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| Peter Paneak, Clyde River, Nunavut. |
© Shari Gearheard, Nunavut
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In the Arctic, Inuit people have been noticing the signs of global warming for years
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As a child, Shari Fox Gearheard used to dig snow caves around her house in Ontario (Canada), crawl inside and fall asleep, “because it was so peaceful”. A couple of decades later, now a postdoctoral researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) based at Harvard University, she lives with the Inuit people of Clyde River, Nunavut, on the eastern shores of Baffi n Island (Canada). In line with the work of UNESCO’s LINKS and MOST programmes that document and promote indigenous knowledge, she is recording the Inuit’s observations of climate change.
According to one of the elders Gearheard has interviewed, the weather has become uggianaqtuq, which, roughly translated, means ‘like a familiar friend behaving strangely’. About 40 or 50 years ago, a snow storm would last for four or fi ve days. On the sixth or seventh day the weather would improve, and remain good for the rest of the season. Nowadays the storms come suddenly with no warning, and more oft en. Th is means it is hard for Inuit to know when it is safe to set off on long hunting trips. “Some people from my community lost their lives because they got stranded in a storm that happened unexpectedly,” says Norman Attungala, an elder in Baker Lake, several hundred kilometres inland.
Wind patterns have also changed, adding a new danger to hunting trips. “Th e wind is packing the snow too hard to build igloos,” Gearheard explains, “making it impossible to build a shelter and wait out unexpected bad weather.” Meanwhile, the motorised skidoos that most hunters now use are less reliable than traditional dog sleds. “Dogs always knew how to get back to their home camp, even during a storm or at night,” says Th omas Qaqimat from Baker Lake.
For Gearheard, the Inuit observations can complement scientific knowledge and vice versa. “As remote sensing, climate models and weather models move to finer scales, Inuit should be partners with scientists, because they can provide ‘ground truth’ to test remote fi ndings.” But, she says, the two cannot always be mapped directly onto one another. “In science,” she says, “weather is separated into temperature, pressure, wind, snow depth, and so on. For the Inuit it is a complex whole.”
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It is also instructive when science and local observations don’t match. For the Inuit, Gearheard notes, aniuvat – snow patches that never melt – have “always” been there. But scientifi c studies of lichen on rocks show that once upon a time, further back in history than Inuit memory goes, the snow was not there. So the melting aniuvat “is not necessarily a sign of global warming, but of the environment going back to normal.” Th e Inuit fi nd this interesting, she adds.
Th e Inuit may not know that the temperature of permafrost has risen by two degrees over the past decades (see box), but they do see their rivers and lakes drying up, as the no longer frozen ground becomes porous, while roads buckle and houses and trees collapse or lean over at bizarre angles. Meanwhile, in Baker Lake, an island to which locals used to canoe in summer can now be reached on foot.
Indigenous peoples from the region are now getting together to pool their experiences, as in the exchange project between the Inuit of Clyde River and Iñupiat of Barrow (Alaska). And, through the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), they have even formed a pressure group to sue the United States, which they accuse of destroying their way of life by polluting, while being unwilling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Kyoto Protocol.
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Average temperatures have risen in the Arctic over the past few decades at twice the rate of the rest of the world, according to a massive 1,400-page analysis put together by over 250 scientists. Snow cover has shrunk by 10% over the past 30 years, and is expected to decline by a further 10 to 20% by 2070. Sea ice – which, to all intents and purposes is ‘land’ for the Inuit, polar bears and walrus – has reduced 5% - 10% in extent and 10 - 15% in thickness, says the report, and is expected to decline 10 - 50% by 2100.
One of the reasons the rate of change is faster in polar areas is that, as the snow cover disappears, it exposes bare black rock, which radiates more heat, rather than refl ecting it. The report points the fi nger at human activity outside the region – the emission of greenhouse gases in industrialised countries.
The warming of the Arctic may threaten the traditional way of life of the region’s 400,000 indigenous people (in eight nations), drive the polar bear extinct, and switch off ocean currents that warm Europe. Yet it could also bring benefi ts, says the report, at least in the short term. As permafrost melts, forests become viable further north – a potential source of new revenue and employment, and also a ‘sink’ to absorb carbon dioxide. Freshwater fi sh and berries may become more abundant, while new opportunities for agriculture appear. Meanwhile, new shipping lanes could open, gas and oil fi elds could become exposed for drilling, and new fi shing grounds appear as migration patterns change.
But, warns the report, the knock-on eff ects of such changes are unpredictable, and not limited to the Arctic. As ecosystems get shaken up, new forms of disease could emerge, while sea level from melting snow and permafrost could swamp low–lying coastal areas from Bangladesh to Florida.
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