The Arctic is Ground Zero for Climate Change
ASHER: Welcome back, everybody. Europe is still struggling to deal with a huge influx of migrants and refugees from the Middle East. This video right here is from the border between Slovenia and Australia (sic). Thousands of people have been waiting there, spending the night in heated tents or indeed in the open air. They huddled around campfires, where the air was filled with smoke. One Iraqi man said his family has slept in a camp on the Slovenian side and had not been given enough food or water. The journey to Europe is extremely dangerous; 22 migrants died Friday in separate shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea The Greek coast guard said 144 other people were rescued and three are still missing. The Greek prime minister strongly criticized Europe's response to the crisis and he said, quote, "These days, the waves of the Aegean are not just washing out dead refugees and dead children on our shores, they are washing out European civilization itself."</s>ASHER: A new United Nations report says the global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is unprecedented. More than 140 nations have drafted individual climate action plans. The report says that by working together nations can achieve their goal of keeping the global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius. The U.N. climate conference, known as COP 21, begins at the end of November in Paris. The rapid pace of climate change is immediate evident in the Arctic and here is Arwa Damon with more.</s>ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's late October in the Arctic, freezing cold and snow-covered, as one would expect. But so much just isn't the way it used to be.</s>JIM JOHANSEN, ARCTIC GUIDE: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.</s>DAMON (voice-over): Jim Johansen is a guide here, taking visitors on a tour, which includes a glacier. For him, compared to last year, the changes on the shoreline are obvious. One just needs to look at the size of the rock beneath the icy blue of the glacier.</s>JOHANSEN: Last year, you can hardly see the rock formation here. You can hardly see that as a gray, a brown line underneath the glacier. It's shedding a lot of ice. This summer it's obviously, it's -- something is happening for sure.</s>DAMON (voice-over): That "something" is climate change. And this, the Arctic, is ground zero. Scientists say temperatures here have increased at twice the rate than anywhere else on Earth in the last several decades.</s>DAMON: Normally by March, these waters would be frozen over, a layer of ice so thick people would take their snowmobiles from town to outlying areas but the last time these waters froze was a decade ago.</s>DAMON (voice-over): We're out with Ole Misund, a former fisherman turned marine biologist and managing director of the University Center in Svalbard. A good catch but this cod species is not supposed to be here.</s>DAMON (voice-over): They appeared three years ago and that, Misund says, is because the temperature of the water where these cod were just pulled out is 4 to 5 degrees warmer than it used to be and now the cod can now swim here.</s>DAMON: How do you know that temperature rise is because of climate change?</s>OLE MISUND, MANAGING DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY CENTER, SVALBARD: We know temperatures in western side of Svalbard is very variable because of the variations in the Northeast Atlantic current but now we see an underlying signal being more and more evident that its due to a general rise in sea temperatures of the world oceans.</s>DAMON (voice-over): Earth's climate is changing. Scientists still trying to unravel its mystery and determine how it will alter our future -- Arwa Damon, CNN, Svalbard, Norway.</s>ASHER: Time for a quick break here on CNN. When we come back, an exclusive update on one of the bloodiest afternoons in the history of U.S. motorcycle clubs. Stay with us for that story and more.