Indigenous Affairs 1-2/08: Climate Change and the Warming Politics of Autonomy in Greenland

The melting of Greenland’s massive inland ice sheet has become much-reported in the scientific literature as a potentially catastrophic example of the Arctic as a region experiencing unprecedented and rapid climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fourth global assessment concludes that airborne, satellite and seismic data indicate thinning around the periphery of the inland ice, where summer melt has increased during the past 20 years, while there is evidence of slower rates of thickening much further inland. A recently updated review of climate change science, since the Arctic Council’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) was published in 2005, suggests that the melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland inland ice has severely accelerated. This has prompted scientists to debate whether both may be close to their “tipping point” of sudden, rapid and possibly irreversible change. Both the ACIA and IPCC reports suggest, with a high degree of confidence, that climate change in the Arctic will have significant global consequences during this century. The Greenland inland ice covers 1.7 million sq. km, has an average thickness of 1600m and a total volume of some three million cubic km. It contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by seven meters over the next two to three centuries.