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It's tempting to think of climate change in terms of elusive numbers and future scenarios -- a spiking line graph of global temperature, a virtual glacier receding on a climatologist's computer screen. But the ravages of climate change are already being felt by people and communities. Northern towns like Churchill, dependent on one major resource for its economic survival, may be the most vulnerable. As the ice on the Hudson Bay disappears, biologists and climatologists predict the town's bears will soon be the first polar bear population wiped out by global warming. This is not welcome news in Churchill. The town's fate and that of the bears may be terribly intertwined.
"The bears are a big draw because they're an exotic animal," town counselor Mike Iwanowsky explained about the town's booming tourism industry. "They're a symbolic animal. You think of the North, you think of polar bears. You think of winter, you think of polar bears. They're, I don't know, 'chic.'" Iwanowsky, a brawny man with a daunting red goatee, was clearly not comfortable using the word. After falling on hard times in the '70s, Churchill found a way to leverage the menace surrounding it into big business. More than 10,000 tourists now visit the self-made "Polar Bear Capital of the World" each fall. For six weeks, beginning in mid-October, when the bears amass near town, beat-up school buses cart visitors toward the tundra every morning and all the restaurants fill up at the end of the day. Hotels and shops sell embroidered fleeces and high-priced bear kitsch.
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Churchill's bear population is the southernmost in the world and, like its human population, subsists under less than ideal conditions. Hudson Bay is not frozen all year. After roaming the ice all winter, gorging on seals, the bears decamp where the last ice melts at the southeast of town. They spend the summer on land, living off reserves in what's called "waking hibernation." But an influx of fresh water into the bay makes the area north of Churchill first to freeze again. And so, each fall, the bears lurch off the tundra toward it, anticipating their first opportunity to get back on the ice where they'll spend another winter ambushing seal pups. The town, of course, is in their way.
But Hudson Bay now melts earlier in the spring and freezes later in the fall, leaving the bears marooned on land for longer stretches of time. Ian Stirling, a leading polar bear researcher with the Canadian Wildlife Service, says the summer season has extended by about three weeks over the last 30 years. Churchill's bear population has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last 20 years, and U.S. and Canadian biologists have correlated the decline to earlier spring melts. Recently a female bear was found torn apart and devoured by a larger male -- which, like the increase in bears' venturing into town, may be a sign of "nutritional stress." Meanwhile, projections show Hudson Bay becoming nearly free of ice, year-round, by mid- to late-century. William A. Gough, a climatologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, has spent a decade analyzing 35 years of sea ice records in Hudson Bay. He's projected its future using six different climate models created by government agencies around the world. "The Canadian model shows total ice reduction by 2050," he said. By 2080, when the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will have tripled, the other models show the same result. "By the end of the century," he said, "there will be no platform for polar bears." And no platform for bear tourism.
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/17/churchill/
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