Senator: Effects of melting ice cap could trickle down to Rhode Island

On a hot and muggy day in Rhode Island, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's mind was on glaciers and polar bears in Greenland.

Giving a pep talk to members of the local environmental groups Clean Water Action and Environment Rhode Island on Wednesday, Whitehouse recounted stories from his recent fact-finding trip to Greenland with other lawmakers working on legislation related to global warming.
Greenland, the freshman Rhode Island Democrat said, is the place where the effects of global climate change are being felt first, and are already starting to have a profound effect on the lives and lifestyles of the native peoples who have lived there for nearly 4,000 years.

 
It is also the place, he added, where "if the worst-case scenarios that we envision play out, the consequences would be the most serious." If the Greenland Ice Cap, which he described as an area one-third the size of the continental United States and two miles thick, were to melt into the ocean it could raise water levels around the world by about 27 feet, Whitehouse said.

That would create a "very serious problem" for coastal states like Rhode Island, but would be "catastrophic" for low-lying countries without strong economies that would allow them to react to the problem.

He called the fragile and deteriorating environment of Greenland a "distant early warning system" for the problem of global climate change.

While visiting the frozen fjords of the Danish protectorate, Whitehouse, a member of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, was told that the people were now having trouble carrying on the tradition of seal hunting by dogsled, a cultural tradition that had sustained society their over the centuries.

"You can't get out on the ice and travel," he related. "Dog sledding was a very big deal and now they are finding people are doing it less and less and less because there is less reward for it. If you are living a subsistence existence and it is the seals you are hunting that are paying for your dogsled and you can't hunt the seals because there isn't enough ice, you don't maintain the dogs and the dogsled just for the luxury, you let them go.

"So that piece of their culture that has been around for a long, long time is starting to go."

Polar bears can not get out on the ice to hunt for food, either, the Greenlanders told Whitehouse.

As a result, they have started to forage for food in
villages where people live. When they get that close to humans, the senator said, not only are they hungry, they are dangerous, so they have to be shot.

Tugging on the heartstrings of his nature-loving listeners, Whitehouse reported that when the adult bears are shot, their cubs have to be killed as well, because they will not survive without the older bears.

"To shoot the polar bear is not something that these people like to do, because of the waste," he said. "It would be like us killing bald eagles.

It's a little thing, Whitehouse acknowledged, "whether a polar bear and her cub get shot won't make any difference in any American's life. But you get a sense for how dramatic the change has been in the lives of people who are there."

So what are America's dogsleds and polar bears - the first signs that global warming might be starting to change our lives here in the United States?
Already, Whitehouse said, "you see fishermen fishing for different things in different places. You see the mean winter water temperature in Narragansett Bay up by four degrees" which he said experts say is "a ecosystem shift.
"I can't tell the difference between water that is 55 degrees and 59 degrees, but the fish can," he said. "And for them it is a whole different ecosystem."

The ice fishing season in Minnesota has been shortened, starting later and ending earlier, he noted. Hunting groups can't find the game they used to and farmers can't grow some of the crops they have in the past. There is no single harbinger of global warming in these parts, Whitehouse told the group, "but particularly where hunting, farming and very environmentally dependent activities are going on, you are starting to see the signs even here. But we're not at the tipping point where the glaciers are."
Whitehouse told his environmentalist audience that, "what you are all doing is very important.

"We've got good leadership here," in Rhode Island, he said. "We're well organized in this state to help get the message out about changes that we need. To be willing to be active, and walk door-to-door and work phones and really do the legwork of environmental activism is critical.

Even though it usually takes 60 votes to get major legislation passed in the Senate, Whitehouse seemed optimistic that significant bills on global warming could pass soon. He said senators tend to fall into one of four groups, "there are people who generally get it. There are people who, when pressed, are willing to concede this is an important point, but it is not a priority for them. There are people who are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of climate change, the Rush Limbaugh school of climate science. And there are people who get it, but feel a political allegiance in their state to coal, to the auto industry, to some major economic provider and unless their problems are solved, they can't go home to a destroyed coal industry, to a destroyed auto industry and say, 'Sorry, guys, but it's all in the interest of climate change.' They have to have thought it through and have the climate change reform produce certain results that helps them.

"We have to get those first two categories big enough so the others matter less," in order to accomplish reform, Whitehouse said.

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