The first global warming refugees

STRIPPED to his shirt sleeves on a desolate polar beach, the Inupiat Eskimo hunter gazes over his Arctic world.

The midnight sun catches on the waves surrounding his island village. The town sits amid the ruins of dugouts that his ancestors chipped from the permafrost when Pharaohs were erecting pyramids in the hot sands of Egypt.

His children and their cousins play tag on a hillock where his wife’s parents and their parents are buried.

Thousands of years ago, hungry nomads chased caribou here across a now-lost land bridge from Siberia, just 100 miles away. Many scientists believe those nomads became the first Americans.

Now their descendants are about to become global warming refugees. Their village is about to be swallowed up by the sea.

"We have no room left here," Tony Weyiouanna, 43, said. "I have to think about my grandchildren. We need to move."

Weather dictates survival in the Arctic. Always it has been the fearsome cold that meant life or death. Now, native Alaskans are alarmed by a noticeable warming trend.

Average temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than 2.2C since 1971 - about the same time, coincidentally, that the first snowmobile made an appearance.

Mr Weyiouanna remembers: "It was mind-boggling to see a sled move without dogs pulling it."

Snowmobile aside, this is still a very rustic village. Its breakwater of sandbags, tires and rusting vehicles is often breached by storms. Recently, four homes tumbled into the sea as villagers huddled in the Lutheran church.

Fuel and water tanks teeter just a few strides from the brink. Another gale or two and the entire island - a half-mile at its widest, 10ft at its highest - could be swamped.

Mr Weyiouanna’s ancestors simply would have loaded their dogsleds and mushed inland. But in modern times, moving a town means Shishmaref’s 600 residents must vote.

It will cost at least 70 million, the US Army Corps of Engineers says.

It’s a staggering sum even by Shishmaref standards, where a light bulb costs 7 at the Nayokpuk Trading Company.

Residents believe the government will pay, although state and federal officials say no relocation fund exists. It is an upheaval many Americans might face in coming decades.

In June, the Bush administration submitted a report to the United Nations acknowledging for the first time that climate change is real and unavoidable. The administration recommends adapting.

Still unresolved is whether rising temperatures are caused by smokestacks and traffic jams pumping more heat-trapping emissions into the atmosphere. Or, natural variations in the complex relationship between the oceans, the atmosphere and the sun.

The army has a 2.1 million plan to rebuild the island’s leading edge with bargeloads of rock. But the money can only be used for erosion control, not relocation. The Corps offers to design a breakwater that is more effective.

The other option is to move.

Three village women open the bingo hall and stretch the Stars and Stripes across the wall. They unfold two portable, metal voting booths and tack a sample ballot to the door.

It reads: "Do you want to relocate the Community of Shishmaref?"

To vote: "Mark an X to the right of Yes or No."

No dangling chads here.

An hour ticks by. Winfred Obruk, who runs the village generator, wanders in. He drops his ballot into the locked box, tapping the lid twice for emphasis.

At 63, he says he is ready to abandon the only home he’s known. "There’s nothing else we can do," Mr Obruk said. "The storms make you feel kind of small. It feels odd to move, but that’s nature."

For a valid referendum, Shishmaref needs 40 per cent of its 341 registered voters to cast ballots.

The village’s median age is about 20. Most youths stay up late hunting, playing video games or cruising the beach on 4x4s. By mid-afternoon, some were persuaded to vote. They want to go anywhere, it seems.

"I went to school on the mainland," said Leona Goodhope, 19. "And when I came back, my house was gone. They moved it to the other side of the village, or it would’ve fallen in."

At 8pm, the election judges put down their copy of the National Enquirer to hand-count the ballots. Outside, a crowd gathered for bingo.

The vote: 161-20. Shishmaref will move. Nobody cheered. The island still could be used as a summer fishing camp, said Mr Weyiouanna. He will become a bureaucrat and co-ordinate relocation planning.

"We will be putting money into the move," he said, "and not pouring it into the sea."

The favoured spot for this 70 million move?

Five miles east.