This is stated to be the current temperature map from "The Weather Network"
That would make the date February 14, 2007 @ 1004 EDT
The obvious realization is that I am correct about the 'heat transfer' from the western Pacific. The temperatures approaching British Columbia are temperate and well above zero in the northwest USA. The temperatures going north are still not impressive realizing the very north of Canada is -30 defrees Centigrade.
In realizing that then where is the cold blast coming from over eastern North America?
NORTH - Canada's North on the front line of incredible climatic change: Temperatures in the Western Arctic are among the fastest rising on Earth
The northwest wind has picked up, sending waves crashing on to the gravel spit that helps protect this remote community on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
By early evening, the water is rolling right over the spit, and a little more of Jackie Jacobson's townsite is swallowed by the sea.
"We need to get some rock to protect that point, otherwise I'm going to have three-or four-foot rollers coming into town," says Jacobson, the mayor of Tuktoyaktuk, the most northern community on the Canadian mainland.
Tuk, as it's commonly known, has the distinction of being one of the Canadian communities most threatened by the climate change already transforming Canada's North. It is eating away at the region's buildings, roads and runways, and damaging the fundamentals of entire communities and ecosystems.
Temperatures in Canada's Western Arctic are among the fastest rising on Earth. The impact is being measured in everything from thinning polar ice to increasing use of gravel and de-icer at northern airports -- 10 times more to cope with freezing rain that used to fall as snow in Inuvik, according to one report.
Schools and houses are heaving as the ground melts, as are wastes that were supposed to stay locked in the frozen ground. Ice roads, critical supply lines in much of the North, are turning to mush weeks earlier than in the past, throwing a wrench into multimillion-dollar industrial and government projects and interrupting travel and delivery to isolated towns.
Northerners pride themselves on being adaptable. But many echo John Keogak, an Inuvialuit hunter from Banks Island, N.W.T., when he says the change is happening "too fast."
"Our children have nothing to depend on," says Keogak, who has raised six children in the tiny village of Sachs Harbour, where musk oxen meat and Arctic char are staples on the dinner table. The local people's lifestyle, he says, is literally melting away.
Scientists now predict the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer months by 2050, give or take 30 years. When it happens, it will be the first ice-free summer in a million years.
Some scoff at the scientists and their ominous predictions.
"I don't believe them, I think they are talking too fast," says 22-year-old Warren Esau, who accompanied Keogak from Sachs Harbour to Tuktoyaktuk for a recent conference that tried to bridge the gaps between scientists studying climate change, policy-makers and northerners.
Charting climate change is a major industry, attracting hundreds of researchers and graduate students to the North each year. They come to examine how carbon migrates through ice, how shrubs are growing on the tundra, and what it all means to the "global carbon budget."
It's largely a southern agenda, says Andrew Applejohn, director of the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik, which issues research licences and helps visiting researchers with logistics. And he would like northerners to have a lot more say in the kind of research done.
More emphasis should be placed on tangibles such as roads, buildings and energy alternatives that could be critical to the survival of Arctic communities on the front line of climate change, says Applejohn, who is angry with the federal government for refusing to fund his institute's wind project in remote Arctic communities.
"If there is any part of Canada where wind energy would pay for itself, it's the North," says Applejohn, noting it can cost $1.50 a litre for the diesel fuel used to generate electricity here.
Communities also need help dealing with the social and ecological change barrelling toward them.
"It's all talk, no action," says Jacobson, rolling his eyes when asked about the federal government's long-promised northern adaptation strategy, which is expected this fall.
Jacobson says he doesn't need more reports and consultation; what he needs is to hold back the rising sea.
Tuktoyaktuk sits on the edge of the sprawling Mackenzie Delta, on land that is little more than an enormous dirty ice cube -- permafrost hundreds of metres thick composed of frozen water, sand and mud.
The icy ground comes in handy -- the town has a remarkable "ice house" 10 metres underground that has 19 rooms to keep fish, whale and caribou frozen until people need it. But it is no match for the Beaufort Sea, which is fast eroding the spits and islands protecting Tuktoyaktuk and its harbour.
Jacobson is not exaggerating about the threat of four-foot waves rolling into town. Much of Tuktoyaktuk already floods in severe storms.
"In high water, our pool becomes part of the Beaufort," he says. Storm surges can raise sea level here more than two metres in a matter of hours, flooding the community pool, the dump and low-lying roads and fields.
Rising temperatures and sea level are expected to make the situation much worse. Gavin Manson and Steve Solomon of the Geological Survey of Canada predict the sea will rise 31 centimetres by 2050 (and 76 cm by 2100) if global warming unfolds as predicted, enough to cause much more extensive flooding during severe storms.
"My house will be underwater," Jacobson says. So will key stretches of the access road to the airport.
While relocation has been raised as an option for Tuktoyaktuk, people in the close-knit community of 1,000 say they are not interested in moving.
"This is our home," says Jacobson, a father of five who runs a shipping business and also serves as an Arctic Ranger who helps patrol the North.
One of his top priorities this summer was to get a load of rock barged in to shore up the fast-eroding north spit.
He is also looking for $15 million from the federal and territorial governments for a 22-kilometre road to higher ground.
"It would give us a back door," says Jacobson.
There is plenty of competition for those dollars as the changing climate plays havoc with the region's infrastructure.
"Roads and airstrips across the Western Arctic are sagging, cracking and deteriorating as the changing regional climate slowly melts the underlying permafrost," says a recent Environment Canada report. Roadbeds have sunk by as much as a metre and some shoulders have washed away. Stretches of the road from Yellowknife to Fort Providence were so bad they were rerouted over more stable permafrost.
Airstrips are not easily moved, and repairs are elaborate and costly. One sagging stretch of runway in Yellowknife was dug up, and the four-metre hole in the permafrost was reinforced with foam, sand, special liners and crushed rock. When ice roads fail, air delivery is often the only option.
The Diavik Diamond Mine came up with the most novel and costly work-around to date. In May, the company hired the world's largest helicopter, an enormous Russian Mi26, to airlift its stranded heavy equipment to its mine 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife when the ice road failed to freeze thick enough last winter.
The weather has changed so much Koegak and other hunters report they are losing their ability to read the sea ice they have safely navigated for decades. They also worry about changes in animals' behaviour and numbers.
Herds of barren land caribou have crashed by as much as 80 per cent since the late 1980s, and beavers, deer, grizzlies and red foxes are moving north.
Musk oxen skeletons still litter Banks Island, a reminder of freak storms two years ago that coated much of the island in ice. It made it impossible for the animals to get at the lichens they needed to survive the winter; biologists estimate close to 20,000 musk oxen died, almost a third of the island's herd.
The prognosis for the Arctic's top predator is not good. Polar bears, which live on and hunt from the now-thinning sea ice, will have trouble surviving in an ice-free Arctic. But viruses, bacteria and parasites may thrive.
Ole Nielsen, a federal marine mammal specialist, worries dolphins and pilot whales may show up in northern waters carrying distemper viruses. Arctic creatures like belugas and narwhales have no natural immunity to such viruses, says Neilson. He likens the threat to the way Europeans spread smallpox around the globe in the 1800s.
Contaminants and heavy metals such as the neurotoxin mercury are another concern. Mercury levels in Western
Arctic belugas have climbed since 1990, and federal scientist Gary Stern suspects the mercury is washing out of melting permafrost.
Waste dumps in the vast Mackenzie Delta, which is rich in both wildlife and fossil fuels, are also leaking.
Close to 150 "sumps," some almost as big as football fields, have been carved out of the permafrost by oil and gas companies to store drill waste that can contain high concentrations of potassium chloride salt. Many sumps from the 1970s have collapsed, or started to fail, releasing potassium chloride into the environment, says federal environmental scientist Steven Kokelj.
He is also documenting with his colleagues how permafrost is warming and the treeline is moving north in response to the record-breaking weather.
"I've been working up here 10 years and this was the first August in the field that we haven't had any snow," says Kokelj.
Source: CanWest News Service - Margaret Munro
