Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press 4 Jun 09;
PANGNIRTUNG, Nunavut – The fish changed colour. New bird species were spotted. Two bridges were wiped out by a once-in-a-lifetime flood that forced villagers to dump sewage into their pristine waters.
The locals say strange things happened last year in this snow-peaked, sapphire-watered hamlet by the Arctic circle.
And they have a message for city-dwellers who might normally be indifferent to the bizarre weather in an Inuit village 1,000 kilometres north of Labrador: This is what climate change looks like.
"Climate change is real," says Ron Mongeau, the town manager of Pangnirtung, a postcard-pretty spot girded by mountains and glacial fjords.
"It's not happening tomorrow or next week. It's happening here and it's affecting the life of everybody in the Arctic – every day."
Climate scientists describe the Arctic as Ground Zero for rising global temperatures, with climate change being felt earlier and more dramatically here than most of the planet.
The most severe example came a year ago, on June 8. Floods knocked out two bridges that separated the community from its garbage dump, sewage-treatment plant, and water station.
Locals were forced to pump their waste into the sea for several days as they jury-rigged a dirt-and-rock replacement bridge.
The town declared a 30-day state of emergency and the federal government later covered the lion's share of an $8 million project that built a replacement bridge last October.
Mongeau says a torrent of meltwater cascaded off the surrounding mountains in an unusually mild spring. He says it eroded the permafrost base of the bridges and destroyed them both.
"We literally had a wall of water – between 12 to 15 feet high – coming down that river," Mongeau said.
"It's unprecedented in the history of this community. The first thing we did is talk to the elders. Nobody has any experience with any event anywhere close to the (water) level that we saw."
Local leaders described similar phenomena last week to the visiting Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean: robins and bluejays spotted for the first time in the area; an unprecedented abundance of smelt in Cumberland Sound; less ice cover; char, caribou and polar bears migrating at different times, to different places.
The town's cherished char also look strange, Mongeau said. The prized fish is comparable to salmon or trout in taste, but with darker flesh.
"Pang is known for really, really red char – the best char in the Arctic," Mongeau said.
"The char is really red because the char eat shrimp. Last summer, the char began to eat capelin and we were getting pale-fleshed char – white, pink, and not red."
Climate scientists say the occurrences up on Baffin Island are unsurprising.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects temperature changes of 5 degrees or more in the Arctic this century – roughly double the expected rate in the rest of North America.
It says sea levels had already risen by an average rate of 3.1 millimetres a year from 1993 to 2003.
Records from Environment Canada already indicate a warming trend in Pangnirtung.
Statistics from the government weather office say the average annual temperature has been 1.4 degrees warmer this decade than in the late 1990s. In five consecutive recorded years, summer temperatures passed 22 degrees – which never happened between 1996 and 2000.
The department was asked to provide statistics for the last decade but, lacking data for Pangnirtung in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008, it offered figures for nine of 11 years starting in 1996.
This winter, though, was a typical cold one, residents say.
One climate scientist says warming will be two or three times greater in the Arctic than elsewhere on the planet because of a phenomenon called, "feedback."
"It's really straightforward physics," said John Stone, a professor at the University of Ottawa.
"The ice melts. The ice is a white, reflective surface. As it melts, you get open sea water. And open sea water is a dark, absorbent surface. As it gets warmer, the ice melts more, and it goes around in circles."
In southern Canada, he says the impact will be felt in a variety of ways: longer growing seasons; less snow in the Rockies; less fresh water on the Prairies; lower water levels in the Great Lakes; rising sea levels; more extreme floods and heat waves.
Forests are already being stripped by pine beetles, tree-eating parasites that thrive in conditions.
Not all changes will be bad. A longer growing season, for instance, could actually be a good thing for the wine-makers of southern Ontario.
The problem, Stone says, is the unpredictability and the potential for it to play havoc with people's lives.
"We might see new crops in Canada. But is there going to be enough water for them?" Stone says.
"Will insects be pollinating the fruit trees? And if you're running a ski slope, you're not too happy. Same thing if you're in a cottage vulnerable to mud slides.
"Your heating bill might go down in the winter – but your cooling bill would go up in the summer. "
One Inuit leader says he's managing to adapt so far. Peter Kilabuk, a former member of the territorial legislature, says he's hunting and fishing as successfully as always.
He's just doing it differently.
The char follow the shoreline once the ice breaks up – which used to happen in July, but has been occurring as early as May in recent years. Kilabuk follows the char.
Seal pups are being forced to leave their dens earlier in the year – raising fears among hunters that they may end up stunted.
Caribou arrive near town later in the year, their traditional migration patterns disrupted by reduced ice cover. The polar bears are doing the same, because they follow the caribou.
Kilabuk's hunting skills had helped him deal with those changes. But the collapsed bridges came as a shock.
"Nobody had seen nothing of this magnitude," said Kilabuk, who sat in the legislature for a decade.
"People were surprised. But at the same time, it confirmed what they had started seeing in the last 20 years."
Climate scientists say there are plenty of reasons to pay close attention to the Arctic – and not just because it serves as an early-warning system for climate change.
It's also because the more the permafrost melts, the more tonnes of trapped methane gases will be released into the atmosphere, with further consequences for the rest of the planet.
Stone says the Arctic is already warning us.
"We are running out of time," he says.
"The changes we had anticipated are occurring faster and faster than we anticipated. The longer we delay (action), the more expensive and difficult it's going to become to address this."
