Arctic town isn't so hot on warming

RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut — They never used to need air conditioners up in the Arctic.

But officials in the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavik authorized the installation of air conditioners in official buildings this year for the first time. Artificial cooling was necessary, they decided, because summer temperatures in some southern Arctic villages have climbed into the 80s in recent years.

Inuit families in the region never used to need to shop for groceries, either. But the Arctic seas that stayed frozen well into the summer have started breaking open much earlier, cutting off hunters from the seasonal caribou herds on which their families depend for sustenance.

And experienced Inuit hunters, as comfortable reading ice conditions as professional golfers are reading greens, had seldom fallen through the ice and drowned. But this year in Alaska, more than 12 vanished into the sea.

"These are men used to running their trap lines, people who know the area well, yet they are literally falling through, they are just gone," said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission in Anchorage and chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. "The ice conditions are just so drastically different from all of their hunting lifetimes."

It took a while, but global warming, the greenhouse-gas phenomenon that most scientists think has altered climates across much of the rest of the world, appears to have finally breached the northern polar redoubt. And the effects on aboriginal societies trying to hold fast to traditional ways have been jarring.

The people of Resolute Bay, a far northern Canadian hamlet of 250, used to hunt eider ducks every summer, using the meat and eggs for food and the soft feathers for clothing. But this past summer was the third in a row that the Inuit couldn't reach the nesting grounds because the ice around them was too thin.

The seals have changed, too.

"Now when we are trying to take the fur off the seals, it's very hard to do," said David Kalluk, 65, a village elder and veteran hunter. "It's like it's burned onto them. Maybe this is because the sea is warmer."

Wayne Davidson, the resident meteorologist in Resolute Bay for 20 years, said monthly temperatures throughout the year are 5 to 11 degrees higher than recent historical averages. For example, Davidson said, the average daily temperature in March was minus 13.4 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with an average of minus 24.2 degrees from 1947 to 1991.

"Science for us in the Arctic is experience," Davidson said. "Resolute used to be a horrible place to live as far as weather is concerned, absolutely brutal. Now it's much milder."

The signs of warming in the Arctic are not merely anecdotal. Last month, NASA climate experts reported that for the past two years, Arctic sea ice has been melting in summer and winter at rates far higher than anything seen before.

Summer sea-ice coverage in 2005 was the smallest recorded in 100 years and was not much larger this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers said, and winter coverage in 2005 and 2006 was 6 percent smaller than the average during the past 26 years.

The recession of ice coverage in the winter is especially alarming, experts said, because it suggests the fundamental climatic engine that creates Arctic ice may be impaired.

"The greenhouse phenomenon is becoming more apparent in the Arctic," said Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who studies Arctic zones.

Not everyone is convinced that global warming is to blame for changes observed in the Arctic and elsewhere.

A few scientists and conservative politicians doubt the widespread theory that humans are causing climate change by burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These skeptics attribute the warming patterns to natural fluctuations in the Earth's complex climate systems.

But a majority of climatologists harbor no such doubts, experts said.

It certainly feels real enough to the people of Resolute Bay. From their perch on the edge of the Barrow Strait, they watched this past summer as the waters of their rocky bay melted and filled with drifting icebergs, a view as depressing as it was picturesque, because in years past the water remained frozen solid enough to traverse aboard sleds and snowmobiles to their traditional hunting grounds.

"The heat of the sun is different now," said Kalluk, the village elder. "I think there is global warming because snow that has never melted before is starting to melt now."