It is about time – no, long overdue – that a U.S. president is visiting the melting glaciers of the Arctic and doing a show and tell for Americans who can’t quite grasp that climate change is real and life-altering.
President Barack Obama, in his weekly Saturday address, began touting the urgent message he will keep up all week as he travels Alaska and tries to change the national conversation on global warming.
“This is all real. This is happening to our fellow Americans right now,” Obama said, noting that Alaskans already are coping with more frequent and extensive wildfires, bigger storm surges as sea ice melts faster, and quickened shoreline erosion – three feet a year in some places.
Obama will try to call attention to Alaska as a kind of climate change ground zero, and he will ask a distracted public to see the harsh effects.
The Arctic has warmed nearly twice as fast as the rest of the world, and parts of northern Alaska have lost what White House senior adviser Brian Deese termed a “football field’s worth of land a day” to coastal erosion and sea-level rise. Alaska’s independent governor says four Alaskan villages are in “imminent danger” and must be relocated.