Kuuvik River Expedition Science

“Average Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years.”
                                              - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2 February 2007, Paris

In April 1896, one month before A.P. Low began his journey to survey the Kuuvik River, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius published a paper about how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can influence average surface temperatures on the planet Earth.  The article was the first to quantitively determine how increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere could raise temperatures, especially in the polar regions, and grip our world in a ruthless climate warming trend.
 
Arrhenius was prophetic to write that: “the temperature in the Arctic regions would rise 8°C to 9°C if the carbonic acid (carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) increased 2.5 to 3 times its present value.”  The reason, he correctly realized, has to do with albedo dynamics.  After he won his Nobel Prize in chemistry, Arrhenius went on to suggest that the burning of fossil fuels by humans will double the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere -- yet per the pollution rates of that era he predicted it would take approximately 3000 years.  Regrettably for the Arctic and we the people of Earth, due to the accelerating rate and increasing volume of human greenhouse gas emissions to the sky, a doubling of the pre-industrial era amount of CO2 in our atmosphere now seems likely to occur before 2060.
 
At present, average temperatures in the Arctic are warming quickly and larger changes are projected.  In Nunavik, like in all other parts of the Arctic, average mean winter temperatures are now anticipated to increase by 4–7 °Celsius (7.2-12.6 °Fahrenheit) within 100 years.  This warming is not a pleasant trend for the Inuit of Nunavik; their traditional way of life is threatened.  Inuit traditions that have served to perpetuate their culture for thousands of years are being altered because of the warming Arctic.  Environmental change is reducing the amount and duration of snow and ice cover, disturbing the timing of the seasons, driving animals and customs adapted to snow and ice toward extinction, making day-to-day weather more unpredictable, and transforming entire ecosystems by introducing unfamiliar flora and fauna species into what used to be recognizable Arctic landscapes.

Humans are artificially modulating the energy balance of the climate system by changing the atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.  The thermal equilibrium our planet is being distorted, and this is dramatically evidenced by ongoing harsh environmental changes in the polar regions.  In the Arctic, moreover, environmental changes caused by hotter temperature trends are now resulting in the acceleration of global warming through climate feedbacks like  permafrost melt.  Given the unavoidable reality that our whole world depends on the Arctic for cooling via elaborate atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems, the ongoing warming of the Arctic has severe implications for each and every society, economy and ecosystem that is currently in existence.

Looking ahead, climate model simulations indicate that Arctic near surface air temperatures will continue to warm-up during the course of the next century, due to humanity's odd inclination to ritually pollute the atmosphere on a massive scale with heat-trapping greenhouse gases.  Furthermore, Arctic temperature increases, and also year-to-year Arctic temperature variability, are projected to be much greater than the global average over the next one hundred years.  The simple message from such computer model results is that the Arctic is increasingly vulnerable to extreme climate change.

Most future climate change scenarios are formulated per the findings of computer climate models that are programmed to make projections of incremental change.  Such computer climate models generally extrapolate linear trends that are somewhat predictable -- mathematically accounting for a multitude of biogeochemistry interactions amongst the atmosphere, oceans, land, and the human technosphere -- and thus standardized simultaneous equation computation methodologies make it possible for humanity to routinely forecast the macro-scale evolution of our Earth’s climate system.
 
However, let not our probable certainties keep us from acknowledging uncertainty, there is no guarantee that the near-future trajectory of our Earth’s climate will be a fairly smooth progression of gradual change.  Indeed, further to human knowledge of existing paleo-climatic data sets, there is also the potential for the Earth to undergo accelerated climate transformations because of atypical, parameter-changing, phase transitions -– like CO2 sink saturation.  We know that Earth has endured decadal-scale abrupt climate changes before, moreover we know that careless human meddling with the chemical equilibrium of our atmosphere could trigger such climate surprises, yet we humans do not know how to comprehensively simulate all the potential biogeochemical ‘tipping points’ within our general circulation climate models -- it cannot be done.  All the more reason, then, for us to honor our thus far mediocre international commitments to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.