Harper To Visit Arctic As Bears Swim For It & Study Shows 60% More CO2 Locked In Soils Than Thought

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With an election-primed Stephen Harper poised to touch down Tuesday in Inuvik to begin a three-day visit to northern Canada, scientists tracking the ongoing Arctic meltdown are sounding new warnings about the state of the polar environment in an era of evidently rapid climate change.

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That news follows a series of reports in recent days highlighting the impact of rising temperatures across the world's northern latitudes - a newly discovered crack threatening a Greenland glacier; eroding shorelines in communities across the Canadian Arctic; and polar bears swimming in dangerously open waters of the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska, far from the safe harbour of any land or ice floe.

"There were some years when some bears may have had to swim as far as 100 miles," Steven Amstrup, the senior polar bear scientist with the United States Geological Survey in Alaska, told the New York Times this week. "Now the ice is much farther offshore, more consistently and for longer. So the possibility of long distances between land and sea ice is much greater." Meanwhile, a U.S. study published Sunday in the British journal Nature Geoscience suggests thawing permafrost in polar regions will unlock up to 60 per cent more carbon dioxide than previously believed, potentially amplifying the greenhouse effect already widely blamed for the current Arctic warming.

Prime Minister Harper and several senior members of his cabinet - including Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who kicked off Canada's largest-ever Arctic sovereignty exercise last week in Iqaluit - are making their high-profile appearances in the North at a time of growing geopolitical tension.

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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/going_green/story.html?id=d8a42fce-935e-4081-9bde-d4561cc64ab9

Yes, Minister - let's turn an ongoing climate and biology nightmare into another exercise in geopolitical dick-waving. Visionary.