Sea Ice, Hunting, Polar Bears and the Inuit

This cartoon caused some comment on Daily Ink:

Posted 04/07/2012, 06:53am

Why take a job with a major oil company when you can continue your prehistoric subsistence life-style so admired by the Greenies?

Posted 04/07/2012, 08:32am

I remember back in the Seventies when they wanted to ban Snowmobiles in the north. Inuit were not impressed.

Posted 04/07/2012, 11:16am

This type of thing may have been true in the 1960s and ’70s, but today, Inuit advise Environment Canada & the Nunavut Dept. of Environment in regards to environmental and land management (called the Elders Advisory Committee or Inutuqait Mianiksijiit Angngutiksanik). (I’m kind of into Arctic Studies!)

My response:

I was commenting more on the fact that sea ice is shrinking and that a lot of Inuit (and polar bears) use this sea ice for hunting.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070515-inuit-arctic.html

“And faster-melting ice is causing a decrease in hunting days each year, while igloos, which native hunters prefer to tents when they are on the trail, are much harder to build with less snow and ice.”

And the reason that sea ice is shrinking? Global warming caused by massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (mainly from fossil fuel burning, but also release of methane from the melting permafrost).

Everyone is entitled to their point of view on this, but the science overwhelmingly points to climate change being real and the sooner we switch to cleaner fuels, the better.