, and plant species that have thrived in the region for millennia are either moving northward or dying out.

The report predicts that polar bears, seals who live on the ice and indigenous people who rely on the two large mammals for food are likely to be devastated by the changes, particularly the melting of sea ice.

"The major message is that climate change is here and now in the Arctic," Dr Robert Corell, a U.S. oceanographer who directed the assessment, told the Times.

Not all of these changes are due solely to changes in temperature; also cited are a number of other human-caused factors, including overfishing, the growing human population and rising levels of ultra-violet radiation from the depleted ozone layer.

"The sum of these factors threatens to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of some Arctic populations and ecosystems," says a section of the report quoted by the Times.

But the consequences of what is happening to the Arctic are certain to be global in scope, according to Gunnar Palsson, the chairman of the Arctic Council, the international body that commissioned the study. He told the Post the region should be seen as a "sort of a bellwether" for the rest of the planet.

"In order to contain these problems, we cannot think in terms of regional solutions," said Palsson.

Indeed, the melting of Arctic ice, which is occurring at a faster-than-anticipated pace, could have dire consequences for coastal areas as sea levels rise as a result.

Even if the United States joins the Kyoto Protocol – which will take legal effect 90 days from Moscow’s formal ratification – the results will be too little and too late to reverse changes that are well underway in the Arctic, because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have built up in the atmosphere for more than a century and cannot be dispersed or broken down, says the study.

At best, implementation of the treaty will slow the rate of long-term change in the Arctic.

The protocol calls for a seven-percent reduction below 1990 levels in total greenhouse gas emissions by the world’s industrialised countries by the year 2012, but does not yet require cuts by other major greenhouse-gas producing nations, notably China and India.

U.S. adherence to the treaty is nonetheless considered critical, because the country is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far, accounting for about 25 percent of annual global emissions.

Bush has opposed the treaty on the grounds that it will reduce economic growth, an assertion challenged by many economists and scientists who say it will make U.S. industry more globally competitive, particularly as the rest of the world develops new technologies to reduce emissions.

The new study’s main findings were to some extent anticipated in September in Senate hearings in which Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a representative of the 155,000 Inuit who live in Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Russia, testified about the changes her people were enduring.

"We find ourselves at the very cusp of a defining event in the history of this planet," she said. "The Earth is literally melting."

Watt-Cloutier pointed in particular to the growing unpredictability in the weather, melting of permafrost and glaciers, the retreat of sea ice, and the presence of previously unknown species, such as robins and mosquitoes and other insects.

"Protect the Arctic and you will save the planet," she said. "Use us as your early-warning system."

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