Scientists calculate the period has been extended by about five days every decade, leaving less and less ice at the end of each summer. Now it's about 10 feet," said Joe Braach, the headteacher of the local school at Shishmaref, a town of about 560 residents on a small barrier island off the north-west coast of Alaska.Scientists studying the Arctic are in little doubt that the region is going through a period of dramatic warming - perhaps the most rapid for thousands of years.The Arctic is like a basin of frozen water surrounded by the northernmost coasts of America, Russia, Scandinavia and Greenland, and the permanently frozen ice cap has always retreated during the long polar summer days But the summer melting period is getting longer. Suddenly the ground began to melt.Some locals began to talk of "drunken forests", caused as the frozen earth beneath Alaska's forests of black spruce turned to mud, resulting in the collapse of trees.In some coastal areas, the retreating sea ice exposed the land to the full force of the harsh winter storms, allowing the sea to erode the land with an increased risk of flooding."When I moved here, the sea was 40 feet from the house. Sometimes it doesn't freeze up until January," he said in a testimony given to a report compiled in 1998.Then there was the melting of the permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that the Inuit rely on for support of the wooden piles on which their houses are built. First it was the thinning of the sea ice on which they trek in search of early winter game. It made hunting for bearded seals or "ugruks" more precarious with the increased risk of falling through the thinner ice, said Benjamin Neakok, a resident of the north Alaskan outpost of Point Ley."It makes it hard to hunt in fall time when the ice starts forming It's dangerous to be out It's not really sturdy And after it freezes there's some open spots.
The indigenous people of Alaska could become the first global warming refugees as their frozen homeland goes through the quickest defrost since the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. The permafrost on which their houses are built is melting, the sea ice that protects their shorelines from the savage Arctic storms is retreating and the animals on which they have traditionally relied are in decline. Alaska's native human population - the Inuit - first began to voice concern at the end of the 1990s when they saw startling changes to the Arctic environment. We must hope his latest stance proves to be a lasting commitment rather than a brief holiday romance.The writer is shadow Education Secretary. Blair must have the courage to tackle what I have previously called "the amoeba" - the mixture of wooliness and resistance to rigour that seems to smother large parts of the educational establishment.
Where change is promoted by this establishment - the proposed abolition of the A-level being a case in point - it is all too often an attack on the parts of the system where excellence and rigour are still encouraged.If the new White Paper includes these measures, it will really make a difference If not, it will just be another of Mr Blair's gimmicks. We should break down the Berlin Wall between the private and state sectors in education. Labour ended the assisted places scheme, which gave a ladder of opportunity to so many, and put nothing in its place.8 The amoeba Finally, Mr. The tide should turn away from the inclusion-at-all-costs agenda, as even its previous advocates now accept. Inappropriate placing of children in mainstream schools damages not only their own education but that of others.7 Removing barriers between public and private. We should ensure that children with special educational needs are given access to the most appropriate form of education. There is a danger that without such freedom, academies will merely replace existing sink schools with failing schools in Norman Foster buildings.