Hot Ice Festival

HARBIN, China -- The hands had melted off a delicately entwined couple of ballet dancers crafted by an ice-sculpting team from Vladivostok. Eaves fashioned from packed snow drooped into icicles at the Roast Meat Fire House restaurant. Authorities banned people from approaching the ice-cube tower at Ice and Snow World because big chunks kept falling off.

The popular ice festival here -- based on a local tradition of making ice lanterns and sculpting snow that reaches back almost 1,400 years to the Tang Dynasty -- has been undercut by climbing temperatures. Heads are falling from statues and intricately sculpted ice animals are turning into shapeless blobs.

The global warming trend that a panel of U.N.-convened scientists last month called unequivocal may or may not be inextricably linked to what is happening in Harbin. It is impossible to say. But the people of Harbin blame climate change for what they say has been a pattern of rising temperatures over the past several years.

"So much melting," lamented Wang Xuhai, director and Communist Party secretary of the Harbin Ice Lantern Art Exhibition Center. "It's part of a worldwide problem."

For Harbin, a usually frigid city in northeast China about 400 miles east of the Russian border, the rise in temperatures is a direct threat to a tourist attraction that brought in 5 million visitors last year and injects millions of dollars into the local economy through tickets, hotel stays, restaurant meals and taxi rides. For China as a whole, the impact is less direct but no less threatening. Breakneck economic growth in recent years has made the country the world's second-largest producer of the greenhouse gases blamed for warming the atmosphere, putting it behind only the United States.