Inuit Intuition

As you dig your way from under the drift of chad heaped up in the political winds of Florida post-Presidential election recounts, keep an eye out for an Associated Press story concerning Inuit who live in the Arctic on Banks Island in Canada’s Northwest Territories. They seem convinced the world is getting warmer, that climate is changing.

According to AP, the Inuit have noticed that permafrost is melting, there are fewer seal and polar bear to hunt, icepacks are thinning, and mosquitoes are more plentiful. AP attributes to tribal member Rosemarie Kuptana this quote: "We can’t read the weather like we used to." Graham Ashford, who heads a project studying changes in Inuit lands, concludes, "It provides strong support for the conclusion that climate change is not just a theory."

We recognize the necessity to tread carefully where there is a possibility of thin ice in today’s political climate. So, with all due respect for the intuition of native peoples and for the passion of the environmental advocacy group that funded this particular study, let’s nevertheless take a peek at the monthly temperature data for Banks Island made available under the auspices of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC provides their data to the research community as monthly temperature anomalies – in other words "departures from normal" – for 5° latitude by 5° longitude grid boxes.

When we areally-average the monthly temperature data for the two grid cells that cover Banks Island, we get the results depicted in Figure 1.

You’ll notice that the record is full of missing values, particularly after 1970. Noticing that, you may also detect something puzzling in light of Inuit intuition and environmental advocacy as reported by Associated Press – there’s no warming in the record. Linear trend analysis reveals no significant warming from 1948-1999. A t-test shows temperatures of the 1950s are no different from temperatures in the 1990s. And among the thirty warmest temperature anomalies in the record, only one is in the 1990s.

No doubt, the way of life is changing for the Inuit of Banks Island. But to blame global warming as the source of change in the absence of a detection of warming in the temperature dataset developed and relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not credible.

Figure 1. IPCC monthly temperature anomalies (°C) for Banks Island, 1948-1999.