Warming Sweeping Through Even Most Distant Realms Of High Arctic - Reuters

[hatrack]

RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut (Reuters) - Even in one of the remotest, coldest and most inhospitable parts of Canada's High Arctic, you cannot escape the signs of global warming. Polar bears hang around on land longer than they used to, waiting for ice to freeze. The eternal night which blankets the region for three months is less dark, thanks to warmer air reflecting more sunlight from the south. Animal species that the local Inuit aboriginal population had never heard of are now appearing.

"Last year someone saw a mosquito," said a bemused Paul Attagootak, a hunter living in the hamlet of Resolute Bay some 2,100 miles northwest of Ottawa and 555 miles north of the Arctic Circle. "Things getting warmer is not good for the animals, which are our food. We still eat them. We worry about them," he told Reuters as temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius) well above the seasonal average.

EDIT

"The most striking thing is that the wind doesn't bite any more. It used to take pieces of skin off you," said Wayne Davidson, who runs the local weather monitoring station and has lived in Resolute Bay since 1985. "The weather here was brutal, probably the coldest, meanest toughest cold weather you could find," he said. But, he said, there have been enormous changes in the temperature. The mean temperature in March was minus 13.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25.2 degrees Celsius) compared with the average of minus 24.2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31.2 degrees Celsius) from 1947 to 1991.

"All months are warmer by between 3 and 6 degrees (Celsius). This is beyond the usual variations," said Davidson. "We're in a total transition ... it's a one-way street right now." U.S. scientists said in September that the Arctic ice was now the smallest it had been for a century, driven by rising temperatures that many experts believe is linked to emissions of greenhouse gases by humans.

EDIT

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyid=2006-04-19T121037Z_01_N12310075_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT.xml

[PublicWrath]

1. But the oil companies can't drill in the Arctic ocean until more ice melts

Geologists say probably 1/4 of the world's oil and gas resources are in the Arctic.
And we will never get anything done about global warming until the oil companies are thrown out of our government.