WP: Inuit See Signs in Arctic Thaw ("The world is slowly disintegrating,")

[Pirate Smile]

Inuit See Signs in Arctic Thaw
Warm Winters Alarm Self-Described Sentries for Planet

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; Page A01

PANGNIRTUNG, Canada -- Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.

Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.


Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, Inuit villagers say this winter has been the worst in a series of warm winters, signaling the growing impact of global warming there.

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists believe will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101722.html

There is also a series of photos on the effects of global warming on the village and area.

[Swede]

1. It doesn't look good,does it?

It seems to be speeding up.

[Pirate Smile]

4. It is horrifying.

In this month's issue of the journal Science, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers said the Bering Sea was warming so much it was experiencing "a change from arctic to subarctic conditions." Gray whales are heading north and walruses are starving, adrift on ice floes in water too deep for feeding. Warmer-water fish such as pollock and salmon are coming in, the researchers reported.

Off the coast of Nova Scotia, ice on Northumberland Strait was so thin and unstable this winter that thousands of gray seals crawled on unaccustomed islands to give birth. Storms and high tides washed 1,500 newborn seal pups out to sea, said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal expert for the federal fisheries department in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

"We are seeing dramatic changes in the weather systems," Conway said. "To be honest, we don't really understand what are the potential impacts. If you look back in history, there have been warming periods that have gotten back to normal. But we don't know if that will happen this time."

Metuq, the hunter, fears the worst. "The world is slowly disintegrating," he said, inside his heated house in Pangnirtung, a community of 1,200 perched on a dramatic union of mountain and fjord on Baffin Island. Seal skins stretched on canvas dried outside his home. The town remained treacherous. Rain in February had frozen solid, and there had been almost no snow to cover it.

[Daphne08]

6. Exponentially speeding up.

I really worry for my children and grandchildren.

[Delphinus]

21. Hi Daphne,

I worry about mine too - but I'm beginning to worry about myself as well! The way these changes are happening, I think everyone alive at this time is going to feel it.

[Lochloosa]

2. It's the "end times"

fundies will be dancing in the streets...

[Pirate Smile]

3. more

In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."

In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform."

Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.

In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.

:(

[BikeWriter]

5. This is the murder of a world's inhabitants.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Next Harbinger: "Tropical" Cyclones above 60N

I know, the Coriolis force up there is a lot different than it is in the Tropics, but there have already been well-documented observations of smallish "Tornadocanes" up north. I think that the appearance of the first "Polar Cyclone" will be a major history-making event.

With accelerated global warming, the poles will warm up disproporationately -- a lot of warm air will migrate pole-ward where it will recondense and become dense fog or fall as rain most of the year; even, eventually, in the Winter.

By increasing the fresh water in the North Atlantic, thermohaline heat transfer will stop, the poles will become cold again, and all that water -- and heat energy -- will provide the fuel for an epoch of reglaciation. Which means good skiing weather -- possibly as far south as Rome, Istanbul, Tokyo, and the Carolinas!

--p!

[AlienGirl]

8. We're in for some bumpy weather, too

The transition from current climate to ice age isn't going to be pretty.

Tucker

[Neil Lisst]

9. that scenario of all the animals fleeing in the winter made me think

of that movie from the Stephen King book Dreamcatcher.

As I read the OP, I couldn't help but think "OMG! The ass worms from outer space are back here!"

-------------------------------------------------

More particularly on topic, I like to tell people "we can argue about causation, but let's talk about the REALITY of global warming."

[roguevalley]

10. I've seen more robins lately than ever. The weather came so

late in Fairbanks last year that song birds like robins that go early stayed too late and froze to death.

[Blue_Forney05]

11. Yeah something is up with the weather,

I recall just this past January or early February the National Weather Service issued TORNADO watches as far north as Michigan. That seems unhead of near the dead of winter.

[donsu]

12. tick, tick, tick, we have to start saving the world by world wide

stopping driving cars one day a wk. (probably Wednesday)

you think I'm nuts? can't be done? won't help?

so what first step, world wide, would you suggest.

doing nothing or doing it slowly won't stop the coming chaos.

[donkeyotay]

13. The rightwingernutjobs, the rushes and foxes drowned out the left

Talked over everyone who wouldn't shut up and go along with their stoopid Contract On America. They shouted down the eco-Nazis and tree-huggers. The made sure a man who wrote a book called "Earth in the Balance" was marginalized as unfit to lead. Well, I'm sure Al Gore will meet his maker with a clear conscience. There are a lot of people who can't say the same.

[Massachusetts]

14. The Great Cleaning of the planet Earth

Will be done by "Mother Nature", and NO ONE else. The "cats already out of the bag", "to late to close the barn door".


Humans, the only species that unwittingly tries to make itself extinct.

[Justice]

15. Is it already too late to reverse course?

That is the real question. If today we stopped using all fossil fuels completely, would even that be enough to reverse the warming trends? Or have we already passed the point at which we can reverse it. Because the aftereffects of fossil fuels remain in the atmosphere for so long, we really don't know if the warming conditions today are caused by our use of these fuels 80 years ago, or last year.

Does anyone smarter than I about these things have any info?

[Dead_Parrot]

17. Yes and no

If we stopped today, the CO2 would still be in the atmosphere and would continue to wreak havoc - melting glaciers, permafrost and a lot of icecaps. If we carry on, we'll add enough to melt the remaining icecaps, and the oceanic methane hydrates.

The CO2 we've put out so far will take ~30 million years to be re-absorbed by plant life. Not good.

On your other point, the effects are caused as soon as the gas is released. what is happening now is caused by the sum of all the CO2 from 200 years ago to 2 seconds ago. And there will be more tomorrow.

[Amonester]

24. And:

"The news of the last year hasn't been good. Last week a research group in Greenland announced that the glacial ice sheets that cover that arctic nation are melting and slipping into the ocean at a rate much faster than scientists had predicted even a year ago ... same news from Antarctica.

Then there was the congressional testimony from James Hansen at NASA. When I first started reporting on global warming 15 years ago, Hansen was arguing that sea levels would rise 3 to 5 feet over a few hundred years. That was bad news for the Everglades and Bangladesh and Cape Cod, but there was time to do something about it.

Now Hansen is worried that sea levels will rise 80 feet! Eighty feet takes out the east coast. Zimmerman's descriptions of what is going on are laced with the word "exponential."

And then there was Katrina. All that glacial runoff is dumping fresh water into the North Atlantic, disrupting ocean currents that act like a giant pump, that shuttles heat from the equator to the northern hemisphere ... warmer ocean temperatures mean more intense hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico."

"Pat Zimmerman has 30 years of hard science under his belt.":
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/02/26/news/opinion/opin820.txt

[meganmonkey]

16. I can't even imagine what that would be like

to watch your climate and eco-system change in fast forward. For a people who are so entwined with the land, or rather the ice, to literally witness its reshaping.

Down here, with our climate control and our seperation from our most vital needs like food and water and air, we may notice that the winters are milder or the weather more erratic, but most of us aren't connected enough to really see the differences.

This is so sad, so devestating, so heartbreaking :cry:

[Lisa]

18. people have gone through the ice, or been lost in storms ...

In recent years, areas that were safe are now no longer okay for travel. It literally has become a matter of life or death. Even experienced hunters are in danger when they're out on the ice. A friend who lives in the NWT told me that people in his town are saying they can't remember conditions this warm, in living memory.

[lovuian]

19. I think there is more here than meets the eye... Maybe

the North Pole isn't going to be the North Pole anymore

I've said this before Cayce predicted a Polar shift this could be the wake up call and the interesting part of this is whats buried under all that ice??? There was a time on Earth that the poles were not sheets of frozen ice... looks like we are heading back to those times...

New Orleans was a wake up call to cities below sea level... they are going to be buried under the sea... Sira Lanka is another ...

Heated water causes humidity... which the North Pole hasn't experienced but with the rain falling looks like it is getting a taste of...

I'm very dissappointed in our scientists they need to step up here and give a Bigger RED ALERT!!!

[Delphinus]

20. Just one more nail in the coffin.

Everyone with a brain sees the effects of global climate change. Most see it happening in their own backyards, just like the Inuit. Still, the boy king ignores it. "Party on!" he says.

[Amonester]

22. Inuit critical of McCartney's campaign (Called McCartney "Silly")

(Story not "directly" related, or maybe not: Inuit need to "survive" somehow. But sure won't if the world boycott their "last" resort...)

Inuit critical of McCartney's campaign

IQALUIT, Nunavut (CP) - Two Inuit leaders say pop star Paul McCartney's recent campaign against the Canadian seal hunt is silly and disrespectful to wildlife.

...

Watt-Cloutier called McCartney "silly" for lying down on sea ice and playing with seal pups.

She says seals may look like cute pets, but should be viewed as wild animals that are hunted by humans.

"Inuit hunt seals for food and clothing, and we market internationally the by-products of our sustainable hunt. This is why attacking the commercial harvest on Canada's East Coast and attempting to destroy the market for seal products also affects the Inuit seal hunt in the Arctic," she said.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2006/03/13/1486108-cp.html



I agree with them.

[Minstrel Boy]

23. I agree too

If we mean to save the Earth we need to pick the right battles. Listening to those much more in tune with it than us may be a good way to start.