Shishmaref: Just The Tip Of Our Iceberg

Imagine, you live in the United States and have no running water, no sewer system, and your home is melting out from underneath you. Shishmaref is a small village at the top of the world and the tip of the United States. Twenty miles south of the Arctic Circle, the island of 700 residents and home to the Inupiat Eskimos, the village has been home to the people for 4,000 years.

Now imagine that the United States government would rather spend 180 million dollars to move the residents from their home land because of global warming. The land in Shishmaref is harsh and rugged. Winds can wobble between 50 and 90 miles per hour and with the waves reaching ten feet, that´s a lot of land being washed from under the homes. The village elders want to stay on and the Army Corps of Engineers built a sea wall, made of huge rocks, at the cost of 35 million dollars, which is now sinking into sand and will last about another ten years. With rising global temperatures, the future is not bright for Shishmaref, but what does Shishmaref´s future say about our future? News and film crews like Oprah and various countries have traipsed through Shishmaref like gawkers passing a freeway accident, doing little to help the village.

Temperatures over the last thirty years have risen fifteen degrees, which may not sound like much but to ice it´s like being 100 degrees, and the rise is causing the thaw of the Earth´s permafrost at the Arctic Circle. Shishmaref is the first village to feel the effects of global warming. They have witnessed their homes falling off the foundations into what the rest of the US calls sink holes. Warmer winters, longer summer months, and disappearing ice, which means ultimately disappearing food sources when the caribou, seals, and other animals move farther north in order to find their own food or to stay in the colder climate.

Although the US government is willing to fit the bill to move the residents, that didn´t keep Shell Oil from paying the village a visit. That alone draws many pictures of when the government chose to pack up and move the Native Americans for the land and many in the government are drawing up a bill to stop the mining in all of Alaska. If mining is halted in Alaska, that could collapse the entire state. Alaska would drop off the map, pretty much making oil drilling easier to get, people lacking work wouldn´t argue; the residents feel that 99.9% of what´s going on or what´s not being done in Shishmaref and the 180 other villages of Alaska in the same position with global warming is politics.

What happens if we do not begin to heed the warning we are being given at every turn? According to the IPCC, The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Arctic ice is disappearing fast and the region may be completely ice free by summer 2040. Ok, 2040 sounds like a long time off, but in reality it´s already 2008; years fly by. Montana´s Glacier National Park now only has 27 glaciers versus the 150 they had in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere spring is coming a week earlier and the winter freezes are starting later. We have a surge of extreme weather, such as the wildfires which engulfed Southern California. The Southern coasts are getting hit by stronger and stronger, higher category hurricanes, and now the plains are seeing stronger tornados like the E5 that hit Greensburg, KS.

Some experts will naysay global warming--that the earth is merely going through the cycle it has gone through before. This may be true, but the earth has gone through these changes over a thousand year period, not a hundred year period, and therein lies the problem. With increases in industrialization, deforestation, and pollution, not to mention pumping larger amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere , our ozone layer is acting much like a tent, trapping all these "greenhouse gases" and eating away at the earth, and humans continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even if all the countries stopped today, it would take years to clean up the mess.

What´s going to happen we are already seeing. Large-scale food and water shortages and effect on wildlife. If the sea around Shishmaref continues to rise, not only will the residents of the village lose their land but also their heritage as they become integrated into other larger towns, villages, and cities. The rising sea levels not only affect Shishmaref, but will have a global effect. Places like Southeast Asia will become swamp land and many could flood. Areas of the US, mainly Louisiana, Florida, and other US coastlines will lose land to the encroaching water levels. We face shortages of fresh water runoff to the regions which depend on it. Heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and the growth of deserts will cause food shortages, and these things will become commonplace. More than one million species face extinction, which does include human extinction. Rising temperatures could cause what scientists call a positive feedback effect, whereby the melting permafrost releases trapped methane and carbon in sea ice and humans cannot breathe methane or carbon.

Shishmaref is truly the tip of our iceberg and not doing all we can to save this village means we may not be able to save ourselves tomorrow. I think Josh Bernstein said it best when he said, "my sense is that global warming is a quantifiable fact based on data produced by unbiased scientists. Whether one believes in it or not is irrelevant -- if I don´t believe in gravity that doesn´t mean I´m exempt from its effect on me", and that is how we should all be thinking about global warming, no matter the cause it does have an effect on us.