Kathleen Lippa
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (May 24/04) - It's getting warmer around the globe, and the Arctic is the first to feel it.

Johnny Peters has known this for years. He has seen the bodies of dead caribou on the ground after they ran into the cold water to escape the unusual heat that swept into the Arctic in recent years.

What Nunavut elders are saying about climate change, as recorded at a conference in Cambridge Bay, March 29-31, 2001. Frank Analok, Cambridge Bay: "The land is now a stranger, it seems, based on our accumulated knowledge. "The seasons have shifted, the ice is thinner and weaker, and the streams, creeks and rivers have changed their characteristics. "Caribou cannot cross the channel anymore until later on in the year, due to later ice freeze up. It is now hard to make piffi anymore in the spring because the sun is too hot." Norman Attungalak, Baker Lake: "I live inland at a cabin. I will relate what I have witnessed from 1982 to 2001. Baker Lake is a lake, it is not salt water. Up until then (1982) we used to be able to travel on the lake ice during May, June and July. We did not require the use of a canoe until late July. "Then, during the last decade, things started to change. It is impossible to skidoo on the lake around July now, and there was a small glacier that you could walk on even in July. The lake has started to melt earlier and earlier." Gamiali Kilukishuk, Pond Inlet: "This year has been memorable because within one year, the melting of the snow was way earlier than normal and the seasons have melded together. "There is no longer any transition period between the seasons. There was a sudden cold snap in August that affected the caribou's fur growth and further hampered them in later fall with ice covered snow." Zach Novalinga, Sanikiluaq: "We used to be able to fish in the lakes in the spring months, but the ice is melting faster and we cannot fish the lakes in the spring now. It seems like the annual snow melt is coming faster and faster every year." -- Quotes courtesy of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.

"It was so hot that summer," Peters told a room full of people in Iqaluit last Monday.

Peters is a hunter. He also happens to be the vice-president of Makivik Corporation in Northern Quebec, one of many Inuit leaders invited to a one-day briefing organized by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) and the Consensus Building Institute of Harvard University on climate change.

Work together

"We already knew it was climate change," Peters said. "There is so much going on around us," he said. "There was no government around when I was growing up. There is nothing being done to stop this. Maybe we have to work together to do something about climate change."

Peters directed all of these comments to Dr. Robert Corell of Harvard University.

Corell was invited to Iqaluit to speak to Inuit on May 17 about climate change, global warming, and how the Arctic is now widely accepted as a barometer of that change. "Warming affects the entire world," said Corell. "Arctic warming has world-wide implications."

Many Inuit in attendance were ready to do constructive battle with Corell on many occasions.

Mainly, the audience wanted a chance to give their two cents worth on a report that deals with observations being made in the North for years.

"We don't need scientists to tell us what is going on," Peters said to Corell, holding the floor with a passionate voice. Climate change is affecting hunters like him, and their children, too.

"Our children need country food," said Peters. "When I don't eat country food, the muscles on my bones feel loose."

"You know it," Corell said calmly. "The rest of the world doesn't."

Because Harvard University has taken a keen interest in climate change and getting Inuit input on the matter, the world may know soon how climate change is affecting Inuit.

Jose Kusugak, one of the invited Inuit leaders, asked the simple, yet hard to answer question: "What is bad?" "What we're seeing up here," Corell said, "the rest of the planet will see 20 to 30 years from now."

Corell works for the World meteorological institute. Since 2000, he has been focusing his talents and energy on a project called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a three-part project that outlines what is happening to everything right now, including the animals, oceans and the Arctic ice.

Changes across the board.

"The Arctic climate is warming rapidly," said Corell.

"Indigenous communities were seeing changes across the board."

The changes were being seen more dramatically at the North and South poles, he said.

"We are not alone in the Arctic," Corell said. "We are fully connected to the rest of the world."

A number of Inuit leaders were invited to give their input during the one-day briefing, including James Eetoolook, vice-president of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated.

After the meeting, Eetoolook said he found the discussions interesting, but it was "one of many" meetings about climate change he expects to attend.

Corell supports the "unique approach" of using IQ and science together to do the report.