Warming climate causes life-altering meltdown in Alaska.

ANCHOR POINT, Alaska - To live in Alaska when the average 
temperature has risen about seven degrees over the 
last 30 years means learning to cope with a làndscape that can 
sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season.

In the village of Shishmaref, on the Chukchi Sea just south of 
the Arctic Circle, it means high water eating away so many 
houses and buildings that people will vote next month on moving 
the entire village inland.

In Barrow, the northernmost city in North America, it means 
coping with mosquitoes in a place where they once were 
nonexistent, and rescuing hunters trapped on breakaway ice at 
a time of year when such things were once unheard of.

From Fairbanks to the north, where wildfires have been burning 
off and on since mid-May, it means living with hvdraulic
jacks to keep houses from slouching and buckling on foundations 
that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is 
no longer permanent.

Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a recreation wonderland a few 
hours drive from Anchorage, it means living in a four-million-acre 
spruce forest that has been killed by beetles, the largest 
loss of trees to insecte ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. 

Governmeut scientiste tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow 
the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.

In Alaska, rising temperatures, whether caused by greenhouse gas emissions or a prolonged 
mood swing of nature, are not a topic of debate or an abstraction. 

Mean temperatures have risen by 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter 
ince the 1970's, federal officials say.

While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on 
how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in this state, Senator Ted 
Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more. startling 
change from rising temperatures than Alaska.

Among the conséquences, Senator Stevens says, are sagging ronds,. crumbling villages, 
dead forests, catastrophic f ires and possible disruption of marine wildlife.

These problems will cost Alaska hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.
"Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any
place in the world," Senator Stevens said.

Scientists have been charting shrinking glaciers and warming 
seas in Alaska for some time. 

But only recently have experts started to focus on what the warming means to the people 
who live in Alaska.

The social costs of higher temperatures have been mostly 
negative, people here say. 

The Bush administration report, which was drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency, 
also found few positives to Alaska's thermal rise. 

But it said climate change would bring a longer growing season and open 
ice-free seas in the Arctic for shipping.

Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a forest nearly twice the size of 
Yellowstone National Park is in the last phases of a graphic 
death. 

Century-old spruce trees stand silvered and cinnamon-colored as they bleed sap.

A sign at Anchor River Recreation Area near this little town poses a question many 
tourists have been asking: "What's up with all the dead 
spruce trees on the Kenai Peninsula?" 

The population of spruce bark beetles, which have long fed on these evergreen 
trees, exploded as temperatures rose, foresters now say.

Throughout the Kenai, people are clearing some of the 38 million dead trees, answering the 
call from officials to create a "defensible space" around houses for fire protection. Last 
year, two major fires occurred on this peninsula, and this year, with temperatures in the 80's in 
mid-May, officials say fire is imminent. 

"It's just a matter of time before we have a very large, possibly catastrophic forest fire," said Ed Holsten, a 
scientist with the Forest Service.

Larry Rude, a homeowner near Anchor Point, says he no longer recognizes Alaska 
weather. 

"This year, we had a real quick melt of the snow, and it seemed like it was just one 
week between snowmobiling in the mountains and riding around in the boat in shirt-sleeve 
weather," Mr. Rude said.

For villages that hug the shores of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, melting ice 
is the enemy. Sea ice off the Alaskan coast has retreated by 14 percent since 1978, and 
thinned by 40 percent since the mid-1960's, the federal report says. 

Climate models predict that temperatures in Alaska will continue to rise over this 
century, by up to 18 degrees.Shishmaref, on a barrier island near the Bering Strait, is 
fast losing the battle to riding seas and crumbling ground. 

As the July 19 vote on whether to move approaches, residents say they have no choice.
"I'm pretty sure the vote is going to be to move," Lucy Eningowuk of Shismaref said.

"There's hardly any land left here anymore".