Beijing sacks CCP chief in restless Urumqi
　

TAKING THE RAP: Thousands of troops were patrolling the streets of Xinjiang region's capital as the Communist Party chief was removed in an attempt to appease the public

AP, URUMQI, CHINA
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 1

Chinese leaders removed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief of the restive western city of Urumqi yesterday, trying to appease public anger following sometimes violent protests this week that the government worries could re-ignite deadly ethnic rioting.

Xinhua news agency, in announcing the decision, did not give a reason for the firing of Li Zhi (栗智), but protesters who marched in their thousands on Thursday and Friday have demanded Li and his boss be dismissed for failing to provide adequate public safety in the city.

A series of stabbings with hypodermic needles that the government blames on Muslim separatists touched off the protests, which left five dead, and further unnerved the city, which is still uneasy following rioting in July that the government says killed 197, mostly members of China’s Han majority attacked by Muslim Uighurs.

Trying to get control of the situation, leaders replaced Li with Zhu Hailun (朱海倫), who has been the party’s top official in charge of law enforcement in Urumqi. Also sacked, Xinhua said, was an official in the police department for Xinjiang, China’s western-most region that abuts Central Asia and whose capital is Urumqi. The official’s name was not released.

Besides assuaging public anger, the Chinese leadership hopes that sacking Li will alleviate calls to remove Xinjiang party secretary Wang Lequan (王樂泉), a member of the ruling Politburo and an ally of President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).

Both Li and Wang took visible roles in trying to defuse the protests, separately wading into crowds to meet with protesters on Thursday, only to be greeted with shouts of “step down.”

TROOP PATROLS

By yesterday, thousands of troops, backed by tanks and metal barricades, patrolled Xinjiang’s regional capital. Paramilitary police manned checkpoints on streets around government and Communist Party headquarters, where security forces fired tear gas on Friday to disperse angry crowds of Han Chinese who say the government isn’t doing enough to protect them from extremists among the native Uighur population.

Entrances to the city’s Muslim quarter remained blocked by thousands of troops backed by heavy metal barricades and tanks.

Traffic was barred from much of the downtown area in the city of 2.5 million and many shops were closed.

There were no updated figures for the number of needle attacks, but unconfirmed reports of new incidents continued to spread through agitated crowds. Angry Han rushed to the southern edge of the city’s central square after people said two Uighur men had attacked an 11-year-old boy. Riot police quickly cleared the area.

The needle attacks began on Aug. 20, though were not publicly reported until Wednesday following days of rumors. Urumqi Deputy Mayor Zhang Hong (張鴻) said on Friday that 21 suspects had been detained, with four people indicted. He said all were Uighurs, while most victims were Han.

VICTIMS

Local police said hospitals in Urumqi were treating 531 people who believed they were attacked, Xinhua said. Of those, 106 showed obvious signs of needle attacks, it said.

Details of the protest deaths were few, although Zhang said on Friday that they all occurred on Thursday, the first day of the street protests, and resulted from “small-scale clashes.” He said two of those killed were “innocent,” while investigations into the other three deaths were continuing.

A report in Urumqi’s Morning Post yesterday said a “small number of people became overexcited and lost control of themselves” during Thursday’s demonstrations. It said casualties included police, paramilitary troops and innocent civilians, but gave no breakdown.

The World Uyghur Congress, a German-based exile group, said Han Chinese attacked more than 10 Uighurs during the protests and tried to storm the Nanmen mosque, but were stopped by authorities.

Tokyo must not fall for Beijing’s ‘carrots’: Lee
　

PRIDE AND HOPE: The former Taiwanese leader called on the Japanese government to carefully weigh the importance of Taiwan in Japan’s future

STAFF WRITER
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 3
　

“Considering the uncertainty regarding the future of China, both Taiwan and Japan should avoid being seduced by its carrots at first sight ... Japanese leaders should take a long, careful look at the advantages and disadvantages of the Taiwan question.”— Lee Teng-hui, former president

Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday called on Taiwan and Japan to retain their identity and not to fall for “carrots” wagged by China.

“Considering the uncertainty regarding the future of China, both Taiwan and Japan should avoid being seduced by its carrots at first sight,” Lee said in Japanese during a speech at a forum in Tokyo marking the 60th founding anniversary of the Junior Chamber International Japan.

Lee, who arrived in Japan on Friday for a week-long private visit, told the gathering of about 2,000 people that the attitude Taiwan and Japan should adopt vis-a-vis China should be: “You are you, I am me. But we are good friends.”

In his speech, titled “The Pride and Hope of a Nation,” Lee offered suggestions on politics and international relations to the country’s youth turks.

He said that Japan should engage China moderately and in harmony with the common interests of US and Japan, adding that Japan would be better to enhance cooperation with Taiwan, which already has de facto independence.

Saying that he has long worked to build Taiwan’ sense of self-­recognition, Lee added that Taiwan was being infiltrated by “Chinese thoughts.”

Lee said that the government should implement its policies by siding with the public.

Lee also congratulated the newly elected Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama of the Democratic Party of Japan.

The priority of the new prime minister should be to bring people happiness and peace, Lee said.

However, the Japanese leadership should be more proactive and increase its efforts to rebuild declining Taiwan-Japan relations when it considers the East Asia community framework, he said.

“From the viewpoint of geopolitics, it’s not too much to say that Taiwan holds the destiny of Japan in its hands,” Lee said.

“Japanese leaders should take a long, careful look at the advantages and disadvantages of the [Taiwan] question and not see the forest for the trees,” he said.

Whether two-party politics in Japan would allow its leaders to adopt the right track and develop roots will depend on whether the Hatoyama administration can run the country in conformity with public opinion, he said.

Lee and his wife, who will go on a sightseeing tour of Japan, are scheduled to return to Taiwan via Fukuoka on Thursday.

New movie casts gaze on White Terror era

AP , VENICE, ITALY
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 3
　

Hong Kong-based director Yonfan’s (楊凡) Prince of Tears (淚王子) will premiere on Friday at the Venice Film Festival, 20 years to the hour after the Golden Lion winner City of Sadness (悲情城市), the last major film to confront the painful period of Taiwanese history known as the White Terror.

“That’s naughty,” Yonfan said, smiling, when asked about the timing of the premiere in an interview overlooking the Mediterranean.

Prince of Tears, which is competing for the coveted Golden Lion, tells the story of the Sun family — an air force pilot, his beautiful wife and two daughters, living in a military-dependent village in southern Taiwan, more privileged than the general population but not immune to the fear spreading through an anti-communist campaign in the country.

The White Terror refers to the period after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) retreated to Taiwan from China. It imposed martial law and strict one-party dictatorship in 1949, and in subsequent years imprisoned, tortured and killed tens of thousands of political opponents.

During that period of “national hysteria,” the movie states that 3,000 people were sentenced to death, 8,000 people were imprisoned and sentenced for a collective total of 10,000 years in prison.

For years, the subject of the White Terror was taboo, Yonfan said. The formal taboo was lifted when martial law ended in 1987, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) City of Sadness, which tells the story of the brutal crackdown on dissidents in Feb. 28, 1947, appeared a year later.

But still, the Asian film industry has shied away from the subject, seeing it as too financially risky, Yonfan said.

“I think many producers, they would think it is not appropriate to do a commercial movie on the White Terror, and no one’s interested in watching the movie because nobody wants to see it,” Yonfan said. “But the movie is important to me. I grew up during the [19]50s in Taiwan. And it is the things that I see and I hear and I feel of that period. I would say this movie is an ­expression of my childhood.”

Because the movie was so important to him, Yonfan financed it himself to retain his artistic freedom. But he said he still faced difficulties developing the film because of its subject, and that only acceptance to the Venice Film Festival helped secure its distribution so far in Taiwan, Hong Kong and France. Without that, the film “probably would have had a harder time,” Yonfan said.

The core plot is based on the true story of what happened to the Sun family — not the real family name — when the parents came under suspicion of communist leanings, but Yonfan populates his first movie ever shot in Taiwan with characters and memories from his own childhood.

There’s the young, beautiful and wealthy Shanghai-born wife of General Liu played by Terri Kwan (關穎), who conspicuously jangles her necklace of 266 pearls, and her loyal driver, played by Jack Kao (高捷), who also appeared in City of Sadness. Joseph Chang (張孝全) plays the air force pilot Sun Han-Sun (孫漢生), who is imprisoned because of a flight made years before to get his eldest daughter out of China. For this, he is accused of being a communist spy and executed. His best friend could clear him, but he is in love with Sun’s wife, played by Zhu Xuan (朱璇) making her big-screen debut.

While the movie is set as political terror begins to spread, Yonfan said Prince of isn’t a historical reckoning with the period, but actually a film about betrayal.

He also did not strive for strict accuracy. Movie posters that appear on the walls might be from films that appeared after 1954, the year depicted in the film. A film clip shown in a school yard was from a film that came out in 1959.

“That is my childhood memory. Many of the things might not be true to the history of 1954. That doesn’t matter to me. Sometimes your memory can be wrong. I use the word postmodern,” Yonfan said.

To develop the core story, Yonfan said he spoke extensively with both of the now grown daughters of the air force pilot. The elder daughter took him to the field where her father had been buried, though she was unable to ever identify his remains.

Disasters and native rights
　

Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 8

We wish to convey our condolences and sympathy to the victims of Typhoon Morakot, especially to our indigenous brothers and sisters who lost their loved ones and had homes, land and property destroyed. The same typhoon, named “Kiko,” hit us in the Philippines, killing dozens of people including indigenous peoples and small-scale miners, leaving more than 1,000 families homeless and affecting more than 28,000 people.

The Taiwanese government’s post-typhoon reconstruction legislation fails to consider the participation of local communities in rebuilding homes and regions. If anyone is concerned about rehabilitation and reconstruction after this tragic event, it is these communities and indigenous peoples themselves. Their survival is at great risk.

They should be part of every step of the decision-making process on matters that concern them.

The framework of rehabilitation and reconstruction covering indigenous territories should reflect respect and recognition of the inherent individual and collective rights of indigenous peoples over ancestral lands, resources and territories, as enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The Taiwanese government should also review and reverse its policies and projects that contribute to and worsen environmental crises and climate change.

Government policy should not provide for the eviction of indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories through the declaration of danger zones in the guise of rehabilitating communities. If leaving an area is the only option because of the risks in staying behind, the communities must be involved in the decision and their consent must still be secured.

The government must first ensure that indigenous peoples hit by Morakot are safe and have access to essential services, while refraining from passing legislation that further marginalizes these oppressed peoples. Any legislative attempt to take advantage of this tragic situation to pave the way for more state land grabs and to locate government and capitalist projects in indigenous territories must be opposed and condemned. Reconstruction efforts must not sacrifice Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

Typhoons, floods, droughts, extreme cold and dry spells, rising sea levels and the like clearly indicate that we have entered a global environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions. The global economic order and “free-market globalization” driven by imperialists and their transnational corporations is the root cause of over-exploitation and depletion of resources, environmental destruction and excessive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, resulting in climate change and global warming.

Climate change is not merely an environmental issue but a question of social justice, national sovereignty and public control over resources, sustainable growth and human development. Mother Nature is now seeking redress for the plunder and destruction that humanity has exacted upon her.

Unfortunately, it’s not the monopoly capitalists and the ruling elite who bear the brunt of these disasters, but poor people — including indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples all over the world contribute the least to climate change given their sustainable natural resource management, their world view and a mode of existence that is dependent on and intertwined with nature.

The Cordillera Peoples Alliance is in unity with the Taiwanese indigenous peoples’ struggle for their rights to land and resources. We are with you in opposing the typhoon reconstruction legislation and salute you in your collective undertaking in overcoming this great difficulty in the aftermath of Morakot.

At this time of great difficulty, we must strengthen our solidarity and intensify our struggle for ancestral domains and self-determination. We must work for a world order and society that is socially just, democratic and ecologically sustainable, and one that respects self-determination in the development of indigenous peoples.

WINDEL BOLINGET
Baguio, Philippines

The green lane could be safer

Living and working on Dunhua Road, I am pleased with the efforts of the Taipei City Government in creating a suitable bike path on a major road. Before the bike lane opened, I was in and out of traffic, dodging taxis and buses that swerved to the curb to pick up or drop off passengers, or riding on the heels of pedestrians on the sidewalk. I risked my life on a daily basis for a simple 15-minute ride to work.

Now I can often ride safely to work on my green cement lane.

Yes, “often.” The majority of cab and bus drivers are doing their part in not blocking the bike lane, but scooter and car drivers are not.

People in Taipei like to complain about how the government is not doing its job, when in fact it is the public who are not doing theirs.

People of Taipei: You run red lights, you ride scooters on sidewalks, you overtake other motorists by driving into oncoming traffic, you ride and park in bike lanes and you never stop at stop signs. Your disrespect for others on the road puts other motorists, bike riders and especially pedestrians in harm’s way.

There is a reason that traffic is being restricted near Deaflympics venues — your driving might seriously injure our international guests, or worse.

Yes, the police need to be out in force, giving bad drivers tickets and taking away licenses. Yes, there needs to be better training for drivers. Blame the government all you want, but take it upon yourself as civilized people to drive better.

When Grandma and Grandpa are crossing the road, stop. Take a breath. Let them get to the other side. But, Gram and Gramps — please — look both ways before you begin your trek.

NAME WITHHELD
Taipei

Dalai Lama rose above the hacks
　

By Cao Changqing 曹長青
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 8

The Dalai Lama arrived in Taiwan late last Sunday night on his third visit to Taiwan. This visit differed from past visits because the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had worked together to defame him. Pan-blue legislators said his visit was nothing but a political show, while the Chinese-language, pro-unification United Daily News said he was using the bones of those who died in Typhoon Morakot to build a political stage for himself.

Ye Xiaowen (葉小文), head of China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs, said the Dalai Lama’s decision to come at this time proved even more unruly; he described the religious leader as a “human calamity.”

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and senior KMT officials fell over themselves promising that they would not meet with him. In this way, Ma, who has been proven incompetent in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot, curried favor with China’s dictators and showcased his ability to beg and grovel before Beijing.

The way the CCP vilified the Dalai Lama was to be expected, since this is how these communist ruffians have always behaved. They do not understand the human language and have even less understanding of civilized values such as friendliness, sympathy and humane treatment.

Ma and his pan-blue legislator cronies, however, have been exposed for the pack of liars that they are. The way they kowtowed to China’s Taiwan Affairs Office is an embarrassment to Taiwan’s democratically elected president and the legislature.

For 20 years, the Dalai Lama has advocated abandoning Tibetan independence and accepting that Tibet is part of China, merely asking that Tibet in return be given a high degree of autonomy. He can’t possibly go further than that.

The Dalai Lama once said that Tibetans have already given up everything they once had and have nothing left to give China.

Some dissidents voiced doubts over the usefulness of the Tibetan government-in-exile’s strategy toward Beijing three weeks ago at the International Sino-Tibetan Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, but the Dalai Lama once again made it clear that he will stick to his “middle way” in handling relations with China.

It was this middle way that he had in mind when he visited Taiwan, so what sort of political activities could he possibly have taken part in?

He has already been forced into agreeing that Tibet is a part of China and keeps repeating that he does not and will not seek independence for Tibet. What do Ma and the other proponents of eventual unification want the Dalai Lama to do? The 6 million people of Tibet remain colonized and the Dalai Lama has been in exile for five decades. Are pan-blue political hacks totally devoid of sympathy and human emotion?

The Dalai Lama is a religious leader who has always stressed peace and non-violence. So, are pan-blue politicians really the same as those in the CCP, who view the Dalai Lama as an enemy?

The Ma administration leans entirely toward China and fears the CCP. The Dalai Lama knew very well that he would face unfriendliness and even enmity from the pan-blue camp by coming to Taiwan, with Ma’s aides even saying they would dictate exactly where the Dalai Lama could go and what he could do during his short visit.

Despite this, the Dalai Lama came, and he comforted disaster victims. This clearly shows he is more concerned with human life than politics.

Despite being attacked by the KMT and the CCP, he refused to give in. Taiwanese should welcome and be grateful for his visit.

The Dalai Lama is the only religious leader in Asia who enjoys a good reputation around the globe, and leaders of many democratic nations feel a deep sense of pride when they meet him.

Two years ago, the US Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, with congressional leaders and then-president George W. Bush attending the ceremony. It is unbelievable and infuriating that a group of lowly political hacks in Taiwan attacked and tried to defame this spiritual leader.

Supporters were asked to welcome the Dalai Lama by making a T-shaped gesture with their hands to represent Taiwan and Tibet and as a gesture of thanks for the love he has shown and as a form of protest against the pan-blue camp’s abuse of power.

The public is becoming more aware of the government’s approach. Its officials are incompetent and are becoming increasingly adept at collaborating with the CCP. Their actions prove the KMT is not a political opponent, but a political enemy of Taiwan.

Cao Changqing is a writer based in the US.

Rebuilding could lower number of unemployed
　

By Lee Ying-yuan 李應元
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 8

‘Unemployed people who are willing to participate should be organized into groups and trained, then given tasks and a performance bonus if they finish on time.’

After the flooding caused by Typhoon Morakot, the Council of Labor Affairs has proposed a “jobs for relief” program.

This is the right direction for resolving the growing problem of unemployment, but there is much room for improvement in the council’s strategy.

Today, participants in post-disaster relief are mostly volunteers and soldiers. In terms of organizational management, these two groups find themselves at opposite extremes. Volunteers are, obviously, working voluntarily, while soldiers rely on discipline and orders. It is moving to see that so many volunteers swarmed into the disaster areas for the post-disaster clean-up.

Experience tells us that after a period of enthusiasm, the number of volunteers gradually decreases with time. Systematic task planning and organization becomes almost impossible because no one knows how many volunteers there are and how long they will be available.

Soldiers, on the other hand, are well-trained and perform relief and clean-up duties efficiently. But since the military has other duties, soldiers may not be able to devote themselves to long-term post-disaster reconstruction.

History shows that disaster relief and reconstruction require a tremendous amount of labor and can employ many people. But the number of available positions in the jobs-for-relief program is low and the number of applicants is high, so there is a gap between supply and demand.

Since both volunteers and soldiers will eventually withdraw from disaster areas, the council should actively invest its Employment Security Fund (就業安定基金) into disaster relief and reconstruction in accordance with Article 5 of the Regulations for Revenues, Expenditures, Safeguard and Utilization of the Employment Security Fund (就業安定基金收支保管及運用辦法).

The council should once again apply the strategy of recruiting employment service providers — previously known as “employment service moms” — to allow disaster victims to participate in the jobs-for-relief program through better planning, organization and training.

Unemployed people who are willing to participate should be organized into groups and trained, then given tasks and a performance bonus if they finish on time.

This way, they will have a sense of belonging and form a collective memory while rebuilding their homeland together. This will not only be efficient but also effective.

Taiwan’s unemployment problem faces structural challenges, and it will be hard to solve this even with the economy slowly recovering.

The jobs-for-relief program is, nevertheless, a feasible short-term emergency measure.

The council should strengthen the program to assist people in disaster areas with a reconstruction agenda and to address the cyclical problem of unemployment.

Lee Ying-yuan is a former minister of the Council of Labor Affairs.
　

The meltdown on Greenland
　

The ice sheet is melting faster than predicted, while political action to fight climate change lags behind

By Patrick Barkham
THE GUARDIAN, SERMILIK FJORD, GREENLAND
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 9

It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.

The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 2,400km from north to south and covers 80 percent of this country. It has been frozen for 3 million years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared, sea levels around the world would rise by 7m, as 10 percent of the world’s fresh water is frozen here.

This is also the season for science in Greenland. Glaciologists, seismologists and climatologists from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in helicopters, taking ice-breakers up its inaccessible coastline and measuring glaciers in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected.

Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, is packing up equipment at his base camp in Tasiilaq, a tiny, remote east coast settlement only accessible by helicopter and where huskies howl all night.

With his spiky hair and ripped T-shirt, Hamilton could be a rugged glaciologist straight from central casting. Four years ago he hit upon the daring idea of landing on a moving glacier in a helicopter to measure its speed.

The glaciers of Greenland are the fat, restless fingers of its vast ice sheet, constantly moving, stretching down into fjords and pushing ice from the sheet into the ocean, in the form of melt water and icebergs.

Before their first expedition, Hamilton and his colleague, Leigh Stearns, from the University of Kansas, used satellite data to plan exactly where they would land on a glacier.

“When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord,” he said. “We thought we’d made some stupid goof with the coordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be.”

It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. A vast expanse had melted away.

When Hamilton and Stearns processed their first measurements of the glacier’s speed, they thought they had made another mistake. They found it was marching forward at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before.

“We were blown away because we realized that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot,” he said.

The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean.

Standing before a glacier in Greenland as it calves icebergs into the dark waters of a cavernous fjord is to witness the raw power of a natural process we have accelerated but will now struggle to control.

Greenland’s glaciers make those in the Alps look like toys. Grubby white and blue crystal towers, cliffs and crevasses soar up from the water, dispatching millenniums of compacted snow in the shape of seals, water lilies and bishops’ miters.

I take a small boat to see the calving with Dines Mikaelsen, an Inuit guide, who in the winter will cross the ice sheet in his 5m sled pulled by 16 huskies.

It is not freezing but even in summer the wind is bitingly cold and we can smell the bad breath of a humpback whale as it groans past our bows on Sermilik Fjord. Above its heavy breathing, all you can hear in this wilderness is the drip-drip of melting ice and a crash as icebergs cleave into even smaller lumps, called growlers.

Mikaelsen stops his boat beside Hann glacier and points out how it was twice as wide and stretched 300m further into the fjord just 10 years ago. He also shows off a spectacular electric blue iceberg.

Locals have nicknamed it “blue diamond”: Its color comes from being cleaved from centuries-old compressed ice at the ancient heart of the glacier. Bobbing in warming waters, this ancient ice fossil will be gone in a couple of weeks.

The blue diamond is one vivid pointer to the antiquity of the Greenland ice sheet. A relic of the last Ice Age, this is one of three great ice sheets in the world. Up to 3.2km thick, the other two lie in Antarctica.

While similar melting effects are being measured in the southern hemisphere, the Greenland sheet may be uniquely vulnerable, lying much further from the chill of the pole than Antarctica’s sheets. The southern end of the Greenland sheet is almost on the same latitude as the Shetlands and stroked by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

Driven by the loss of ice, Arctic temperatures are warming more quickly than other parts of the world: Last autumn, air temperatures in the Arctic stood at a record 5oC above normal.

For centuries, the ice sheets maintained an equilibrium: Glaciers calved off icebergs and sent melt water into the oceans every summer; in winter, the ice sheet was then replenished with more frozen snow.

Scientists believe the world’s great ice sheets will not completely disappear for many more centuries, but the Greenland ice sheet is now shedding more ice than it is accumulating.

The melting has been recorded since 1979. Scientists put the annual net loss of ice and water from the ice sheet at 300 gigatonnes to 400 gigatonnes (equivalent to 1 billion elephants being dropped in the ocean), which could hasten a sea level rise of catastrophic proportions.

As Hamilton has found, Greenland’s glaciers have increased the speed at which they shift ice from the sheet into the ocean.

Helheim, an enormous tower of ice that calves into Sermilik Fjord, used to move at 7km a year. In 2005, in less than a year, it speeded up to nearly 12km a year. Kangerdlugssuaq, another glacier that Hamilton measured, tripled its speed between 1988 and 2005. Its movement — an inch every minute — could be seen with the naked eye.

The three glaciers that Hamilton and Stearns measured account for about one-fifth of the discharge from the entire Greenland ice sheet. The implications of their acceleration are profound.

“If they all start to speed up, you could have quite a large rise in sea level in the near term, much larger than the official estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] would project,” Hamilton said.

The scientific labors in the chilly winds and high seas of the Arctic summer seem wrapped in an unusual sense of urgency this year. The scientists working in Greenland are keen to communicate their new, emerging understanding of the dynamics of the declining ice sheet to the wider world.

Several point out that any international agreement forged at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December will be based on the IPCC’s fourth assessment report from 2007. Its estimates of climate change and sea-level rise were based on scientific research submitted up to 2005. The scientists say this is already significantly out of date.

The 2007 report predicted a sea level rise of 30cm to 60cm by 2100, but did not account for the impact of glaciers breaking into the sea from areas such as the Greenland ice sheet. Most scientists working at the poles predict a 1m rise by 2100. The US Geological Survey has predicted a 1.5m rise. As Hamilton points out: “It is only the first meter that matters.”

A 1m rise — with the risk of higher storm surges — would require new defenses for New York, London, Mumbai and Shanghai, and imperil swaths of low-lying land from Bangladesh to Florida. Vulnerable areas accommodate 10 percent of the world’s population — 600 million.

The Greenland ice sheet is not merely being melted from above by warmer air temperatures. As the oceans of the Arctic waters reach record high temperatures, the role of warmer water lapping against these great glaciers is one of several factors shaping the loss of the ice sheet that has been overlooked until recently.

Fiamma Straneo, an Italian-born oceanographer, is laboriously winding recording equipment the size of a fire extinguisher from the deck of a small Greenpeace icebreaker caught in huge swells at the mouth of Sermilik fjord.

In previous decades the Arctic Sunrise has been used in taking direct action against whalers; now it offers itself as a floating research station for independent scientists to reach remote parts of the ice sheet.

It is tough work for the multinational crew of 30 in this rough-and-ready little boat, prettified below deck with posters of orang-utans and sunflowers painted in the toilets.

Before I succumb to vomiting below deck — another seasick journalist — I examine the navigational charts used by the captain, Pete Willcox, a survivor of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. He shows how they are dotted with measurements showing the depth of the ocean but here, close to the east coast of Greenland, the map is blank: This part of the North Atlantic was once covered by sea ice for so much of the year that its waters are still uncharted.

Earlier in the expedition, the crew believe, they became the first boat to travel through the Nares Strait west of Greenland to the Arctic Ocean in June, once impassable because of sea ice at that time of year. The predicted year when summers in the Arctic would be free of sea ice has fallen from 2100 to 2050 to 2030 in a couple of years.

Jay Zwally, a NASA scientist, recently suggested it could be virtually ice-free by late summer 2012.

Between 2004 and last year, the area of “multiyear” Arctic sea ice (ice that has formed over more than one winter and survived the summer melt) shrank by 1.5 million square kilometers — an area larger than France, Germany and the UK combined.

Undaunted by the sickening swell of the ocean and wrapped up against the chilly wind, Straneo, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the world’s leading oceanographic research centers, continues to take measurements from the waters as the long Arctic dusk falls.

According to Straneo, the rapid changes to the ice sheet have taken glaciologists by surprise.

“One of the possible mechanisms which we think may have triggered these changes is melting driven by changing ocean temperatures and currents at the margins of the ice sheet,” Straneo said.

She has been surprised by early results measuring sea water close to the melting glaciers: One probe recovered from last year recorded a relatively balmy 2oC at 60m in the fjord in the middle of winter.

“This warm and salty water is of subtropical origin — it’s carried by the Gulf Stream. In recent years a lot more of this warm water has been found around the coastal region of Greenland. We think this is one of the mechanisms that has caused these glaciers to accelerate and shed more ice,” Straneo said.

Straneo’s research is looking at what scientists call the “dynamic effects” of the Greenland ice sheet. It is not simply that the ice sheet is melting steadily as global temperatures rise. Rather, the melting triggers dynamic new effects, which in turn accelerate the melt.

“It’s quite likely that these dynamic effects are more important in generating a near-term rapid rise in sea level than the traditional melt,” Hamilton said.

Another example of these dynamic effects is when the ice sheet melts to expose dirty layers of old snow laced with black carbon from forest fires and even cosmic dust. These dark particles absorb more heat and so further speed up the melt.

After Straneo gathers her final measurements, the Arctic Sunrise heads for the tranquillity of the sole berth at Tasiilaq, which has a population of fewer than 3,000 but is still the largest settlement on Greenland’s vast east coast. Here another scientist is gathering her final provisions before taking her team camping on a remote glacier.

Several years ago Meredith Nettles, a seismologist from Colombia University, and two colleagues made a remarkable discovery: They identified a completely new kind of earthquake. These quakes were substantial — measuring magnitude 5 — but had been invisible because they did not show up on seismographs. (While orthodox tremors registered for a couple of seconds, these occurred rather more slowly, over 1 minute.)

The new earthquakes were traced almost exclusively to Greenland, where they were found to be specifically associated with large, fast-flowing outlet glaciers. There have been 200 of them in the last dozen years; in 2005 there were six times as many as in 1993.

Nettles nimbly explains the science as she heaves bags of equipment on to a helicopter, which will fly her to study Kangerdlugssuaq glacier.

“It’s quite a dramatic increase, and that increase happened at the same time as we were seeing dramatic retreats in the location of the calving fronts of the glaciers, and an increase in their flow speed,” she said. “The earthquakes are very closely associated with large-scale ice loss events.”

In other words, the huge chunks of ice breaking off from the glaciers and entering the oceans are large enough to generate a seismic signal that is sent through the Earth. They are happening more regularly and, when they occur, it appears that the glacier speeds up even more.

The scientists rightly wrap their latest observations in caution. Their studies are still in their infancy. Some of the effects they are observing may be short-term.

The Greenland ice sheet has survived natural warmer periods in history, the last about 120,000 years ago, although it was much smaller then than it is now.

Those still skeptical of the scientific consensus over climate change should perhaps listen to the voices of those who could not be accused of having anything to gain from talking up climate change.

Arne Sorensen, a specialist ice navigator on Arctic Sunrise, began sailing the Arctic in the 1970s. Journeys around Greenland’s coast that would take three weeks in the 1970s because of sea ice now take a day. He pays heed to the observations of the Inuit.

“If you talk to people who live close to nature and they tell you this is unusual and this is not something they have noticed before, then I really put emphasis on that,” he said.

Paakkanna Ignatiussen, 52, has been hunting seals since he was 13. His grandparents would travel 1km to hunt seals; now he must go 100km because the sea ice disappears earlier — and with it the seals.

“It’s hard to see the ice go back. In the old days when we got ice it was only ice. Today it is more like slush,” he says. “In 10 years there will be no traditional hunting. The weather is the reason.”

The stench of rotting seal flesh wafts from a bag in the porch of his house in Tasiilaq as Ignatiussen’s wife, Ane, says: “The seasons are upside down.”

Local residents are acutely aware of how the weather is changing animal behavior. Browsing the guns for sale in the supermarket in Tasiilaq, Axel Hansen says more hungry polar bears prowl around the town these days. Like the hunters, the bears can’t find seals when there is so little sea ice. And the fjords are filled with so many icebergs that local people find it hard to hunt whales there.

Westerners may shrug at the decline of traditional hunting but, in a sense, we all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate. The scientists swarming over this ancient mass of ice, trying to understand how it will be transformed in a warming world, and how it will transform us, are wary of making political comments about how our leaders should plan for 1m of sea level rise, and what drastic steps must be taken to cut carbon emissions. But some scientists are so astounded by the changes they are recording that they are moved to speak out.

What, I ask Hamilton, would he say to US President Barack Obama if he could spend 10 minutes with him standing on Helheim glacier?

“Without knowing anything about what is going on, you just have to look at the glacier to know something huge is happening here,” the glaciologist said.

“We can’t as a scientific community keep up with the pace of changes, let alone explain why they are happening,” he said.

“If I was, God forbid, the leader of the free world, I would implement some changes to deal with the maximum risk that we might reasonably expect to encounter, rather than always planning for the minimum,” he said.

“We won’t know the consequences of not doing that until it’s way too late. Even as a politician on a four-year elected cycle, you can’t morally leave someone with that problem,” Hamilton said.

Flashpoint in the Himalayas
　

A little-known Tibetan Buddhist enclave is at the center of an increasingly tense dispute between China and India

By Edward Wong
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, TAWANG, INDIA
Sunday, Sep 06, 2009, Page 13

“The India-China frontier has become more ‘hot’ than the India-Pakistan border.”— Brahma Chellaney, professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi

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This is perhaps the most militarized Buddhist enclave in the world.

Perched above 3,000m in the icy reaches of the eastern Himalayas, the town of Tawang is not only home to one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most sacred monasteries, but also the site of a massive Indian military buildup. Convoys of army trucks haul howitzers along rutted mountain roads. Soldiers drill in muddy fields. Military bases appear every kilometer in the countryside, with watchtowers rising behind concertina wire.

A road sign on the northern edge of town helps explain the reason for all the fear and the fury: The border with China is just 37km away; Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, 509km; and Beijing 4,307km.

“The Chinese army has a big deployment at the border, at Bumla,” said Madan Singh, a junior commissioned officer who sat with a half-dozen soldiers one afternoon sipping tea beside a fog-cloaked road. “That’s why we’re here.”

Though little known to the outside world, Tawang is a flashpoint in relations between the world’s two most populous nations. It is the focus of China’s most delicate land-border dispute, a conflict rooted in Chinese claims of sovereignty over all of historical Tibet.

In recent months, both countries have stepped up efforts to secure their rights over this rugged patch of land. China tried to block a US$2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank on the grounds that part of the loan was slated for water projects in Arunachal Pradesh, the state that includes Tawang. It was the first time China had sought to influence the territorial dispute through a multilateral institution.

Then an Indian general announced that the Indian military was deploying extra troops and fighter jets in the area.

The growing belligerence has soured relations between the two Asian giants and has prompted one Indian military leader to declare that China has replaced Pakistan as India’s biggest threat.

Economic progress might be expected to bring the countries closer. China and India did US$52 billion of trade last year, a 34 percent increase over 2007. But businesspeople say that border tensions have infused official deliberations over business deals, dampening the willingness of Chinese and Indian companies to invest in each other’s countries.

“Officials start taking more time, scrutinizing things more carefully, and all that means more delays and ultimately more denials, “said Ravi Bhoothalingam, a former president of the Oberoi Group, the luxury hotel chain, and a member of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi. “That’s not good for business.”

The roots of the conflict go back to China’s territorial claims to Tibet. Not only does the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, live in the foothills of the western Himalayas with the blessing of the Indian government, but China insists that this swath of northeast India has historically been part of Tibet, and thus should be part of China.

Tawang is a thickly forested area of white stupas and steep, terraced hillsides that is home to the ethnic Monpa people, who practice Tibetan Buddhism, speak a language similar to Tibetan and once paid tribute to rulers in Lhasa. The sixth Dalai Lama was born here in the 17th century.

The Chinese army occupied Tawang briefly in 1962, during a war with India fought over this and other territories along the 4,057km border. More than 3,100 Indian soldiers and 700 Chinese soldiers were killed and thousands wounded in the border war. War memorials highlighting China’s aggressions in Tawang here are big draws for Indian tourists.

“The entire border is disputed,” said Ma Jiali, an India scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government-supported think tank in Beijing. “This problem hasn’t been solved, and it’s a huge barrier to China-India relations.”

In some ways, Tawang has become a proxy battleground, too, between China and the Dalai Lama, who passed through this valley when he fled into exile in 1959. From his home in the distant hill town of Dharamsala, he wields enormous influence over Tawang. He appoints the abbot of the powerful monastery and gives financial support to institutions throughout the area.

Last year, the Dalai Lama announced for the first time that Tawang is a part of India, bolstering the Indian government’s territorial claims and infuriating China.

Traditional Tibetan culture runs strong in Tawang. One morning in June, the monastery held a religious festival that drew hundreds from the nearby villages. As red-robed monks chanted sutras, blew horns and swung incense braziers in the monastery courtyard, the villagers jostled each other to be blessed by the senior lamas.

At the Tawang monastery, an important center of Tibetan learning, monks express apprehension about China’s rule over Tibet, which the Chinese army seized in 1951.

“I hate the Chinese government,” said Gombu Tsering, 70, a senior monk who watches over the monastery’s museum. “Tibet wasn’t even a part of China. Lhasa wasn’t a part of China.”

Few expect China to try to forcefully annex Tawang, but military skirmishes are a real danger, analysts say. The Indian military recorded 270 border violations and nearly 2,300 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by Chinese soldiers last year, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, a research organization in New Delhi. Chellaney has advised the Indian government’s National Security Council.

“The India-China frontier has become more ‘hot’ than the India-Pakistan border,” he said in an e-mail.

Two years ago, Chinese soldiers demolished a Buddhist statue that Indians had erected at Bumla, the main border pass above Tawang, a member of the Indian Parliament, Nabam Rebia, said during a session of parliament.

Tawang became a part of modern India when Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with British officials in 1914 that established a border called the McMahon Line between Tibet and British-ruled India. Tawang fell south of the line. The treaty, the Simla Convention, is the basis for the Indian claim to Tawang, but is not recognized by China.

“We recognize it because we agreed to it,” said Samdhong Rinpoche, the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile. “If China agreed to it now, it would be a recognition of the power of the Tibet government at that time.”

China has grown increasingly hostile to the Dalai Lama after a severe outbreak of ethnic unrest in Tibet. This year, it turned its diplomatic guns on India. China moved in March to block a US$2.9 billion loan to India from the Asian Development Bank, a multi-nation group based in Manila that has China on its board, because US$60 million of the loan had been earmarked for flood-control projects in Arunachal Pradesh, the state that includes Tawang. The loan was approved in mid-June over China’s heated objections.

“China expresses strong dissatisfaction to the move, which can neither change the existence of immense territorial disputes between China and India, nor China’s fundamental position on its border issues with India,” Qin Gang (秦剛), the foreign ministry spokesman, said in a written statement.

Weeks after China first tried to block the loan, the chief of the Indian air force, now retired, told a prominent Indian newspaper that China posed a greater threat than Pakistan.

Another official, J.J. Singh, the governor of Arunachal Pradesh and retired chief of the Indian army, said the next month that the Indian military was adding two divisions of troops, totaling 50,000 to 60,000 soldiers, to the border region over the next several years. Four Sukhoi fighter jets were immediately deployed to a nearby air base.

Since 2005, when Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) visited India, the two countries have gone through 13 rounds of bilateral negotiations over the issue. A last round was just held last month, with no results. Though China has actually resolved many of its border disputes in recent years, India remains a glaring exception.