New Zealand Celsias

Every year a new group of figures come out, and every year those of us who track global warming (aka climate change ) are a little bit more concerned about the loss of Arctic Ocean sea ice, and how that loss will affect populations in both the short- and long-term.

This year’s figures  , courtesy of NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, U.S.), show that ice continues to melt, this year reaching its second-lowest level since scientists began keeping records.

These records, which are kept at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, support the contention of hundreds of scientists globally who insist that the planet is warming, and that the activities of humanity are driving that warming.

Called anthropogenic climate change, the manifestations are evident everywhere, but nowhere more poignantly than in the Arctic, where McGill University professor and climate researcher Dr. James D. Ford is engaged in a five-year program called Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) to track the effects of global warming on the Inuit  .

Dr. Ford’s group is also working in Uganda and Peru, but it is among the Inuit in Canada’s Nunavut Territory – a new region carved from the former Northwest Territories – that the plight of indigenous people facing down climate change becomes most apparent, and most appalling.

Responding in an interview, Dr. Ford noted that the changes are hitting the young and old equally hard. For example, while many of the experienced hunters know about the dangers of uncertain ice thicknesses and dangerous or unexpectedly brittle ice – having learned to identify such conditions as part of their tradition – many of the younger hunters do not share this knowledge, leading to more and more accidents in which the unwary fall through the ice and are not recovered because of the record cold of Arctic waters.

The same thing happens in the general Inuit population as well, because to the Inuit the ice is not just a hunting field, it is a highway, across which they travel from village to village to spread the news, barter goods and seek health care and information.

Unfortunately, those doing the traveling are often young, inexperienced, and without the benefit of a traditional hunter’s education.

“When things go wrong,” Dr. Ford adds. “They often don’t know what to do.”

For those of us in the lower 48, and for people living in developed countries, this changing terrain would be the equivalent of all the roads shifting their courses, with no map to show those changes. For young Inuit, and even for older Inuit without experience, the results can be tragic.

More important, perhaps, is the fact that the Inuit can no longer hunt as freely as they once did. Even experienced hunters need to move more slowly, more cautiously. Thus, the traditional Inuit foods of seal, whale and walrus are less prevalent, forcing even those traditional hunting families to increasingly rely on expensive and less nourishing food from local stores.

This food, whose cost is seriously inflated by the fact that it has to be flown in (except for a brief period in midsummer), is essentially unavailable to impoverished Inuit, who now can not even rely on what they once considered staple foods from the sea.

The resulting effects on health are, as Dr. Ford observes, unfortunate. There is, however, a single note of hope.

“The Inuit are beginning to realize how their very fluid traditions, of hunting and traveling, lend themselves to tackling the worst effects of climate change. So in that sense the adversity of climate change strengthens community bonds rather than weakening them.”

This is extremely encouraging as another round of climate change reports sees carbon dioxide levels soaring to new heights, ice reaching new lows, and even the ozone layer experiencing record loss  .