Arctic Heat Wave.

• Author: Johansen, Bruce E.
• Position: Effects of global warming on the environment in the Arctic

It's another warm day in Iqaluit, capital of the new semi-sovereign Inuit nation of Nunavit in the Canadian Arctic. The bizarre weather is the talk of the town. The urgency of global warming is on everyone's lips.

While George W. Bush stalls with talk about needing "sound science," the temperature hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit on July 28 in this Baffin Island community that nudges the Arctic Circle. That's thirty-five degrees above the July average of 47, making it comparable to a 115- to 120-degree day in New York City or Chicago.

It is the warmest summer anyone in the area can remember. Swallows, sandflies, and robins are making their debuts, and pine pollen is affecting people as never before. Travelers joke about forgetting their shorts, sunscreen, and mosquito repellant--all now necessary equipment for a globally warmed arctic summer.

In Iqaluit (pronounced "Eehalooeet"), a warm, desiccating westerly wind raises whitecaps on nearby Frobisher Bay and rustles carpets of purple saxifrage flowers as people emerge from their overheated houses (which have been built to absorb every scrap of passive solar energy) with ice cubes wrapped in hand towels. The wind raises eddies of dust on Iqaluit's gravel roads as residents swat at the slow, corpulent mosquitoes.

Welcome to the thawing ice-world of the third millennium. Around the Arctic, in Inuit villages connected by the oral history of traveling hunters as well as by e-mail now, weather watchers are reporting striking evidence that global warming is an unmistakable reality. Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island, above the Arctic Circle, is sinking into the permafrost. Shishmaref, an Inuit village on the far-western lip of Alaska sixty miles north of Nome, is being washed into the newly liquid (and often stormy) Arctic Ocean as its permafrost base dissolves.

In the Arctic, a world based on ice and snow is melting away.

"We have never seen anything like this. It's scary, very scary," says Ben Kovic, Nunavut's chief wildlife manager. "It's not every summer that we run around in our T-shirts for weeks at a time."

At 11:30 A.M. on a Saturday, Kovic is sitting in his backyard, repairing his fishing boat, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans in the warm wind, with many hours of Baffin's eighteen-hour July daylight remaining. On a nearby beach, Inuit children are building sand castles with plastic shovels and buckets, occasionally dipping their toes in the still-frigid sea water.

"The glaciers are turning brown," he says, speculating that melting ice may be exposing debris and that air pollution may be a...