Good Thing Global Warming Isn't Real...

Chicago Tribune:

Blasting A/C in the Arctic

One area is 5 to 11 degrees above average

In this northern territory, temperatures are rising, hunters are falling through ice and offices are using something they've never used before--air co

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent

September 29, 2006

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

But earlier this year, officials in the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavik authorized the installation of air conditioners in official buildings for the first time. Artificial cooling was necessary, they decided, because summertime 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 in grocery stores, either. But the Arctic seas that always 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 a dozen vanished into the sea.

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

...The signs of warming in the Arctic are not merely anecdotal. This month, NASA climate experts reported with alarm that for the last 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 a century and was not much larger this year, the NASA researchers said, and winter coverage in 2005 and 2006 was 6 percent smaller than the average over the last 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 basic question of global warming is no longer a subject of dispute in the scientific literature," said Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at the University of California, San Diego, who reviewed 928 scientific papers about climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found none challenging evidence of human contributions to global warming.

"The discussion has moved on to how quickly will things change in the future, the rate of ice melting and differing climate models," Oreskes said. "There's almost nobody left anymore who doesn't accept that global warming is real."

...SIGNS OF ARCTIC CLIMATE CHANGE

Ice-covered areas of the Arctic seas have been declining at the highest rate in a century of recorded observations.

Mosquitoes were sighted in Resolute Bay last year for the first time.

Experienced Inuit hunters are falling through the ice along routes they once traversed with ease.

Polar bears are hungrier and venturing more frequently into Inuit villages.

Air conditioners are being imported to Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavik.