Tiny Arctic town fights losing battle with changing climate

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories -- Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They’re building windmills.

That’s wind-power turbines, to be exact — a token first try at "getting rid of this fossil fuel we’re using," said Mayor Merven Gruben.

It’s a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of "you people in the south," as Gruben calls the rest of us who fill the skies with greenhouse gases. …

Since 1970, temperatures have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) in much of the Arctic, much faster than the global average. People in Tuk say winters are less numbing, with briefer spells of minus-40 C (minus-40 F) temperatures. They sense it in other ways, too, small and large.

"The mosquitoes got bigger," the mayor’s aunt, Tootsie Lugt, 48, told a visitor to her children-filled house overlooking Tuk harbor. ...

The later fall freeze-up, earlier spring break-up and general weakening of sea ice make snowmobile travel more perilous. A trip to the next island can end in a fatal plunge through thin ice. ...

http://desdemonadespair.blogspot.com/2009/09/tiny-arctic-town-fights-losing-battle.html