Arctic will face rapid, devastating change: new reports

Jane George in Nunatsiaq Online: The Arctic Council, the international body which unites eight Arctic nations, meets next week in Nuuk. But at this May 12 gathering, top government officials from Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland won’t hear how intensely climate change is affecting the Arctic today and may in the future damage the world’s food supply and flood its major cities.

Three separate reports prepared by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program on snow and ice, mercury, and contaminants are not yet on the Arctic Council’s agenda, Nunatsiaq News has learned. Unless these reports are tabled, Canada’s foreign ministers and U.S. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton will not necessarily see or consider these rerports’ compelling new evidence about how the Arctic of tomorrow will look startlingly different than that remembered by Inuit elders.

“It’s crazy,” said Bob Corell, the chairman of the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, who reviewed the more recent reports on climate change in the Arctic. In the future, there will be less snow, less ice and a changed environment for all living things, says 2011 AMAP report, Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, to be released May 4 in Copenhagen at a conference on climate change and pollution.

The report paints yet another bleak picture what the Arctic will be like by 2100, when temperatures will rise from 4 C to 11 C — or more. The past six years have been the warmest ever in the Arctic, the executive summary of the SWIPA report says. In the future, scientists see the Arctic Ocean continuing to absorb more of the sun’s energy during the summer due to the loss of ice — in a kind of “vicious circle,” according to one of its authors, Jim Overland.

Travelling on land will become more difficult in the Arctic, the region’s buildings and other infrastructure will suffer more stress, and some Arctic communities will face relocations….

Fiord with Eureka Weather Station; horizon: Fosheim Peninsula and Sawtooth Range on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. Shot by the great photographer of the Arctic, Ansgar Walk, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license