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Inuit village blames climate change for strange events :

The fish changed colour. New bird species were spotted. Two bridges were wiped out by a once-in-a-lifetime flood that forced villagers to dump sewage into their pristine waters.

The locals say strange things happened last year in this snow-peaked, sapphire-watered hamlet by the Arctic circle.

And they have a message for city-dwellers who might normally be indifferent to the bizarre weather in an Inuit village 1,000 kilometres north of Labrador: This is what climate change looks like.

"Climate change is real", says Ron Mongeau, the town manager of Pangnirtung, a postcard-pretty spot girded by mountains and glacial fjords.

"It's not happening tomorrow or next week. It's happening here and it's affecting the life of everybody in the Arctic - every day."

Climate scientists describe the Arctic as Ground Zero for rising global temperatures, with climate change being felt earlier and more dramatically here than most of the planet.

The most severe example came a year ago, on June 8. Floods knocked out two bridges that separated the community from its garbage dump, sewage-treatment plant, and water station.

Locals were forced to pump their waste into the sea for several days as they jury-rigged a dirt-and-rock replacement bridge.

The town declared a 30-day state of emergency and the federal government later covered the lion's share of an $8 million project that built a replacement bridge last October.

Mongeau says a torrent of meltwater cascaded off the surrounding mountains in an unusually mild spring. He says it eroded the permafrost base of the bridges and destroyed them both.

"We literally had a wall of water - between 12 to 15 feet high - coming down that river," Mongeau said.

"It's unprecedented in the history of this community. The first thing we did is talk to the elders. Nobody has any experience with any event anywhere close to the (water) level that we saw."

Local leaders described similar phenomena last week to the visiting Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean: robins and bluejays spotted for the first time in the area; an unprecedented abundance of smelt in Cumberland Sound; less ice cover; char, caribou and polar bears migrating at different times, to different places.

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Climate scientists say the occurrences up on Baffin Island are unsurprising.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects temperature changes of 5 degrees or more in the Arctic this century - roughly double the expected rate in the rest of North America.

It says sea levels had already risen by an average rate of 3.1 millimetres a year from 1993 to 2003.

Records from Environment Canada already indicate a warming trend in Pangnirtung.

Statistics from the government weather office say the average annual temperature has been 1.4 degrees warmer this decade than in the late 1990s. In five consecutive recorded years, summer temperatures passed 22 degrees - which never happened between 1996 and 2000.

The department was asked to provide statistics for the last decade but, lacking data for Pangnirtung in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008, it offered figures for nine of 11 years starting in 1996.

This winter, though, was a typical cold one, residents say.

One climate scientist says warming will be two or three times greater in the Arctic than elsewhere on the planet because of a phenomenon called, "feedback."

"It's really straightforward physics," said John Stone, a professor at the University of Ottawa.

"The ice melts. The ice is a white, reflective surface. As it melts, you get open sea water. And open sea water is a dark, absorbent surface. As it gets warmer, the ice melts more, and it goes around in circles."

In southern Canada, he says the impact will be felt in a variety of ways: longer growing seasons; less snow in the Rockies; less fresh water spilling down to the Prairies; lower water levels in the Great Lakes; rising sea levels; more extreme floods and heat waves.

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