Global Warming:
Will You
Listen Now, America?
By Andrew Buncombe
20 August , 2005
lndependent
Two
of the leading contenders to contest the next US presidential election
have delivered an urgent warning to the United States on global warming,
saying the evidence of climate change has become too stark to ignore
and human activity is a major cause.
On a high-profile and bi-partisan fact-finding tour in Alaska and Canada's
Yukon territory, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Hillary Clinton,
the Democratic senator for New York, were confronted by melting permafrost
and shrinking glaciers and heard from native Inuit that rising sea levels
were altering their lives.
"The question
is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action,"
Mr McCain said at a press conference in Anchorage. "Go up to places
like we just came from. It's a little scary." Mrs Clinton added:
"I don't think there's any doubt left for anybody who actually
looks at the science. There are still some holdouts, but they're fighting
a losing battle. The science is overwhelming."
Their findings directly
challenge President George Bush's reluctance to legislate to reduce
America's carbon emissions. Although both senators have talked before
of the need to tackle global warming, this week's clarion call was perhaps
the clearest and most urgent. It also raises the prospect that climate
change and other environmental issues could be a factor in the presidential
contest in 2008 if Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain enter it. Mrs Clinton and
Mr McCain, who represents Arizona, are among the leading, and the most
popular, likely contenders.
That they chose
Alaska as the stage from which to force global warming on to the American
political agenda was not a matter of chance. In many ways, this separated
US state is the frontline in the global warming debate. Environmentalists
say the signs of climate change are more obvious there than perhaps
anywhere else in the US.
Dan Lashof, a scientist
with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a respected Washington-based
group, told The Independent: "People in Alaska are starting to
freak out. The retreat of the sea ice allows the oceans to pound the
coast more, and villages there are suffering from the effects of that
erosion. There is permafrost melting, roads are buckling, there are
forests that have been infested with beetles because of a rise in temperatures.
I think residents there feel it's visible more and more, more than any
other place in the country."
President Bush's
administration has repeatedly questioned the evidence of global warming
and the contribution of human activity to any shift. Mr Bush, who in
2001 refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty on global warming weeks after
he took office, has repeatedly been accused of doing nothing to enforce
tighter controls on emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse
gases". But this summer, the US National Academy of Sciences -
and the scientific academies of the other G8 nations as well as Brazil,
China and India - issued a statement saying there was strong evidence
that significant global warming was happening and that "it is likely
that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human
activities". They called on world leaders to recognize"that
delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects
and will likely incur a greater cost". Mrs Clinton, who must first
win her re-election to the US senate next year if she is to enter the
2008 White House race, said at the press conference that she had spoken
to scientists as well as native Alaskans during the trip.
She said that, flying
over the Yukon, she saw forests devastated by spruce bark beetles, believed
to be increasing at an unprecedented rate because of warmer weather.
She also talked of what a 93-year-old woman at a fish camp at Whitehorse
told her. The woman said she had been fishing there all her life but
now fish have strange bumps on them.
"It's heartbreaking
to see the devastation," Mrs Clinton said. Mr McCain, Mrs Clinton
and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine,
also went to Barrow, the northernmost city in the US. There, they spoke
to scientists and Inupiaq Inuit. They also saw shrinking glaciers in
Kenai Fjords National Park.
Mr McCain - with
Senator Joe Lieberman - is behind proposed legislation that would require
power-generating companies to reduce carbon emissions to their 2000
levels. Mr Graham, a Republican, said he had been moved by what he had
seen. "Climate change is different when you come here, because
you see the faces of people experiencing it. If you go to the people
and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something's
going on, you're not listening."
Mrs Collins, a Democrat,
was even more convinced. She said the evidence in Alaska represented
the "canary in the mine shaft of global warming crying out to us
to pay attention".
© 2005 Independent
News & Media (UK) Ltd.