Far north feels worst effects of warming

[kurth]

Far north feels worst effects of warming
By BETH DUFF-BROWN, Associated Press Writer

Inuit hunters are falling through thinning ice and dying. Dolphins are being spotted for the first time. There's not enough snow to build igloos for shelter during hunts. As scientists work to establish the impact of global warming, explorers and hunters slogging across northern Canada and the Arctic ice cap on sled and foot are describing the realities they see on the ground. Three of them recently spoke to The Associated Press.

"This is really ground zero for global warming," said Will Steger, a 62-year-old Minnesotan who has been traveling the region for 43 years and has witnessed the impact of warming on the 155,000 indigenous people of the Arctic. "This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very delicate, interconnected ecosystem and, one by one, small pegs of that ecosystem are being pulled out," Steger said by satellite phone from a small village outside Iqaluit, about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Iqaluit is the provincial capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut...

When he was interviewed in early March, he and his American and Inuit colleagues were heading for the Clyde River, through the highest polar bear population in the world. It was still the height of winter in the Arctic, but the temperature, 11 degrees Fahrenheit, was more typical of spring. He said hunters he meets on Baffin Island are describing to him creatures they have no words for in their language, Inuktitut — robins, finches and dolphins. He said they all tell him the same thing: Hunting on the thinning sea ice has become too dangerous.

"All of these villages have lost people on the ice," Steger said. "When you have a small village of 300 or 400 people, losing three or four of their senior hunters, it's a big loss." Millennia of learning to read the winds, clouds and stars and find the best hunting are being lost, he said. "A lot of the elders will no longer go out on the sea ice because their knowledge will not work anymore. What they've learned and passed on for 5,000 years is no longer functional," Steger said. "They can't build igloos anymore; everything is just upside down up here."...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070415/ap_on_sc/voices_from_the_ice;_ylt=AqMQGyi_BKdURB8fPwLb2dqs0NUE

[Eurobabe]

1. Tell me, we've had temps in the 70s all week in Germany

this is about 2 months ahead of schedule. One can only imagine what summer will be like? Repeat of 2003?