Greenland Residents Detect Sea Changes

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• SPENCER MICHELS, NewsHour Correspondent:

  On Greenland's west coast, residents of the town of Ilulissat — the name means "among the icebergs" — say they are already feeling some results of global warming. Climbing temperatures have affected the fishing and tourism industries, the lifeblood of the town's 4,500 residents, sometimes for good, sometimes not.

• OLE HANSEN HOF, Crane Operator:

  Some people say it's OK because it's warmer. Some people, they worry about the future, what might happen if the ocean is changed and the fish move out.

• SPENCER MICHELS:

  Changing ocean temperatures mean some species of fish have left, but others have arrived from the south. Fishing now takes place year-round.

• GREENLAND RESIDENT:

  What most people are afraid of, of fishermen, the cold water fish is disappearing, and their equipment is to fish cold water fish, so they're going to have a big bill in the future if they want to change the gear.

• SPENCER MICHELS:

  Dog-sledding, a major tourist activity, used to run through April. Now it's limited to mid-winter. The implications of a warming climate go far beyond Ilulissat.

• LARS KRISTIAN, Dock Worker:

  Because the water, it's getting bigger and bigger, maybe the islands of the Atlantic, it's getting drowned.

• GREENLAND RESIDENT:

  You don't have to be a scientist to see the changes. They're big changes.

• SPENCER MICHELS:

  But you do need to be a scientist to know just how big the changes are, how fast they'll come, and what they mean. That's why researchers are focusing on the Jakobshavn glacier, one of the world's largest. It is so large that the icebergs that break off from it, a process called calving, are sometimes more than 40 stories high and three city blocks wide.

  Glaciers are slowly moving rivers of ice. The Jakobshavn used to creep along at a pace that could truly be called glacial. Then, in 1997, it doubled its speed. It's now moving more than the length of a football field each day, making it the world's fastest glacier.

  Its ice also thinned, and the calving front — the place where the icebergs break off — has retreated inland. When these icebergs reach the ocean and eventually melt, they raise sea level. But not enough is known scientifically about the reasons for these changes, or their impact, or how fast they will happen in the future, here and elsewhere.

  Even a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, couldn't answer those questions. It said scientists simply did not have enough understanding of the melting process to make solid predictions of future sea level rise. That's where researchers like New York University's David Holland come in.

• DAVID HOLLAND, Oceanographer, New York University:

  So the IPCC report, there are two headlines from it. One is that, in the next century, the air temperature is going to increase. That is solid science, totally credible, believable, good observations, good models.

  The second headline is that sea level will rise between 20 and 60 centimeters. That's totally incredible and unbelievable. That's just a guess based on past behavior, how much sea level has risen in the past century. We cannot predict yet sea level change, and we're stuck, and we're stuck because we aren't able to model processes that we have not observed.