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The land of ice embracing climate change

Foreign Correspondent

Big nations might be struggling to avoid a two-degree temperature rise. The Arctic island of Greenland is welcoming it.

Greenland's massive ice cap is melting at alarming speed, raising fears of sea levels rising around the world.

But for many of Greenland's 56,000 residents, melting ice means money.

"I'm quite optimistic," Andrias Olsen, a fleet manager with the State fishing company Royal Greenland, said.

"We're seeing some higher stocks due to climate change — at least due to warmer sea temperatures — but also due to the ice cap melting.

"A lot of nutritious water comes down the big fjord systems, which creates optimal conditions for fishery."

Almost 80 per cent of Greenland is covered by an ice cap, meaning everyone has to make a living on the coast.

And the fishing industry has rarely been busier. Fishermen aren't just catching more of the staples like cod and halibut.

They're harvesting tens of thousands of tonnes of warm-water fish like mackerel and blue fin tuna, that only appeared off Greenland seven years ago.

Record catches in 2016 helped the economy grow by 4.6 per cent.

Add in bitterly cold winters and you can see why many of these Arctic residents think a little bit of global warming is a good thing.

"It will be nice to be warmer," a 13-year-old student named Athena told Foreign Correspondent.

"I could use some of that."

As well as being the world's biggest island (not counting continents), Greenland is experiencing some of the biggest impacts of climate change.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of most other countries and while Greenland's average temperature has risen 1.5 degrees since the 1950s, some parts have already warmed by more than 2 degrees — the red line drawn at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris that the world had to avoid.

In the farming heartland of Kujalleq in southern Greenland, a two-degree rise since the mid-1990s has extended the growing season by three weeks.

Farmers who once barely scratched a living have been building up their flocks and planting new fields of crops in the hope of a lasting agricultural boom.

But even in the Arctic, an extra degree or two of heat can have disastrous consequences.

Melting ice, melting heart

Adam Lyberth doesn't share his compatriots' joy at the rising temperatures.

He's a guide in Greenland's only inland town, Kangerlussuaq, and takes tourists and scientists out to the nearby glaciers and ice cap.

As we drive along the dirt road — Greenland's longest at 38 kilometres — he points out the effects a recent drought has had on the sandy landscape.

"We had no rain at all in summer, the lakes are drying up, we had record bush fires," he said.

"Some hunters said it's difficult to find reindeer, they smell the bushfire and the wildlife doesn't like it."

Eventually we reach the start of the ice cap, an almost incomprehensibly large ice sheet stretching 2,700km across the island.

"When you are surrounded by such amazing nature you especially notice how the ice is changing and becoming darker and melting rapidly.

"When it melts like this my heart melts."

Adam Lyberth is in a minority in Greenland. But the rest of the world has good reason to be nervous about the ice cap's melt.

The US space agency NASA, which measures the cap by satellite and airborne radar, estimates it's now losing more than 300 billion tonnes of ice a year. A billion tonnes is the equivalent of 400,000 Olympic swimming pools.

More worryingly, the melt is accelerating. Since 2004, it's been losing on average an extra 30 billion tonnes a year.

Greenland is contributing a quarter of global sea level rise and while that's now measured in millimetres, scientists predict it will increase to centimetres and even metres this century if the melt keeps accelerating.

That doesn't mean the cap will disappear. Every year most of the melt is replenished by snow and this season the ice cap bucked the trend and gained slight mass, prompting some climate change 'sceptics' to label the meltdown a myth.

Unfortunately, the extra snow was caused by record hurricanes in the Caribbean that sent record precipitation all the way to the Arctic.

"Larger hurricanes, droughts, flooding — it's all signs of a changing climate," Thomas Juul-Pedersen, a senior scientist at the Greenland Climate Research Centre, said.

"It doesn't mean the ice sheet isn't changing. The melting season is increasing dramatically. It starts melting earlier and the melt continues for full into the autumn every year."

Shame about the drought

We head south to Kujalleq to see how farmers are faring with the higher temperatures.

Ten years earlier, I travelled around here with an agricultural consultant named Kenneth Hoegh, and it was clear Greenland was experiencing a farming revolution.

Instead of just growing turnips and potatoes for their own consumption, sheep farmers were investing heavily in commercial crop production.

Kenneth agrees to take me out again but warns that farmers aren't quite as optimistic as they used to be.

"They've had a lot of droughts in the months of May and June and that has become more or less the new normal," he said.

We navigate through fields of ice, dodging giant bergs that have calved off a nearby glacier, to reach the property of one of the farmers I met last time, Ferdinand Egede.

Sure enough, he has tales of woe … summers are now too hot and dry, snow melts early in winter then freezes, rain comes late in the season and mucks up the haymaking.

"It's never easy to be a farmer," Kenneth jokes.

"You're never satisfied."

But on the way back he tells me they're adapting to change.

"If they just sat down and did nothing and were not proactive, they'd have to stop being farmers."

Greenlanders have a long tradition of adapting.

Over the centuries, Inuit hunters in the High Arctic migrated to the more temperate south and learned to fish and farm.

Whatever the rest of the world fears, people here seem confident they can cope with however the climate's changing — and turn it to their benefit.

Watch Foreign Correspondent's episode On Top of the World on ABC iview or YouTube.

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