Canadian Arctic Warming Rapidly - Globe And Mail

[hatrack]

In the summer of 1993, federal fisheries scientist John Babaluk was on Banks Island, the most westerly of the big islands that stretch across Canada's Far North, when some people showed him what had come up in the nets they had set for Arctic char. No one in the tiny Inuvialuit community of Sachs Harbour had ever seen such a fish, which wasn't such a surprise, considering that it was 1,500 kilometres away from home. They had caught sockeye salmon, normally found on the Pacific coast of British Columbia and Alaska.

"We actually saw, recorded, took pictures and did some measurements on some sockeye salmon that had shown up in Sachs Harbour. That was the first time that any of the locals that we talked to had seen them," Mr. Babaluk says.

The itinerant salmon is just one of many strange sightings across the country. The Far North is being introduced to the robin, the South's harbinger of spring and a bird so rarely seen above the tree line that the Inuvialuit don't even have a name for it. In Southern Ontario, the Virginia opossum now thrives as far north as Georgian Bay. A few decades ago, it was unknown because the climate was too cold. Wildlife biologists in Manitoba have noted that migratory butterflies are returning earlier in the spring and that polar bears along the province's Hudson Bay coastline are getting thinner because the sea ice is melting earlier, giving the animals less time to fatten up on seals, their main prey.

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A group of federal and provincial scientists have concluded that global warming has had a profound influence on Canada after completing the most exhaustive review ever undertaken of the hundreds of studies on the country's climate trends. They looked at reports of unusual wildlife sightings, such as Mr. Babaluk's salmon, the extent of glaciers on the Rockies and data from weather stations going back more than a century. Except for small parts of the Northeast that have actually become cooler of late, the warming is almost universal -- and not necessarily just a momentary blip. "There are really strong indicators that the climate is changing," says Environment Canada's Linda Mortsch, the scientist co-ordinating the effort, "and I think Canadians should be aware of that."

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[donsu]

1. we ignore global warming to our peril

here we stand watching the global warming snowball plunging down the mountain, growing bigger and more lethal by the moment, as if we thought it would never reach the bottom.

sigh