March 10, 2018
By Sophie Hares

Playa Del Carmen, Mexico  - Icelanders (click here) have long joked that global warming was something people on the chilly Nordic island could look forward to, but as ice caps and glaciers melt at record speeds, that gag is wearing thin, according to the country’s president.

Warming oceans around the North Pole are harming biodiversity and fish stocks, and causing acidification in the world’s northern regions, forcing countries like Iceland to adapt to a new reality, said President Gudni Johannesson.

“The common joke in Iceland is to say that on this cold and windy, rain-swept island, global warming is something we should cheer for - but it’s no longer funny,” Johannesson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

“Climate change affects us all on this globe, but you can see the effects in particular in the northern regions - the ice cap around the North Pole is melting at record rates, the oceans there are getting warmer,” he said....

...Changing patterns of fish migration will make it essential to reach deals with neighboring nations over fish catches, said the president, a former academic who has written about Iceland’s “cod wars”....