This post originally appeared on VICE Canada
It's pretty easy to get apocalyptic when describing US President-elect Donald Trump's stance on climate change.
He has said global warming is a hoax made up by China for to disadvantage American manufacturers (which China's government has since refuted).
He's tapped fellow deniers for key roles, including a Republican congressman who believes the earth's atmosphere is actually cooling as energy adviser, and a turtle cleverly disguised as a fossil fuel loving-loving think tank analyst to head up the transition for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In his first 100 days, Trump is also planning to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, approve the TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline and rescind federal regulations on drilling, fracking, and coal mining.
It's a disaster for the environment.
But let's not kid ourselves. For people living in the Arctic—especially the 60,000 Inuit people living in 53 communities throughout four massive regions—the climate apocalypse is already here.
"The sea level rise and melting permafrost have combined for some of our communities to have literally fallen into the sea, especially in the Western Arctic," Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, told VICE. "There are immediate concerns that we have about the sustainability of some of our communities based on climate change."
Climate scientists and analysts agree the globe must stay below two degrees Celsius—or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—of warming above pre-industrial averages by 2100 in order to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic levels of climate change.
Some countries, including Canada, agreed to an "aspirational goal" of a 1.5 degrees Celsius limit at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference; the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming "marks the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime," according to a recent study written by climate researchers.
But in the Western Canadian Arctic, the annual average temperature has already gone up five degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, says Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law and author of Who Owns the Arctic?: Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North.
The entire region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world due to a trend known as "polar amplification." There's ongoing debate about what causes this phenomenon, with potential factors including large weather systems transporting heat to the poles, increasing snow and ice cover loss, and changes in cloud cover and atmospheric water vapor.
Whatever the reason, the situation has reached absolute crisis level. Sea ice levels in both the Arctic and Antarctica are currently at record lows, while temperatures over the Arctic Ocean are currently 20 degrees Celsius hotter than usual.
"The Arctic exists in a balance between ice and water, between the frozen and unfrozen," Byers told VICE. "A change of just a couple of degrees can dramatically change the Arctic environment. It can transform ice-covered ocean into open water. The effects of climate change are brutally visible in the Arctic today."
To be sure, the trend has been noticed for decades by Inuit elders, hunters, trappers, and fishers.
Paul Crowley, director of the WWF's Canadian Arctic Program, says that Indigenous people had long observed the sun was coming up at a different time of year and angle than usual, only to be dismissed as "crazy" by white Southerners. It turned out that atmospheric conditions had indeed changed, resulting in more humidity and refraction. The elders were right.
That was only the beginning. There have been major shifts in caribou populations in the Eastern Arctic, requiring a hunting moratorium on Baffin Island. Obed says elders have noticed a decline in the quality of the taste of meat from animals, as well as skins for use in clothing.
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