This video was made by http://climatecrocks.com/. Plenty more where that came from!

400 indigenous representatives gathered in Alaska for the Summit, hosted by the Innuit Circumpolar Council. The ICC are an international non-governmental organization (NGO) that represents the interests of approximately 150,000 Inuit of the United States, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka. The purpose of the conference was to enable indigenous representatives to discuss the issues and share solutions, and to develop a common position for Copenhagen at the end of the year. And of course the issues were complex and difficult to negotiate.

There was real objection by some to the use of market mechanisms to manage emissions because of the commodification of essential natural resources. There was from the younger representatives a committment to taking the strongest possible action to reduce emissions. And there was considerable concern from those whose only economic resource is oil and who still want the option of developing it. The duress of poverty suffered by many indigenous communities must not be dismissed. As we know from the submissions on the ETS, the Treaty settlement forestry concerns held by Maori are serious for similar reasons.

Global warming has very different impacts on indigenous communitites and the solutions needed will be very different.

Here in Aotearoa we are very aware of sea level rise on the Pacific Islands. The Maldives have a fund for the purpose of purchasing land in order to relocate the entire island. Kiribati are following suit.

In the Arctic, indigenous Yup’ik are looking to relocate an entire village because of rising water levels caused by climate change.

The community of the tiny coastal village of Newtok voted to relocate its 340 residents to new homes 9 miles away, up the Ninglick River. The village, home to indigenous Yup’ik Eskimos, is the first of possibly scores of threatened Alaskan communities that could be abandoned.
Warming temperatures are melting coastal ice shelves and frozen sub-soils, which act as natural barriers to protect the village against summer deluges from ocean storm surges.
We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council.

Meanwhile in other parts of the world water scarcity is the issue

In the African nation of Kenya, the Samburu tribe is on the verge of a food and economic crisis, the U.N. said, as lengthy droughts kill livestock that provides income and sustenance for the community. In Mexico, highland Mayan farmers are fighting to survive amid decreasing rainfall, unseasonal frost and unprecedented changes in daytime temperatures, the U.N. reported. These conditions are forcing the farmers to plant alternative crops and to search for other sources of irrigation.

The Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change was an excellent start to developing an international indigenous position for Copenhagen. Solutions to climate change issues cannot avoid dealing with the self determination of indigenous people, that is the right to have control over thier own resources, economic development and cultural practice. Neither can the solutions take a one size fits all approach nor rely solely on market mechanisms to provide a just outcome. The long term economic inequities imposed on many indigenous communities must also be addressed

If indigenous people are not at the table from the beginning of the discussions the solutions will be neither effective nor fair. We have long experience of failure in this in Aotearoa. Lets hope that the rest of the world learns from our mistakes.

The only way to save the economy is to save the climate with it.  As Johann Hari in The Independent notes:

The Wall Street Crash hadn’t happened for 80 years. The Arctic Crash hasn’t happened for three million years: that’s the last time there was watery emptiness at the top of the world. The Arctic is often described as the canary in the coal mine. As one Arctic researcher put it to me this week: the canary is dead. It’s time to clear the mine, and run.

This isn’t a problem that we can, to quote John Key out of context, ‘put on the backburner’ while we resolve the issues surrounding our share portfolios and family trusts.

But time is exactly what we don’t have. The key to understanding why lies in grasping the difference between a two-degree celcius rise in global temperatures and a three-degree rise. At first glance, neither sounds like a big deal. If you go out for a picnic and the temperature rises by three degrees, you take off your jacket. But if your body heats up one or two degrees, you get sick and take to your bed. If it heats by three degrees and doesn’t go back, you die. The ecosystem isn’t a picnic; it’s more like your body. Small variations in global temperatures have vast consequences. The last Ice Age was only six degrees colder than today. A global rise of just 0.8 degrees has melted the Arctic.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

And what does Jeanette have to say?

We won’t fix this one by changing light bulbs. It’s really, really scary.

That pretty much sums it up. The scientists have reported that at some locations, the methane release is 100 times normal background levels, so this is a meltdown significantly greater than business as usual.

The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

It is truly disturbing that such an important indicator of anthropogenic global warming gets such short shrift in the main stream media. We should be responding as if our lives depended on it. Because they do. tick. tick. tick. tick…

Of course, for some this is a good thing:

Shipping companies are already getting ready to exploit the new routes. The Bremen-based Beluga Group says it will send the first ship through the North-east passage – cutting 4,000 nautical miles off the voyage from Germany to Japan – next year. And Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, last week announced that all foreign ships entering the North-west passage should report to his government – a move bound to be resisted by the US, which regards it as an international waterway.

But, as No Right Turn notes, we’re not just talking about less ice hockey and polar bears, here.  The flow on effects as this trend continues could well be catastrophic if we don’t act soon.

Image credit: The Telegraph

Detailed measurements from a Greenland ice core showed pollutants from burning coal–the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead–were much higher than expected.

Luckily things have improved from the beginning of the last century when some really dirty coal was being burnt. But that’s still a lot of heavy metal potentially finding its way into our food chain. Well, not my food chain, because I don’t eat food from the Arctic, but all those North Americans and Europeans. But guess it will make our clean Antarctic food chain look more appealing?

Hat tip – Treehugger