Conference brings attention to global warming

28 September 2005Channe 2 Broadcasting

Anchorage, Alaska -On a day when NASA revealed that the North Pole's ice cap has shrunk to the smallest size ever recorded, Native leaders from eight nations across the Arctic gathered in Anchorage to discuss the problem of global warming.

According to the Native people gathered at UAA today, the problem is devastating. For example Russian nomads claimed that an incredible one million reindeer died in the Russian Arctic over the course of the past decade. It's a massive die-off attributed, in part, to an ironic side effect of global warming, ice.

When herds of hoofed animals like caribou or reindeer roam the tundra, they of course have to eat. The Native people who hunt these animals say the caribou and reindeer have evolved a remarkable mechanism for finding food beneath the snow. Native hunters say the caribou use their hooves to dig beneath the snow and uncover nutritious grasses.

But in recent years the porcupine caribou of North America and these reindeer herds of Northern Russia have had a problem.

It seems that more and more in recent years, the first snowfall of the season is followed by something unusual in these latitudes, a winter rainstorm. The rainstorm can leave a glaze of ice on top of the snow and that can make it impossible for the weaker reindeer in the herd to punch through the snow for food.

People at this conference are utterly convinced that the warming of the earth -- so disruptive to their traditional ways of life -- is largely the result of the burning of fossil fuels by man in the industrialized nations of the world.

No question. Just from, from what everybody's been talking about today, the indicators are all there and the stories are very, very similar," said Patricia Cochran, Alaska Native Science Commission.

Now many scientists agree with the assessment that the earth is warming and that man is at least partly responsible. One reason they say that is because they can measure the output of the sun and that has actually declined in recent years. With the sun not responsible for the warming, computer models do suggest that greenhouse gases input by man are at least partly responsible for the heating of the earth.