“Everything is warming up”

MONTREAL – By declarations, petitions and demonstrations, scientists, indigenous people and youth tried to lever public opinion during the United Nations conference on climate change, which wraps up today.

On Wednesday at an event called, The Right to be Cold, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, announced ICC is petitioning the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to determine whether the United States’ rejection of treaties and actions to cut emissions linked to climate change, is “willfully threatening the Inuit cultural right to exist.”

At Arctic Day, held earlier this week as part of Canada’s World of Solutions activities, Arctic indigenous leaders tabled a declaration of their rights.

The permanent participants to the Arctic Council – Inuit, Saami, Aleuts, Gwitch’in, Athabaskan and the “small peoples” of northern Russia – want to push for official UN recognition of Arctic indigenous residents as “vulnerable,” because, as their declaration says, “climate change is threatening our ways of life and the resources on which we depend.”

“We have to ask every country to do what they can do. We’re asking for Arctic action,” said Chief Gary Harrison of Alaska.

Harrison is grand chief of the Arctic Athabaskan Council and speaker for the indigenous permanent participants to the Arctic Council. Harrison said it’s important for indigenous peoples in the Arctic to be eligible for adaptation funds from the UN and other developed nations, to help them deal with the impacts of climate change.

Meanwhile, youth marched in a “Time is running out” protest parade last weekend. They also played a slushy demonstration hockey game downtown to show the impacts of climate change on Canada’s favourite game, and they produced a more serious declaration.

This declaration, called “Our climate, our challenge, our future,” calls for a place for youth in future international climate change negotiations, higher curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and many other practical measures to keep the world cooler.

“Human rights and social justice must be included in the transition from fossil fuel dependence,” reads the declaration.

The threat is real.

Scientists also voiced their mounting concerns. Louis Fortier of the University Laval’s Arctic Net institute in Quebec City was one of more than 40 noted Arctic researchers from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Services who signed an open letter to Prime Minister Paul Martin.

This letter asks for immediate action on climate change and more money for climate research, but it arrived in Ottawa just as Martin’s government was set to fall in a non-confidence vote.

“We met with Martin. He didn’t say anything about it. I get the feeling that the letter was buried under a pile of papers,” Fortier said.

As calls for action grow, evidence in support of a political response to climate change is also increasing.

“Everything is warming up,” Fortier said. “It’s not a single thing, it’s everything that’s changing.”

Indigenous representatives from around the circumpolar world told about a wide variety of changes to their environment: from land slides, higher water levels, tornadoes, hummingbirds, unfamiliar spiders and disappearing glaciers in Alaska, to new parasites in the Saami area of northern Scandinavia, and warmer, fresh water in far eastern Russian waterways.

In Greenland, warmer weather, fewer ice packs and stronger winds have made life more difficult for hunters and fishermen, said Lena Kielsen Holm of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Greenland. She said that due to the lack of ice, hunting hooded seals is extremely difficult and more wind means travel is risky.

And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, scientists had even worse news to share. At best, they now predict global warming will bring the Arctic less extreme minimum temperatures in winter, reduced sea ice, and more precipitation.

Six scientists who spoke at an event organized at the World of Solutions, said if their worse-scenario predictions come true, the world could see the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves, water levels rising by seven metres or more, and up to 30 per cent of the world’s population displaced off the coasts.

“Tipping mechanisms,” which operate like the flick of a switch, were the focus of the scientists’ presentations. These mechanisms are the points where changes to the climate happen suddenly and irreversibly, such as when the world plunged from a sudden temperature increase of 10°C over few decades about 8,000 years ago to a decrease 1,000 years later.

A breakdown of the salty, cold North Atlantic current, which rules weather in this part of the world, could start a similar spiral of change in the next 100 years. This could lead to much warmer temperatures in North America.

Research released last week suggests the North Atlantic current is already much fresher, warmer and weaker. The “clear potential” for a sudden flow reversal is raising “considerable concern” among Canadian scientists.

To halt the build up of greenhouse gases and avoid the complications of more global warming, scientists are now suggesting a global reduction of 50 to 75 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions before 2100. This is many, many times more than the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol asks participating countries to achieve by 2012.

These cuts would, at least in southern Canada, mean a total lifestyle change. But these cuts might come too late to prevent devastating temperature increases of up to five to 10°C in Canada’s Arctic and other regions in the high latitudes.