Baked Alaska

In the Arctic, where flowers are madly blooming, trees are growing to mutant sizes and the snowpack is thinning, researchers are getting an incontrovertible view of global warming.

By Rebecca Clarren

Sep 10, 2004 | Thin bright light stretches taut across the late afternoon sky. At an Arctic biology research site, 135 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, an expanse of golden tundra rolls unhindered toward the craggy mountains of the Brooks Range. Silver rivers and lakes, blueberries and umber hills grace the landscape.

At the moment, University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte is not enjoying the view. As she stares at the tundra carpet with concern, her husband, Peter Ray, a retired Stanford professor of plant physiology, yells from up the hill. "Hey, Donie, you've got to come look at this. The eriophorum are efflorescing again." Translation from science speak: The flowers are blooming.

It's the second time they've blossomed this year. Given an atypically long season of warm weather, the flowers are confused, thinking spring is here again.

"It's a bad strategy for them because they'll lose their seeds to the frost," says Bret-Harte, looking worried behind large gold-rimmed glasses. Flowers only make one set of buds each year so if they spend next year's buds now, they'll be out of luck next spring. If the warming trend continues, the flowers may go extinct.

Lean and tall with a long black braid down her back, an intellectual Olive Oyl, Bret-Harte has spent the past 10 summers studying Arctic plants at this research site in Toolik Lake, Alaska. While it's too soon to prove statistically, she and Ray suspect that these confused flowers are just one more example of the phenomenon threatening the entire planet: global warming.

Over the past century, Bret-Harte explains, due to the increase in oil and gas consumption, carbon dioxide and methane emissions have skyrocketed. Such gases hover above the earth, trap the sun's heat, and cause the planet to warm up. In just the past three decades, this warming has heated the Arctic by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the mid-1950s, Alaska's glaciers have lost about 3,300 cubic kilometers of melted ice and snow -- enough to submerge the entire state of Texas in 15 feet of water. Due in part to this influx of fresh water combined with warmer temperature, computer models predict that the Arctic Ocean's sea ice could completely disappear within 70 years.

While it's unlikely the four horsemen of the apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride, global warming will likely have an enormous and dire impact on human populations in the Arctic and beyond. Already, native communities that dot Alaskan shorelines are seeing villages crumble. Waves, unhindered by large ice chunks, now swell and break against the shore with a ferocity never seen before. Banks are eroding and high water has consumed so many homes and buildings that two villages have been forced to move inland.

Alaska is not alone. In his alarming book "Boiling Point," Ross Gelbspan writes that global warming is disrupting "the normal flow of deep-water currents that determine climactic conditions in much of the world." For instance, Gelbspan reports, extreme effects of the weather phenomenon, El Niño, have caused China's Yangtze River to overflow, killing more than 3,000 people, leaving 230 million people homeless, and generating $30 billion in damages. Worldwide, warmer weather means more extreme floods and drought, which creates breeding grounds for countless disease-carrying insects.

"There's strong consensus now in the scientific community that global climate change is caused by human activities," says Bret-Harte in her kind, matter-of-fact manner. "There are always a few folks that disagree. But mostly they work for the oil and gas industry."

And apparently for the Bush administration. Claiming the jury is still out on what causes global warming, the president has written a climate change policy that is about as aggressive as a tortoise. Loath to enact measures that would reduce our addiction to oil and gas -- and income to his friends and campaign supporters -- the Bush administration has spent the past several years misrepresenting the science on climate change in order to justify a path of inaction. For the Arctic researchers who are watching a landscape in flux, this is beyond infuriating.

"We see the possible consequences of no action and the consequences are looking graver and graver and more and more imminent," says John Hobbie, the tough co-founder of the Institute of Arctic Biology Toolik Field Station and director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Lab. "We scientists realize that climate change is more than just vague words and models."

Next Page: A dark outlook for birch and willow, caribou and Arctic grayling

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