From Baffin Island to New Orleans

Progressive, The, Dec, 2005 by Bruce E. Johansen

SEVERAL YELLOW JACKET WASPS were sighted in Arctic Bay, a community of 700 people on the northern tip of Baffin Island at more than 73 degrees North latitude, during the summer of 2004. Noire Ikalukjuaq, the mayor of Arctic Bay, said he knew no word in the Inuit language for the insect.

In Kaktovik, Alaska, a village on the Arctic Ocean, a robin built a nest during the summer of 2003--not an unusual event in more temperate latitudes but quite a departure where, in the Inupiat language, no name exists for robins.

During the summer of 2004, hunters found half a dozen polar bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. They had tried to swim for shore after the ice had receded 400 miles. A polar bear can swim 100 miles--but not 400.

Global warming is leaving its evidentiary trail in melting ice as well as in the heating of the seas. The wrath of intensifying hurricanes and typhoons stoked by warming oceans has already devastated parts of the subtropics. The yellow jacket, the robin, the drowned polar bears, and the hurricane triplets--Katrina, Rita, and Wilma--are harbingers of an ominous future.

The Inuit can empathize with the people of New Orleans. You probably haven't seen Inuits on the evening news, but some hunters have died after falling through unseasonably thin ice. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on global warming on August 15, 2004. She said the Inuits' ancient connection to their hunting culture may disappear within her grandson's lifetime, as the melting ice makes it difficult for them to get to their traditional hunting and harvesting areas.

"My Arctic homeland is now the health barometer for the planet," she said. "We are an endangered species."

When I first met Watt-Cloutier in Iqaluit during the summer of 2001, she was just beginning to tackle global warming. Now she takes her case to international diplomatic and scientific forums. Equally at home in ornate conference halls and in a small boat hunting seals with other Inuit near Baffin Island, Watt-Cloutier leads about 155,000 Inuit who are struggling to maintain some semblance of tradition in a swiftly changing, melting, and often polluted Arctic homeland. She has the delicacy of a diplomat, the precision of a scientist, and the verve of a social activist.

In her spacious house overlooking Frobisher Bay, she serves visitors some of the best Arctic char sushi on the planet, along with an urgent message: "Protect the Arctic and you will save the planet. Use us as your early-warning system. Use the Inuit story as a vehicle to reconnect us all so that we can understand the people and the planet are one."

Climate change in the Arctic is accelerating year by year. During the summer of 2004, compared to the previous year, enough Arctic ice to blanket an area twice the size of Texas melted. The same trend continued this summer. In the past, weak-ice years often were followed by years in which ice was restored. This kind of balancing hasn't been occurring recently.

"If you look at these last few years, the loss of ice we've seen ... is rather remarkable," says Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. Scientists now talk seriously of an ice-free Arctic in the summer. The main point of debate is how soon this will happen.

In January 2004, Watt-Cloutier sent me an e-mail from Baffin Island: Frobisher Bay had just frozen over for the season at a record late date. "We are finally into very 'brrrrrr' seasonal weather, and the bay is finally freezing straight across," she wrote. "At Christmastime, the bay was still open and as a result of the floe edge being so close we had a family of polar bears come to visit the town a couple of times." The previous Christmas, rain had fallen in Iqaluit, an unprecedented event.

Two weeks before writing me, Watt-Cloutier was representing the Inuit at a U.N. conference on climate change in Milan, Italy. "Talk to hunters across the North and they will tell you the same story--the weather is increasingly unpredictable," she told the gathering. "The look and feel of the land is different. The sea-ice is changing. Hunters are having difficulty navigating and traveling safely. We have even lost experienced hunters through the ice in areas that, traditionally, were safe! ... Our elders, who instruct the young on the ways of the winter and what to expect, are at a loss."

It's about 4,000 miles from Baffin Island to New Orleans. But the same phenomenon that is threatening the Inuits' way of life may have wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast.

Hurricanes are heat engines. They live and die according to the warmth of the water over which they move. Although other factors were involved, one important reason why Katrina, Rita, and Wilma blew up so quickly into three of the six most intense hurricanes in U.S. history was the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding seas, 88 to 90 degrees at summer's peak, 2 to 4 degrees above recent averages.