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Evacuations have begun in Western Alaska

Evacuations have begun in Western Alaska, where rising sea levels will soon wipe out an Eskimo village. House by house, the Alaskan Eskimo village of Shishmaref is falling into the ocean. Shishmaref sits on an island a quarter of a mile across and two and a half miles long. Its 600 people are moving. They call themselves the first refugees of global warming. "It's like an ice cube with a bunch of houses on it, sitting on the beach. If it stays really cold, these houses can sit there forever, but if it warms just a little bit, the ice cube starts to melt, and the houses start to shift," said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. National Geographic reports global temperatures could rise as much as 10 degrees by the end of the century. The 1990s were the warmest decade since record keeping began in the 1800s. In just the past 50 years, temperatures in parts of Russia, Canada and Alaska have increased as much as 7 degrees. The hard sea ice that once protected Shishmaref has begun to melt, making the village more vulnerable to giant storms and waves, Field said. Many scientists say what's happening shows the power of global warming.

"These communities are like canaries in a mine," said Patricia Cochran of the Alaska Native Science Commission. "What happens here will happen to rest of the world." But some critics say Alaska is just one fragile spot and not necessarily a sign of a larger global warming phenomenon. "The damage from the small little village is from waves coming off ocean not necessarily the lack of ice," said Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services. "There's some talk that it's because there's not as much ice, there's more wave action, but there may've been more storms in recent years." Some scientists say they expect the north to warm faster than the rest of the world, but it's hard to predict what that will mean for Californians. "The global projections now say we might have global average warming of 3 to 10 degrees," Field said. "Shishmaref already has warmed 7 degrees. In California, we might see more. We might see less." What experts don't know is how much of the temperature change is caused by nature and how much by human pollution.

posted by ... @ 8:27 PM