[A-List] Destructive creation: Climate change in Arctic

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

washingtonpost.com
Signs of Thaw in a Desert of Snow
Scientists Begin to Heed Inuit Warnings of Climate Change in
Arctic

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 28, 2002; Page A01


IQALUIT, Nunavut -- And so it has come to be, the elders say, a
time when icebergs are melting, tides have changed, polar bears
have thinned and there is no meaning left in a ring around the
moon. Scattered clouds blowing in a wind no longer speak to
elders and hunters. Daily weather markers are becoming less
predictable in the fragile Arctic as its climate changes.

Inuit elders and hunters who depend on the land say they are
disturbed by what they are seeing swept in by the changes:
deformed fish, caribou with bad livers, baby seals left by their
mothers to starve. Just the other year, a robin appeared where no
robin had been seen before. There is no word for robin in
Inuktitut, the Inuit language.

Elders say they are afraid of the changes. "When I was a child,
if there was a ring around the sun or the moon, it meant the
change of weather in the next few days. Better or worse, it was
nature's message for the hunter," said David Audlakiak.

He is walking on a thick layer of ice frozen over the arctic
waters. The hills behind him should still be covered in snow, but
are mostly bare. As this winter ends, he says that it has been
warmer than winters past. The bald spots showing the tundra are
disturbing.

Audlakiak, who grew up in an igloo, says there are more signs the
land, sea and animals are in turmoil. "The weather pattern has
changed so much from my childhood. We have more accidents because
the ice conditions change. We are living in one of the most
unforgiving climates in the world. It is becoming more dangerous
every year."

There is increasing evidence that the Arctic, this desert of
snow, ice and killing cold wind, one of the most hostile and
fragile places on Earth, is thawing. Glaciers are receding.
Coastlines are eroding. Lakes are disappearing. Fall freezes are
coming later. The winters are not as cold. Mosquitoes and beetles
never seen before are appearing. The sky seems to be clapping as
thunderstorms roll where it was once too cold for them.

"The Inuit always observed the sun and astrology for direction
and for weather," Jayko Pitseolak, an Inuit elder here, said
through an interpreter. "We were taught . . . that one day the
world will change, and it has."

While scientists debate the causes of climate change and
politicians debate whether to ratify the Kyoto accord to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions that many scientists believe cause
global warming, the Inuit who live in Canada's Far North say they
are watching their world melt before their eyes.

For years, the wisdom of Inuit hunters and elders about climate
in the Arctic, known as "traditional knowledge," was largely
disregarded. Sometimes it was called merely anecdotal and
unreliable by scientists who traveled here with their recording
devices, measuring sticks and theories about the North. Some of
them viewed the Inuit as ignorant about a land in which they and
their ancestors have lived for thousands of years.

But in the last few years, scientists have begun paying more
attention to what the Inuit are documenting, and even
incorporating it into their research about changes in the
climate, the prevailing weather conditions of a given area. In
1997, the Canadian government mandated that government agencies
incorporate traditional knowledge into land-use decisions and
consult aboriginal people about the environment.

"Traditional knowledge is very useful," said George Hobson, a
geophysicist and retired director of the Polar Continental Shelf
Project, a Canadian government agency that provided logistical
support to government and university scientists researching the
Arctic.

"If you go back 100 years or 200 years ago, European forefathers
thought they [the Inuit] were savages. 'What did they know?' they
said. But there was traditional knowledge and people were not
tapping it. It was just waiting to be passed down. Some people
might say, 'I'm a university prof, what does that fellow know? He
doesn't have grade six.' But when they have grade six and they
have lived out on the land, they had one hell of a lot of
knowledge about land and animals. They may not have had the same
education, but they were not stupid. You could not be stupid and
survive in that kind of climate."

During the past 40 years, average temperatures in Canada's
Western Arctic have risen by 1.5 degrees Celsius, to -13.5
degrees Celsius, according to Environment Canada, the
government's environment ministry. Temperatures have also risen
in the Central Arctic, but not in the Eastern Arctic, where some
scientists suggest there may even be a modest cooling. "Global
warming doesn't mean all areas will warm," said Tom Agnew, a
senior meteorologist with the Meteorological Service of Canada.
"Some will warm and some will cool a bit." Some scientists
predict a rise in sea levels leading to devastating floods,
thinning ice and perhaps even an ice-free Arctic within 50 years.

Terry Fenge, former research director of the Inuit Circumpolar
Conference of Canada, said that in the last decade scientists
have acknowledged the Arctic as a barometer of climate change and
the effects of pollution. "This is one of those very important
areas where traditional knowledge and traditional science is
coming together with Western science and they are both in essence
saying the same thing: Climate change is not a future event. It
is happening now."

For the Inuit, climate change poses an immediate danger to a way
of life. They cannot read the weather the way they used to.

"When you think in terms of the long-term negative effects of
climate change, this could be the beginning of the end of the way
of life for a whole people," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president
of the circumpolar conference. "Our cultural heritage is at stake
here. We are an adaptable people. We have over the millennium
been able to adapt to incredible circumstances. But I think
adaptability has its limits. If the ice is not forming, how else
does one adapt to seasons that are not as they used to be when
the whole environment is changing underneath our feet,
literally?"

For thousands of years, the Inuit have lived by rules that
require them to respect animals and the land. The Inuit's
ancestors are believed to have arrived in the Western Arctic
about 10,000 years ago, migrating from Siberia across what was
then the Bering land bridge.

They adapted to the cold climate as they hunted seals, walruses
and beluga whales. It was a time "when people and animals could
speak together and when spirits of the sea and the land
controlled the fate of both the animal and human world,"
according to a report by the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, a
nonprofit Inuit organization.

Hunters would forecast the weather by looking for signs in the
way animals behaved or by looking at clouds, stars, wind, snow
and water currents. Some Inuit knew to expect bad weather if a
caribou or seal shook its head, according to a report on
traditional knowledge by the International Institute for
Sustainable Development, a research institute in Winnipeg.

"In spring, Inuit expect bad weather when northbound geese
reverse direction," the report said. When an echo traveled for
miles, poor weather. Cold was expected when "the woodpecker's
beak moves fast."

Siloah Atagoojuk, who lives here in Iqaluit, has lines on her
face, but she does not want to pretend she knows more than anyone
else -- nor does she try to assign blame. She is simply worried.
Her world is not as it used to be and her people may not be able
to adapt to it. "There is sickness in the animals," Atagoojuk
says. "The flesh doesn't look good. You have to cook it extra.
Even the caribou are not healthy, as fat -- same for marine
animals. We have known all along since we were little kids there
will be a time when the Earth will be destroyed and destroy
itself. Seems this is happening."

The sustainable development institute produced a videotape of
observations by Inuit hunters and elders that was recently shown
as evidence of climate change at a conference in The Hague. In
the video, hunters and elders speak about melting permafrost,
shrinking glaciers and a stronger sun. There is concern that the
community of Tuktuujaqtuuq, in the Western Arctic, could slide
into the sea.

"Tuktuujaqtuuq is very low and very vulnerable," said Rick
Armstrong, manager of scientific support services for the Nunavut
Research Institute. He said ice acts as a buffer between land and
ocean and protects coastal communities from storms and erosion.
"With the warming, there is a concern they may need to move
buildings in Tuktuujaqtuuq."

The Inuit, many of whom toggle between the Stone Age and the
Space Age, building igloos and surfing the Web, have created a
Web site on which elders and hunters post their observations.
"About two years ago, when we were corralling reindeer . . . the
north wind started blowing and there were dead birds and dead
hair seals and dolphins. All kinds of sea birds that were washed
ashore," said Herman Toolie of the community of Savoonga. "And
dog salmon that were never touched by sea gull or foxes. They
were never eaten. We were wondering why. . . . One of the elders
said that these things never used to happen. It is something new
to them."

Near the sea's edge, the ice floes are melting. The hunters are
heading out on snowmobiles. Natsiapik Naglingniq knows they are
headed into danger, unable to rely on the weather or the ice,
which is opening and closing, teasing those who walk across it.
Just the other day, a hunter went on the local radio to warn that
the ice seems to be melting from the bottom.

Naglingniq says that when she was just a girl, living in an
igloo, her job was to take out the garbage and, as she did, take
notice of the world.

"When I would come back in, my parents would ask, 'So what was
the weather like out there?' I would explain. By explaining the
weather to my parents, I learned to be able to tell what the next
day's weather would be like."

In the dark, she would watch for a ring around the moon. "That
would mean that it will be a bad day tomorrow." But if she saw a
clear night and the stars getting closer and farther, as if they
were getting bigger and smaller at the same time, "it meant it
will be windy the next day."

In the past, Naglingniq says, there were good days and bad days,
but not the same as the weather today, changing so rapidly that
people cannot make sense of the ring around the moon or the
burning circle around the sun.

"We were told by the elders at the time there will be a change,"
Naglingniq says. Beneath her fur-trimmed parka, her eyes are
turning a milky gray, but she says she can see when something is
amiss. Last summer, the elders saw insects they had never seen
before. "The insects are larger," she says. "It has lots of legs
and it is quite big. As soon as it observes humans, it curls up
in a ball. It's strange." She cannot say its name. There is no
word in Inuktitut for this insect.

Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18506-2002May27.ht
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