Excerpts from an interview with Gunter Weller:Radio Interview: Earth & Sky, October 30, 2004 -Can you give me a preview of some of the predictions you'll be making in the upcoming assessment? Well, the computer models show us areas where the warming will be greatest and they generally show that that will be the case in the central arctic. As the ice gets thinner, the feedback on the climate will accelerate. The projected increases in temperature in winter in the arctic are up to 9 degrees centigrade. That's almost 17 or 18 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's a pretty substantial increase. And the consequences of this might be that in summer there will be little or no ice in the central arctic. This has implications for transarctic shipping. And people are beginning to take that up as an interesting issue. If you want to ship goods between the West Coast of the U.S. or from Asia to Europe, it's considerably shorter to ship your stuff through the Arctic Ocean. So the whole idea of transarctic shipping is an economic incentive and as a positive, presumably positive, influence of climate change is being considered now and could change things considerably. With the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, there is a danger that polar bears as a species may become extinct because they no longer have a suitable habitat. So these are some of the big changes that we foresee in the future. Also, the melting, the thawing, of permafrost in the interior in Alaska here and other permafrost areas will change not only man-made structures, infrastructure, but also ecosystems. As the ground begins to thaw, as trees begin to collapse in boreal forests, particularly if the ground is ice rich, ... the transformation from a boreal forest ecosystem into wetlands and eventually into grasslands is something that is also projected as a future impact. So you can see in the Arctic, we expect to see in the long term pretty dramatic transformations from one sort of ecosystem to another. And also pretty substantial economic impacts of one way or another. -Are any of these changes surprising to you? Well, I think the computer models with all their deficiencies pointing out these pretty dramatic changes, like the potential disappearance of the sea ice in the arctic ocean in summer was a bit of a surprise. It was always assumed that with the warming of the climate, there would be a reduction in the extent of ice. But that some of the models actually predict that there will be a complete disappearance. I think that's a complete surprise. Now of course, the models give different results depending on which model you use. But they're all pretty uniform in their opinion, in the projections that the ice extent will shrink considerably. So I would consider that one of the surprises. The other one is possibly the rapid spread of insects with a warmer climate, including the spruce bark beetles that have done such fantastic damage already in Alaska. And the possibility that also factors that affect the health of humans. West Nile, for example, is spreading at a pretty rapid rate through Canada at the moment and is expected to reach Alaska probably in the not too distant future that some of these vector borne diseases and health problems multiplying. I find that a bit -- the speed at which they're moving at the moment and are likely to expand in the future -- I find pretty surprising too. So there are surprises of this kind.
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The Warming of the Artic: The Arctic Council consists of eight nations with Arctic territory: United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. Their recently completed four-year study, which involved more that 250 scientists, is comprehensive and alarming. There is international controversy over whether or not the US pressed the Council to delay the release of the report until after the election. This report will be the focus of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) Symposium in Reykjavik, Iceland, November 9 - 12, 2004. Big Arctic Perils Seen in Warming, Survey Finds Global Warming Will Decimate Arctic Peoples Gunter Weller, Director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research Information about the Arctic Council
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