[1770] in peace2
Global Climate Change
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix AuYeung)
Thu May 30 12:08:51 2002
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From: "Felix AuYeung" <auyeung@cbpp.org>
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To: "save-news@mit.edu" <save-news@mit.edu>,
"peace-announce@mit.edu" <peace-announce@mit.edu>
Cc: "Heather Fuller" <fuller@cbpp.org>, "Heidi Goldberg" <goldberg@cbpp.org>,
"edrake@alum.mit.edu" <edrake@alum.mit.edu>
Date: 30 May 2002 12:06:00 -0400
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As their world melts underfoot, the Inuit detect ominous changes
DeNeen L. Brown
The Washington Post
Thursday, May 30, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/59452.html
IQALUIT, Canada 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.
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Inuit elders and hunters who depend on the land say they are disturbed by what those changes are bringing with them: 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.
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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.
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Audlakiak, who grew up in an igloo, says there are more signs that 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."
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There is increasing evidence that the Arctic, this desert of snow, ice and bitterly 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.
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"The Inuit always observed the sun and astrology for direction and for weather," Jayko Pitseolak, an Inuit elder here, said through an interpreter. They were taught "that one day the world will change, and it has."
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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.
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For years, the wisdom of Inuit hunters and elders about climate in the Arctic, known as "traditional knowledge," was largely disregarded.
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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.
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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.
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In 1997, the Canadian government mandated that government agencies incorporate traditional knowledge into land-use decisions and consult aboriginal people about the environment.
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"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.
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"If you go back 100 years or 200 years ago, European forefathers thought they, the InuitŠ 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.
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"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."
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During the past 40 years, average temperatures in Canada's Western Arctic have risen by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) 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.
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"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."
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Some scientists predict a rise in sea levels leading to devastating floods, thinning ice and perhaps even an ice-free Arctic within 50 years.
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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."
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For the Inuit, the changes in climate pose an immediate danger to a way of life. They cannot read the weather in the way that they used to.
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"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 millennia 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 ancestors of the Inuit 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.
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They adapted to the 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.
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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.
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"In spring, Inuit expect bad weather when northbound geese reverse direction," the report said. An echo traveling for miles means poor weather is coming. Cold is 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, and 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.
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"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."
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The sustainable development institute produced a videotape of observations by Inuit hunters that was recently shown as evidence of climate change at a conference in The Hague.
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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.
