For a moment I thought this was about the store....
Anyway, do Iceland now have TV on a Thursday?
Brian

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What Worries Iceland? A World Without Ice. It Is Preparing.
As rising temperatures drastically reshape Iceland's landscape, businesses
and the government are spending millions for survival and profit.
By Liz Alderman, Aug. 9, 2019, NY Times

HÖFN, Iceland - From the offices of the fishing operation founded by his
family two generations ago, Adalsteinn Ingólfsson has watched the massive
Vatnajökull glacier shrink year after year. Rising temperatures have already
winnowed the types of fish he can catch. But the wilting ice mass, Iceland's
largest, is a strange new challenge to business.

"The glacier is melting so much that the land is rising from the sea," said
Mr. Ingólfsson, the chief executive of Skinney-Thinganes, one of Iceland's
biggest fishing companies. "It's harder to get our biggest trawlers in and
out of the harbor. And if something goes wrong with the weather, the port is
closed off completely."

A warmer climate isn't affecting just Höfn, where the waning weight of
Vatnajökull on the earth's crust is draining fjords and shifting underground
sediment, twisting the town's sewer pipes. As temperatures rise across the
Arctic nearly faster than any place on the planet, all of Iceland is
grappling with the prospect of a future with no ice.

Energy producers are upgrading hydroelectric power plants and experimenting
with burying carbon dioxide in rock, to keep it out of the atmosphere.
Proposals are being floated for a new port in Finnafjord, now a barren
landscape in the east, to capitalize on potential cargo traffic as shipping
companies in China, Russia and Arctic nations vie to open routes through the
melting ice. The fishing industry is slashing fossil fuel use with
energy-efficient ships.

Glaciers occupy over a tenth of this famously frigid island near the Arctic
Circle. Every single one is melting. So are the massive, centuries-old ice
sheets of Greenland and the polar regions. Where other countries face rising
seas, Iceland is confronting a rise in land in its southernmost regions, and
considers the changing landscape and climate a matter of national urgency.

When Europe suffered record-breaking heat in July, Iceland's capital,
Reykjavik, clocked its highest temperatures ever. Iceland's economy is on
the cusp of a recession, partly because an important export, the capelin
fish, vanished this year in search of colder waters. This week, the United
Nations warned that the world's land and water resources are being exploited
at an unprecedented rate.

"Climate change is no longer something to be joked about in Iceland or
anywhere," Gudni Jóhannesson, Iceland's president, said in an interview,
adding that most Icelanders believe human activity plays a role. "We realize
the harmful effects of global warming," he said. "We are taking
responsibility to seek practical solutions. But we can do better."

The country elected an environmentalist, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, as prime
minister in 2017 on a platform of tackling climate change. Her government is
budgeting $55 million over five years for reforestation, land conservation
and carbon-free transport projects to slash greenhouse gas emissions. More
will be spent by 2040, when Iceland expects businesses, organizations and
individuals to be removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as
they put in.

Environmental activists say that still isn't enough to make Iceland, a
wealthy nation of just 350,000 people, a model. Despite generating clean
geothermal energy and hydropower, major industries including aluminum and
ferrosilicon production also produce a third of Iceland's carbon dioxide.
Tourism, now the engine of growth after a banking collapse in 2008, has
flourished with warmer weather but added to Iceland's climate woes as planes
packing millions of visitors push per capita carbon dioxide emissions above
that of every country in Europe.

Bigger nations like Norway and Finland have cut emissions more, and over 190
other countries except the United States have pledged to combat climate
change under the Paris agreement. But with the impact in Iceland more
visible than in other nations, it is doing what it can - while trying to
turn the warming climate into an economic advantage.

"Let's look at practical solutions instead of being filled with despair,"
Mr. Jóhannesson said.

Ólafur Eggertsson, a farmer, has been anticipating how to tame the wilds of
his new environment. On a sunny day, he pointed to a sparkling glacier
sprawled thinly atop the nearby Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland's
southern rim. Eyjafjallajökull erupted spectacularly in 2010, snarling
European air traffic and raining ash over the Thorvaldseyri farm run by his
family since 1906. But even before that, the glacier had been visibly
retreating, and far faster than when his father and grandfather worked the
land.

That alarms him, he said, because glaciers keep volcanoes cool. Scientists
predict more eruptions in the coming century as the glaciers melt. Mr.
Eggertsson is working to make the farm carbon neutral to prevent more
warming, by transforming it from a mainly dairy operation to an 160-acre
estate with barley and rapeseed fields - crops that couldn't grow in the
cold climate 50 years ago.

He is converting the rapeseed to biofuel. And Mr. Eggertsson, who plans to
ramp up his 364,000-euro investment in the crop business in coming years, is
hoping that Iceland's farmers will one day grow enough barley to avoid
importing it on polluting ships and planes.

"Sometimes what I'm doing feels like a drop in the ocean," Mr. Eggertsson
said, pulling handfuls of barley from the soil. "But humans are contributing
to warming. I have no choice but to act."

Others are finding deals in the demand from companies and people eager to
offset their carbon footprint. Near Mr. Eggertsson's farm, Reynir
Kristinsson this year planted 200,000 native birch trees on 700 acres of
volcanic flatland that his nongovernmental organization, Kolvidur, leases
from the state.

More than a million trees have been purchased by Icelandic companies and
foreign ones like Ikea since 2010. Mr. Kristinsson is negotiating with
Isavia, Iceland's airport operator, in hopes of crafting a deal to plant
trees for every tourist and Icelander who flies in and out of the island,
and is bidding to lease 12,000 more acres, forecasting "exponential growth."

Some companies are just trying "to green wash" their image, Mr. Kristinsson
acknowledged. But as consumers demand transparency, businesses are more
serious about protecting the environment and know they have to spend
substantial money toward battling the changes. "If they don't show they're
acting responsibly, they will lose clients," he said.

Yet most of Iceland's volcanic terrain is deforested, and it will take
decades for newly planted trees to absorb carbon at a large scale. Trees are
certainly not a fast fix for Iceland's glaciers, which scientists say now
can no longer recover the ice they are losing.

That includes Vatnajökull, which once stretched over more than a tenth of
Iceland and now covers 8 percent of this 40,000-square mile island. Named a
Unesco World Heritage site in June, it is shrinking by a length of nearly
three football fields a year in some places.

In Höfn, Mr. Ingólfsson's business has been thwarted by the change. While
the land here has risen nearly 20 inches since the 1930s, in the last decade
alone, it has floated four inches above sea level. It is forecast to rise as
much as six feet in the coming century, according to the Icelandic
Meteorological Office.

That new land is preventing Mr. Ingólfsson from acquiring bigger-capacity
trawlers that his competitors use. HB Grandi, a Reykjavik-based rival that
is one of Iceland's largest fishing companies, has invested in enormous
super-trawlers that use less fossil fuel and allow for a larger catch. This
year, cold water capelin can't be found. But mackerel are now swimming in
the warmer currents around Iceland, and the value of the catch has risen
noticeably.

Such investment - which also translates into smaller fleets - is running
through Iceland's fishing industry, and fits a national strategy to reduce
carbon emissions that contribute to ocean acidification and harm fish. The
transformation is important and strategic: Fish account for 39 percent of
Iceland's exports.

Mr. Ingólfsson's trawlers can now move in and out only at high tide, and his
business suffers for that. Last winter, two were stuck outside the harbor
when a storm hit, he said, forcing the catch to be offloaded at another
factory on the east coast, leaving scores of workers at his Höfn plant idle.

"Unless we find a solution," he said, "things will just get worse."

Glacial melting is also expected to oversaturate watersheds in the next
century, and scientists predict that they then will dry up, forcing energy
producers to adapt. Landsvirkjun, the state-run energy company, which
generates three-quarters of Iceland's power, is building room for additional
water turbines at its dams. It is also building new capacity for wind
turbines to operate when the glaciers die.

"From a design perspective, we're taking into account what will happen in
the next 50 to 100 years," said Óli Grétar Blondal Sveinsson, the executive
vice president for research and development. "There will be no glaciers," he
said flatly.

That prospect has jolted Icelanders - and some visitors - to a realization
that they are witnessing a treasure vanish. Steinthór Arnarson, 36, quit his
job as a lawyer three years ago to open a tour business at the Fjallsárlón
lagoon, employing 20. He takes visitors on inflatable boats around
iceberg-studded waters that barely existed two decades ago.

A native of the area, he recalled the lake's being a fraction of its current
size when he was a teenager. When he returned in 2012, the Vatnajökull
outlet here had melted so much that the lagoon had grown a mile wide, and
thundering rivers nearby had shifted course.

Many of the 200 tourists who visit daily want to see Vatnajökull before it
disappears, Mr. Arnarson said.

"People are stunned by the glacier's beauty and feel like me," he said,
gazing at the 130-foot-high wall of blue ice soaring from the water.

"It's nice to see a piece of it break off," he said. "But it's really sad."
Egill Bjarnason contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/b...te-change.html