Warming Arctic climate confirmed by study

The most comprehensive international assessment of Arctic climate change has concluded that Earth’s upper latitudes are experiencing unprecedented increases in temperature, glacial melting and weather pattern changes, with most of those changes attributable to the human generation of greenhouse gases from automobiles, power plants and other sources.

The 144-page report is the work of a coalition of eight nations that have Arctic territories – including the United States, which has hosted and financed the coalition’s secretariat at the University of Alaska.

The findings, which reflect four years of study, confirm earlier evidence that the Arctic is warming far more quickly than the Earth overall, with temperature increases in some northern regions exceeding by tenfold the average 1 degree Fahrenheit increase experienced on Earth in the past 100 years.

“For the past 30 years, there’s been a dramatic increase in temperature and a decrease in the thickness of ice,” said Robert Corell, a senior fellow with the American Meteorological Society and chairman of the climate assessment group, which produced the report.

Those changes are already having practical impacts, including a reduction in the number of days each year that the tundra is hard enough to be driven on or drilled safely for oil. They can be expected to have even greater impact in the near future, the report predicts, in terms of agriculture, wildlife ranges for terrestrial and marine plants and animals, and global shoreline flooding because of increases in sea level caused by melting ice.

The report is scheduled to be released Tuesday, but its summary findings were reported today by the New York Times.

Gunnar Palsson, Icelandic chair of the Arctic Council, predicted in an interview last week that the report “is going to generate a great deal of attention throughout the world.”

“Climate change is not something that’s going to happen – it is happening all over the Arctic,” Palsson said. “The Arctic is sort of a bellwether” for the rest of the Earth.

The report’s authors believe Arctic temperatures will rise several degrees in the coming decades, according to a summary prepared by Gunn-Britt Retter, a technical adviser with the council’s Indigenous People’s Secretariat. Winters are expected to become warmer, and wet periods in the Arctic are expected to become longer, more frequent or both.

If nations want to temper or reverse that trend, Corell said, they will need to act quickly because carbon dioxide, the gas that is the prime culprit in global warming, typically lingers in the atmosphere 100 years before being recycled.

The Bush administration has consistently resisted calls for mandatory curbs on carbon dioxide emissions, saying it would cost too many American jobs. A coalition headed by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., is pushing legislation that would establish a pollution trading system aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions to 2000 levels by 2010, but it lacks the votes for passage.