"The Arctic is an early warning for the world," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), said of a study which found the Arctic was heating twice as fast as the global average due to a build up of greenhouse gases.

Scientists say carbon dioxide released from burning oil, coal and gas in power plants and cars is the main source of global warming. Together the eight Arctic nations account for almost 40 percent of emissions.

But the United States is isolated from the other seven nations stretching into the Arctic -- Russia, Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland -- by opposing caps on emissions of the heat-trapping gases.

"Inuit hunters falling through the ice are linked to the cars we drive," Watt-Cloutier said. "Washington must act." The ICC represents 155,000 Inuit from Canada to Greenland.

Some hunters have drowned by falling through the thinning and thawing ice while tracking the seals, walrus and polar bears which some Inuit rely on for food.

"We thought (global warming) would happen hundreds of years from now, but now ... it's our children, it's us who have to deal with it," said Geir Tommy Pedersen, president of the Saami Council representing reindeer herders from Russia to Norway.

"We are already beyond the time for action," he said.

DEADLOCK

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report (ACIA), by 250 scientists and released this week in Reykjavik, also warns that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2100 in summer, driving species like polar bears toward extinction. The Arctic heats up faster than the rest of the globe because dark ground and water, once exposed, soak up far more heat than snow and ice.

Diplomats are due to meet in Reykjavik on Nov. 19 for a last-ditch session to try to break the deadlock on policy recommendations meant to be agreed at the Nov. 24 meeting of foreign ministers in the eight-nation Arctic Council.

The diplomats say the dispute is the stiffest test yet of the council, which was set up in 1996 to address Arctic issues after the Cold War and has to operate by consensus.

Washington has already rejected a draft urging all Arctic states to work hard to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, diplomatic sources said.

President Bush pulled the United States out of the United Nations' 1997 Kyoto protocol in 2001, saying it was too costly and unfairly excluded developing nations. His policies seek to curb the growth of emissions but without caps.

Scientists are privately fuming at Washington, accusing it of trying to question the science behind the ACIA report.

One clause of a draft ministerial document favored by Washington, for instance, would merely "note" the ACIA report while other nations would go further to endorse its findings by noting it "with appreciation," they said.