Alaska Trip Prompts Call for Global Warming Action
Fresh from visits to the Yukon in Canada and Alaska’s northernmost city, four U.S. senators said Wednesday that signs of rising temperatures on Earth were obvious, and they called on Congress to act.
“If you can go to the Native people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something’s going on, I just think you’re not listening,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.
He was accompanied on the trip by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
The senators said in Anchorage that Inupiat Eskimo residents in Barrow, Alaska’s northernmost city, had found their ancestral land and traditional lifestyle disrupted by disappearing sea ice, thawing permafrost, increased coastal erosion and changes to wildlife habitat.
Heat-stimulated beetle infestation has killed vast amounts of the spruce forest in the Yukon, the senators said.
Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has dismissed global warming as a hoax.
President Bush backs a voluntary plan for industry to cut greenhouse gas output.
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