Therefore, the climate tears first come in the Swedish mountains

For a week, me and photographer Marco Nilson and climate researchers are out in nature. We go up on the calcareous mountain where microscopic small mountain flowers bloom, out on the mountain lakes, out into the marshes where the cloudberry glows golden yellow. It's like being on the roof of the world. The view is breathtaking, sweeping, the look and the mind can walk many miles. Everywhere, small mountain lakes glitter like unobtrusive eyes toward space.

Climate scientists tell us about the research that has been going on for over 100 years. And how they can see what is happening in an increasingly warmer mountain world. Here, the heating goes twice as fast as in other parts of the world.

The spring forest climbs out on the calcareous mountain. In 100 years, the tree line has moved 230 meters up the Nuoljafjället above Abisko science station. Before the turn of the century, Kungsleden, the long hiking trail that passes through unblemished mountain massifs, will mostly go through snow forests. Those who wander will have to fight mosquitoes and flies.

Already we see how the bushes move fastest upwards, like a vanguard. Behind the knowledge, the mountain birches march and behind them coniferous trees. We learn that Abisko is no longer counted as an Arctic climate zone but is the same zone as the coniferous forest. The definition of Arctic climate is that it should be an average temperature below zero degrees. But since 1989, Abisko has had warm winters. It's raining more.

Mountain smiles, mountain veronica and other Arctic flowers will disappear in the shade of the spring forest. Instead, the coniferous plants move north. I smell an insignificant little mountain plant that climate scientist Keith Larsen points out, it smells of vanilla.

There is also a dramatic change under the water surface. The char is the world's northernmost food fish. It thrives best in cold mountain lakes but now it struggles to reproduce. When we row out on a lake, the researcher measures that the lake holds almost 15 degrees. The roasting does not want more than 11 degrees.

It may sound a bit with only a few degrees difference but for a sensitive fish there is a big difference. In addition, it has got a new enemy. As the mountain lakes are heated, the pike have begun to establish themselves in mountain lakes. It is a much better hunter than the char and eats up both the juvenile and the char. In a lake east of Abisko that the researchers intensively studied, it took only two years for the pike to knock out the char.

Whatever I ask, I get factual and dry facts. "Well, we expect that the char can be eliminated in 73 percent of all mountain lakes".

“Yes, the permafrost also releases here, since 2005 the peat that was previously frozen but which has now thawed has increased by 25 percent. You breathe in methane gas right now ”.

I get to dig through the thawed permafrost, through thinning plant parts that have been frozen for thousands of years but are now wet. Finally, I can put my hand on the permafrost, it's the ice-cold skin of the ant. As it slowly descends further and further down as the marsh collapses and turns into wetland.

We interview and film, chant and carry, in the rain and sunshine and we make a report that will go in Aktuellt. Both Marco Nilson and I have traveled throughout much of the world and together have done climate reports on how an increasingly hot world is affecting people and nature.

No one will die due to climate change in Abisko, it's not like in Monrovia's slums in Liberia where people's simple shed crashes into the sea due to sea level rises or in Kenya where farmers are forced to leave after many years of drought and misery.

Abisko is an ancient landscape where ancient Sami and reindeer migratory paths run like thin veins, along with jokes and streams and glaciers, it is a timeless landscape, grinded by the ice and snow and winds until it became just as sweeping, billowing and strangely friendly. even though it is so respectful. Seemingly unchangeable. Until now.

Now the forest will take over - and there will be brand new horizons. Because even though countries would crush fossil fuels tomorrow, climate change will continue for longer than due to all the carbon dioxide that has already accumulated in the atmosphere.

There are many values ​​that are about to be lost, at the top of the high north. For Sami, fishermen, hikers, bird watchers and flower lovers.

Exactly what I find difficult to put into words and certainly it is different for me than for you.

Maybe that's why the tears come. There is now one word for this - climate change.