The Greenland ice sheet has survived natural warmer periods in history, the last about 120,000 years ago, although it was much smaller then than it is now.
Those still skeptical of the scientific consensus over climate change should perhaps listen to the voices of those who could not be accused of having anything to gain from talking up climate change.
Arne Sorensen, a specialist ice navigator on Arctic Sunrise, began sailing the Arctic in the 1970s. Journeys around Greenland’s coast that would take three weeks in the 1970s because of sea ice now take a day. He pays heed to the observations of the Inuit.
“If you talk to people who live close to nature and they tell you this is unusual and this is not something they have noticed before, then I really put emphasis on that,” he said.
Paakkanna Ignatiussen, 52, has been hunting seals since he was 13. His grandparents would travel 1km to hunt seals; now he must go 100km because the sea ice disappears earlier — and with it the seals.
“It’s hard to see the ice go back. In the old days when we got ice it was only ice. Today it is more like slush,” he says. “In 10 years there will be no traditional hunting. The weather is the reason.”
The stench of rotting seal flesh wafts from a bag in the porch of his house in Tasiilaq as Ignatiussen’s wife, Ane, says: “The seasons are upside down.”
Local residents are acutely aware of how the weather is changing animal behavior. Browsing the guns for sale in the supermarket in Tasiilaq, Axel Hansen says more hungry polar bears prowl around the town these days. Like the hunters, the bears can’t find seals when there is so little sea ice. And the fjords are filled with so many icebergs that local people find it hard to hunt whales there.
Westerners may shrug at the decline of traditional hunting but, in a sense, we all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate. The scientists swarming over this ancient mass of ice, trying to understand how it will be transformed in a warming world, and how it will transform us, are wary of making political comments about how our leaders should plan for 1m of sea level rise, and what drastic steps must be taken to cut carbon emissions. But some scientists are so astounded by the changes they are recording that they are moved to speak out.
What, I ask Hamilton, would he say to US President Barack Obama if he could spend 10 minutes with him standing on Helheim glacier?
“Without knowing anything about what is going on, you just have to look at the glacier to know something huge is happening here,” the glaciologist said.
“We can’t as a scientific community keep up with the pace of changes, let alone explain why they are happening,” he said.
“If I was, God forbid, the leader of the free world, I would implement some changes to deal with the maximum risk that we might reasonably expect to encounter, rather than always planning for the minimum,” he said.
“We won’t know the consequences of not doing that until it’s way too late. Even as a politician on a four-year elected cycle, you can’t morally leave someone with that problem,” Hamilton said.
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