The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future Read Online Free PDF

sunscreen, DEET, and plenty of white T-shirts, I get another puzzled look.
    In summer, even on the high Arctic tundra, there is muggy heat, hordes of buzzing insects, and water running everywhere. Yes, there are stunted trees, tundra mosses, and no raccoons, but these things are the result of cold winters, not summers. In summer the sun circles the sky day and night. Everything is bathed in heat and light. The ground thaws, flowers bloom, and rodents teem. While driving through Fairbanks, Alaska, I noticed people starting softball games at midnight. The place simply explodes with pent-up life in fantastic overdrive.
    There is now overwhelming evidence that northern winters are becoming milder and growing seasons are getting longer. From weather station data, we know that air temperatures rose throughout the northern high latitudes during most of the last century, and especially after 1966. There was a short cooling snap lasting from about 1946 to 1965, but even then large areas of southern Canada and southern Eurasia continued to warm. After 1966, temperatures took off sharply, especially in the northern Eurasian and northwestern North American interiors, where annual air temperatures have been rising at least 1° to 2°C per decade on average. That’s about ten times faster than the global average, and it’s being driven almost completely by warmer springs and winters. 297

Hunters on Thin Ice
    People rely on sea ice too. For millennia the Inuit and Yupik (Eskimo) peoples have lived along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and even out on the ice itself, hunting seals, polar bears, whales, walruses, and fish. It is the platform upon which they travel, whether by snowmobile, dogsled, or on foot. It is the foundation on which they build hunting camps to live in for weeks or months at a time.
    These hunters have watched in astonishment as their sea-ice travel platform—dangerous even in good times—has thinned, become less predictable, and even disappeared. People’s snowmobiles and ATVs are crashing through into the freezing ocean. Farther south, they are crashing through the ice covering rivers and lakes. In Sanikiluaq, Canada, I learned that weaker ice and a two- to three-month shorter ice season is impairing people’s ability to catch seals and Arctic char. In Pangnirtung a traditional New Year’s Day bash celebrated out on the ice has become unsafe. In Barrow, two thousand miles west on the northernmost tip of Alaska, I learned hunters are now taking boats many miles offshore, hoping to find bits of ice with a walrus or bearded seal. 309
    This is a serious matter. In the high Arctic, eating wild animals is an essential part of human survival and culture. In Barrow I was welcomed into the home of an Inuit elder, who explained that three-quarters of his community relies on wild-caught food. 310 I was struck by this because Barrow is one of the most prosperous and modernized northern towns I have seen. There is a huge supermarket with most everything found in the supermarkets of Los Angeles. But groceries are two or three times more expensive because there is no road or rail to Barrow, so everything must be flown or barged in. Most people at least supplement their diet with wild food; many crucially depend on it. Alongside Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant (which has surprisingly good food and is apparently visited by members of the Chicago Bulls basketball team) I saw plenty of bushmeat in Barrow. My host’s kitchen and backyard were festooned with racks of drying meat and fish; in his driveway was a dead caribou. Another driveway had two seals, yet another a massive walrus. In the Arctic, obtaining “country food” is not for sport—it is as important to people’s diet as thin-crust pizza is to New Yorkers.
    Of all northern peoples, the marine mammal-hunters living along the Arctic Ocean coast are suffering the most from climate change. Less sea ice means more accidents and fewer ice-loving animals to eat. It means faster