Icy Island Warms to Climate Change Thursday, June 7, 2007
QAQORTOQ, Greenland -- The biggest island in the world is a
wind-raked place, gripped by ice over four-fifths of its land,
prowled by polar bears, its coastlines 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, a lanky
young man 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 fiord, 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 here. The Arctic is feeling
the globe's fastest warming. At a