Up north, climate change receives a warm welcome

QAQORTOQ, Greenland — The biggest island in the world is wind-raked, gripped by ice over four-fifths of its land, prowled by polar bears, and its coastlines are choked by drifting icebergs and sea ice. Many of its 56,000 people, who live on the fringes of its giant ice cap, see the effects of global warming — and cheer it on.

"It's good for me," said Ernst Lund, who is one of 51 farmers raising sheep on the southern tip of Greenland.

His animals scramble over the cold, granite hills of a dramatic fjord, his farm isolated from the nearest town by a long boat ride threading past drifting mounds of ice, followed by a jolting truck trip along seven miles of gravel road.

"I can keep the sheep out two weeks longer to feed in hills in the autumn. And I can grow more hay. The sheep get fatter," he said.

In few parts of the world is climate change more real — and personal — than Greenland. The Arctic is feeling the globe's fastest warming. At a science station in the ice-covered interior of Greenland, average winter temperatures increased nearly 11 degrees Fahrenheit from 1991 to 2003. Winters are shorter, ice is melting, and fish and animals are on the move.

A rapid meltdown and fast-sliding glaciers in Greenland could raise sea levels around the world and flood coastal cities and farmland. The infusion of cold water could jolt the Gulf Stream, alter weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere and scatter fish and marine stocks.

Yet this sweeping reworking of humanity's global accommodations likely will be fickle. While Greenland has many people who fear what warming will bring, it has quite a few others who reckon they may do quite well by it.

Return of the cod

Kim Hoegh-Dam, 44, is betting a bundle that the changing climate will bring the cod back to Greenland. The businessman has lined up more than $1 million to buy a small fleet of cod trawlers and three processing plants.

"Global warming will increase the cod tremendously and will bring other species up from the south," he said.

Hoegh-Dam's ancestors have lived for 200 years in Qaqortoq, which once grew rich on cod. In the early 20th century, the town boasted Greenland's first public bath, available to residents three times a year, once more annually than was common at baths in sophisticated Copenhagen, Denmark. The big whitefish fed Europe and nurtured New England, becoming the mainstay of Greenland's economy.

But the Greenland cod catch plummeted in the late 1960s, and the cod disappeared in 1991. Researchers attributed it to a double blow of overfishing and a 4-degree drop in the water temperature because of shifting currents. Hard-pressed watermen turned their boats and production plants to shrimp, now Greenland's chief export.

The seas around Greenland now show the highest temperatures since the 1960s. A trawler sent with government inspectors to test the old cod grounds off eastern Greenland this year made a good catch: The holds were filled with 25 tons of cod in one hour.

Conservationists are cautious. "If you start fishing this, you could stop the cod from building up," said Holger Hovgard, of the Greenland Institute for Natural Resources in the capital, Nuuk. If the sea temperatures rise enough to bring back cod, he asked, what happens to the cold-loving shrimp?

For now, many Greenlanders who wrest a living from the harsh environment see opportunities.

Kim Hoegh-Dam's brother, Kenneth Hoegh, 41, is the agriculture advisory agent in southern Greenland. While his brother bets on fish, Kenneth Hoegh is developing new markets for the small band of farmers in this self-governing dependency of Denmark.

Farmers raised 22,000 lambs for local meat markets last year, and Hoegh soon will host the chef of a renowned Copenhagen restaurant to persuade him to put "Arctic lamb" on the menu.

Hoegh has six cows and wants to start a small dairy. He packs sheep wool off to England for sorting and then to Lithuania to be woven into fine blankets labeled Greenland wool.

Tables in his office in Qaqortoq are loaded with potatoes to be planted on the warm edges of fjords. At his agriculture station, employees are growing Chinese cabbage, flowers and turnips in greenhouses and under protective plastic sheets. "The only limiting factor on human endeavor in Greenland is the temperature," Hoegh said.

Six hundred miles north, 170 miles past the Arctic Circle, in the fishing village of Ilulissat, Inuit men gather around barrels of bait one afternoon as they thread hundreds of hooks attached to their long fishing lines.

Traditionally, when the winter pack ice closed over the waters of their fjord, the men would take lines and nets on dog sleds and cut holes in the ice to catch halibut. But the pack ice never closed in recent winters, and the men worked from boats all year.

"It is much easier to go by boat than to try to haul everything by dogs," said Ove Olsvig, 39. "We can catch a lot more." He paused. "I don't think it's good," he added. The higher catch will take its toll on the fish stock, he said. Then, "the fishing will not be so good."

Easier hunting for seals

Cuno Jensen, 22, a teacher, walked by carrying a rifle. When he was a boy, he said, he and his father would go onto the ice and lie in wait for hours to get a shot at a seal. With the water open year-round, "we just take a boat out, and it's easy to get close enough to shoot the seal."

Ono Fleischer, one of the most renowned dog sledders in Greenland, dismisses any sentiment over the shrinking ice.

"With the warmer weather, we don't have to fight the cold so much. Our health is better. Our equipment doesn't break down so much, and we don't use so much fuel. The time for industry is longer, and there are more places we can go by boat," Fleischer, 59, said at his home overlooking Ilulissat. "I can't think of any negative consequences."

But others, who depend on the ice, can. In the sparsely populated far north of Greenland, Inuit wait for the Arctic Sea ice to close each fall. They take dog sleds and snowmobiles onto the ice to hunt food: seals, whales and polar bears. But the ice now takes longer to come.

The ice-patrol station in Daneborg keeps excellent records: The water was open for 80 days a decade ago. It now stays ice-free for 140 days, said Soren Rysgaard, a researcher for the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

Unlike Inuit farther south who live by fishing, these hunters need ice to stalk their prey on foot.

In three recent years, some northern villages appealed for emergency food aid because they could not get on the ice to hunt. "If a seal hunter can't hunt, what is he to do?" asked Alfred Jakobsen, Greenland's minister of the environment.

Researcher Natalia Alexandrova contributed to this report.