XPost: az.general   
   From: michelle@michelle.org   
      
   Despite the evidence, there are people financially beholden to   
   Exxon-Mobile and other corporations who continue to deny reality.  They   
   would let the world be destroyed for their thirty pieces of silver.  Feh!   
      
   Far North Feels Worst Effects of Warming   
      
   April 16, 2007 ‹ By Beth Duff-Brown, Associated Press   
      
   IQALUIT, Nunavut -- Inuit hunters are falling through thinning ice and   
   dying. Dolphins are being spotted for the first time. There's not enough   
   snow to build igloos for shelter during hunts.   
      
   As scientists work to establish the impact of global warming, explorers   
   and hunters slogging across northern Canada and the Arctic ice cap on   
   sled and foot are describing the realities they see on the ground. Three   
   of them recently spoke to The Associated Press.   
      
   "This is really ground zero for global warming," said Will Steger, a   
   62-year-old Minnesotan who has been traveling the region for 43 years   
   and has witnessed the impact of warming on the 155,000 indigenous people   
   of the Arctic.   
      
   "This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very   
   delicate, interconnected ecosystem and, one by one, small pegs of that   
   ecosystem are being pulled out," Steger said by satellite phone from a   
   small village outside Iqaluit, about 200 miles south of the Arctic   
   Circle. Iqaluit is the provincial capital of the Canadian territory of   
   Nunavut.   
      
   Steger, who made the first journey to the North Pole by dogsled without   
   resupply in 1986, is sledding with Inuit guides for three months across   
   Baffin Island, the northeastern corner of Nunavut, with two teams of   
   huskies and a cameraman.   
      
   He is charting his 1,200-mile adventure on his Web site, and making a   
   documentary about how Inuit hunters are being forced to adapt to a   
   warming Arctic Ocean and melting polar ice cap. In June, he will testify   
   before a U.S. Senate committee on climate change.   
      
   When he was interviewed in early March, he and his American and Inuit   
   colleagues were heading for the Clyde River, through the highest polar   
   bear population in the world. It was still the height of winter in the   
   Arctic, but the temperature, 11 degrees Fahrenheit, was more typical of   
   spring.   
      
   He said hunters he meets on Baffin Island are describing to him   
   creatures they have no words for in their language, Inuktitut -- robins,   
   finches and dolphins. He said they all tell him the same thing: Hunting   
   on the thinning sea ice has become too dangerous.   
      
   "All of these villages have lost people on the ice," Steger said. "When   
   you have a small village of 300 or 400 people, losing three or four of   
   their senior hunters, it's a big loss."   
      
   Millennia of learning to read the winds, clouds and stars and find the   
   best hunting are being lost, he said. "A lot of the elders will no   
   longer go out on the sea ice because their knowledge will not work   
   anymore. What they've learned and passed on for 5,000 years is no longer   
   functional," Steger said. "They can't build igloos anymore; everything   
   is just upside down up here."   
      
   ------   
      
   Meeka Mike says the thinning of the ice became noticeable about 10 years   
   ago, forcing Arctic animals to migrate farther north.   
      
   Now Inuit hunters like herself are finding stranded walrus and seal pups   
   left to die on floating ice.   
      
   "It takes longer now to get out to our hunting areas because we can't   
   access it by ice," Mike says in her cedar house in Iqaluit, sitting on   
   the floor with friends as they sew a pair of caribou hunting pants   
   she'll wear when she next ferries supplies by snowmobile and wooden sled   
   to Steger's expedition.   
      
   "The ice freezes much later and therefore it's thinner and breaks off   
   during the full-moon tide," she says, pointing out to Frobisher Bay, a   
   massive inlet of the Labrador Sea on the southeastern corner of Baffin   
   Island.   
      
   To an outsider, the bay in midwinter looks ice covered with wisps of   
   vanilla icing. But Mike says hunters can see the bay rise and fall with   
   the tide.   
      
   Life, she says, is "very much out of sync."   
      
   She blames Americans for emitting one-fourth of the world's greenhouse   
   gases which scientists say are very likely causing the warming. But it   
   is not in the Inuit culture to be too accusatory, and she says it with a   
   smile: "Unfortunately, you are the people who cause most of this climate   
   change," she says to an American journalist.   
      
   ------   
      
   Farther north is Rosie Stancer, a 47-year-old mother and distant   
   relative of the British royal family. She set off alone on March 6 for a   
   60-day journey across 475 miles of the frozen Arctic Ocean to reach the   
   North Pole, using compass, solar and satellite navigation.   
      
   She is carting her own food and fuel on a sled she drags behind her, and   
   carries a shotgun to ward off polar bears.   
      
   If she makes it she will be the first woman to have trekked solo to both   
   Poles. She was the second woman to trek alone to the South Pole in 2004.   
      
   As of Easter Sunday, she had 324 miles to go. And warming or no warming,   
   she is feeling the Arctic, with mild frostbite on two toes.   
      
   She is examining global warming effects for a polar research institute   
   at Cambridge University. "I'll be monitoring the temperatures, wind   
   direction and comparing the ice conditions to 10 years ago," Stancer   
   said in a telephone interview from Resolute Bay, where it was minus 45   
   degrees Fahrenheit several days before she took off.   
      
   "If I can come back as an ordinary person with a firsthand account, that   
   message will hit home and awaken individual consciences about cleaning   
   up our own back yard," said Stancer.   
      
   Her biggest obstacle, she says, is time -- the period in which the ice   
   is safe enough for a plane to land and pick her up shrinks every year as   
   the ice cap melts. Pilots say she has only 60 days to arrive at the   
   North Pole, though most teams typically take longer.   
      
   "You know, everyone is going ooh-la-la and being indignant about our   
   climate change. But what did they expect?" Stancer says of those who are   
   just waking up to global warming. "Why are people surprised that this is   
   a living, breathing planet?"   
      
   Why leave her banker husband and young son back in Britain for isolation   
   at the top of the world?   
      
   "There is very little between you and nature and God," she says. "All   
   your layers of materialistic crud just drop away and your life and its   
   priorities are distilled down to pure survival."   
      
   ------   
      
   On the Net:   
      
   Steger's site: http://www.globalwarming101.com   
      
   Stancer's Site: http://www.rosiestancermarsnorthpolesolo.co.uk   
      
   --   
   Support the troops:  Bring them home ASAP.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)