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October 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Grise Fiord Feature: Norway Carbon Tax The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

FEATURE Grise Fiord: Cold warriors Map: Ellesmere Island Sidebar: The bear facts CLIMATE CHANGE Slumping, sinkholes ... Low-carbon diet Ellesmere Island Ice Shelves Geoengineering Reviews & resources

“We were looking for seal holes. My dad was waiting near one. We’d been out for hours. I was driving around, and we were just about to head home but my dad saw something far away. It was a polar bear.” Daniel Flaherty is recounting how, on his fifteenth birthday two days ago, he aimed his father’s rifle and shot a bear. Flaherty’s father, Raymond Mercredi — a Saskatchewan Cree-Chipewyan who’s been here for 30 years — spent hours today marinating wild meat and simmering it in a rich gravy. He has invited half the town to his spacious home to enjoy a feast of polar bear and muskox, spaghetti and hot dogs. Stickyfaced toddlers waddle about, teenage girls muster on the couch in T-shirts and jeans, boys play hand-held video games, and the front door constantly swings open for new arrivals. Flaherty, a grade nine student, looks more rapper than hunter: baggy jeans, hoodie, ball cap, sneakers. Sure he’s proud of con - quer ing the world’s largest land predator, but for dinner, he prefers spaghetti.

There are a little more than a dozen individual polar bear populations in Canada, according to Ian Stirling, one of the world’s leading polar bear researchers. They range from the Beaufort Sea to Davis Strait and from the High Arctic to Hudson Bay. An emeritus scientist with Environment Canada and adjunct professor at the University of Alberta, Stirling has studied polar bears, seals and the impacts of climate change for four decades, paying particular attention to the bears’ southern range in western Hudson Bay, where significantly less ice — and therefore less access to seals, their main food source — means bears there are now smaller, less healthy and having fewer cubs.

Hunting is an essential part of Inuit life. Illustrated left is the seasonal cycles that determine what foods people in the North eat. Source: The Canadian Atlas Online

He started noticing problems in the mid-1990s. “There were some fluctuations within the data,” he says, “but it was a long-term, unidirectional trend, and I began to suspect climate change.” By 1997, the hypothesis became fact. “And all the data we’ve collected in the 10 years since then have been consistent with everything we said back then. Sadly.” The western Hudson Bay population is clearly dwindling. From 1987 to 2004, it has shrunk to 935 from 1,200.

Aside from Stirling’s bears and the Beaufort Sea populations, which are also in decline, it’s unclear how other groups are faring. Research in remote, cold places with sporadic air service is prohibitively expensive. High Arctic hunters report more bears than ever and claim there’s no crisis. Stirling says bears at higher latitudes might be healthier because plenty of sea ice still forms annually, seals can make dens and the bears have a platform from which to hunt. But if you believe the models that project continuous Arctic warming and corresponding sea ice depletion, “then I think things don’t look good,” says Stirling, and that’s troubling for some Inuit with whom he’s worked. “It worries and confuses a lot of them, especially older people. They’re having a hard enough time trying to pass on traditions, and with less opportunity, what are they going to do?”

Climate change impacts the sea ice in many complex and interconnected ways, and some conditions compound others. Energy trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases affects wind formation and direction, explains Kinnard, and wind impacts ocean currents. More warm water from the Atlantic Ocean is migrating to the Arctic, for example, eroding ice from below, while warmer air thins it from above. Wind and currents crack it and move it around, creating open water, which absorbs more heat from the sun than does ice — accelerating the melt. Sometimes these conditions lead to more abrupt alterations. In 2005, a 66-square-kilometre slab of ice broke off from the Ayles Ice Shelf on the northern coast of Ellesmere, creating a floating ice island slightly larger than Manhattan. And in July, a four-square-kilometre chunk split from the neighbouring Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.

“The loss of sea ice is stunning,” says Kinnard. “When I looked at the maps of the Arctic Ocean from summer 2007, I remember feeling scared. Maybe scared is not the right word. Impressed.” Last year was the northern hemisphere’s warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880. Arctic Ocean ice was 39 percent smaller in 2007 than the previous 20-year average. “You see these data,” he says, “and always, as a scientist, you have to think, is this real? Is it possible that it’s something else?

But when it’s so fast and so big, it looks like a clear sign to me.” There are other signs. In the planet’s geological continuum, we’re in the middle of an interglacial period, and according to the Earth’s orbital and rotational elements, which are cyclical, we should be cooling toward its next ice age in 3,000 to 5,000 years. But it’s getting warmer, instead.

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