Environmentalists vs Inuit. And as we all know, the scientists are always right. Even if they don’t live anywhere near the polar bears, they’re always right.

“Nunavut is really not addressing the science, and to date there has not been any report released to back up the position of Nunavut.”

Speaking of science, the polar bear emerged as a species roughly 110,000-130,000 years ago, diverging from the brown bear as it migrated north. It was only about 10,000 years ago that Polar bears changed their molar teeth significantly to adapt to the mainly carnivorous diet during the last glaciation period.

Mankind is currently a part of the Cenozoic era between mass extinctions that periodically wipe out all life on Earth. Bears emerged in the late Eocene to early middle Miocene [38-18 million years], but did not emerge into the recognizable animal we know by sight until the Pliocene period about 4 million years ago. Polar Bears are an evolutionary divergence caused by the glacial Pleistocene epoch, in which we are still technically experiencing, with this species emerging in its current form during the Holocene, a time coinciding with the advent of mankind’s entire recorded history.

Hence, polar bears have been around two-hundredths of 1 per cent of the third era of complex life forms on the planet. If this species is merely an adaption to the last glacial maximum, I don’t see why mankind is so surprised to see them disappear with the retreat of the polar ice.

Nunavut 1 European Union 1

Nunavut’s legislature passed a ban on European booze 9-0, even though it could violate international trade agreements, because the EU banned seal products last year.

A Nunavut MLA said that the Territory won’t go completely dry.

“You’ve got to remember, we’re not making it illegal for people to order European liquor in Nunavut. They can still do it through a government permit and get it from Ottawa, Montreal and even Yellowknife. It’s just at the government liquor stores … we’re not going to sell the liquor.”

Photo: Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff gives a thumbs up while eating a seal meat appetizer on Wednesday. By Chris Wattie / Reuters.

If there’s one thing that’s united many Canadians from all political stripes, it’s fighting back against the self-righteous, ignorant animal rights activists passing themselves off as the European Union. Practically all of Canada’s political establishment has spoken out for the rights of Canadian hunters to continue their long tradition of culling seals along the Gulf of St.Lawrence.

That season is almost upon us again, beginning in late March and the first or second week of April off Newfoundland. Canada’s largest export market for seal pelts has been Norway, but has also traded with Germany, Greenland, and China. As the pelts have lost their value due to negative animal rights campaigns, seal meat has begun to pick up as a strong market in Asia.

Prior to the 2009 European Union ban on Canadian seal products, total Canadian seal product exports were valued at $18 million Canadian.

On Wednesday, MPs and senators of all political parties joined for a luncheon in the House of Commons featuring seal. It is the first time that seal was featured on the menu in the 100 year history of Parliament Hill.

While the menu was meant as a means of promoting seal meat, it was also a slap to the face of the European ban. Inuit Canadians were recently snubbed at a G7 Finance Ministers summit in Nunavut when they featured a luncheon that was boycotted by the Europeans. Nunavut has since responded by threatening to ban European alcohol.

Michael Ignatieff has spoken out against the European ban before to the British media. In May of 2009 he told the Telegraph that the ban was misguided.

“We look at the culling of deer in Scotland and wolves in Europe by farmers and find it very frustrating to see this reaction to a carefully regulated and managed cull here, which is an economic mainstay of some of the poorest communities in Canada,” he said.

“Europe’s inability or refusal to see the seal cull for what is smacks of hypocrisy and misunderstanding.

“Paul McCartney, I love your music – but leave the seals to the people who know them. This is not marginal to us, this is very important.”

Unfortunately for Mr.Ignatieff, not everybody is playing ball. Liberal MP Mac Harb is taking his one-man fight to Parliament Hill in an attempt to pass a private member’s bill to ban the commercial seal hunt in Canada. Siding with the Humane Society International and a climate scientist, Mr.Harb warned that the seal hunt should also be cancelled because global warming has melted the sea ice off of the east coast of Canada.

Conservative Minister for Fisheries Gail Shea has urged Michael Ignatieff to reign in Mr.Harb.

“It is very unfortunate that the Liberal leader is allowing a member of his caucus to attack the seal hunt at a time when all Canadians should be united behind our sealers and behind our northern and coastal communities,” Ms. Shea said in the House of Commons on Monday. “I would also encourage the Liberals to take a clear stand on this issue. If they support Canadian coastal communities, then please stand up for them.”

But the seal ban has probably already done irreparable damage to the industry. Canadian seal exports were worth $9.7 million last year, nearly half the value of $18 million from 2006. This is bad news for the industry, particularly the Inuit, who have been hoping that seal meat exports would create a financial boom for Northern communities.

I may be the only person who finds this remotely interesting, but when I punched in the previous graphs from 1951-2005, I felt like I wasn’t fully addressing the Arctic melting claim, since the years in which most of the melting were claimed, specifically 2006 and 2007, were absent from the graph. That wasn’t on purpose. That was because they’re not available from environment Canada. The data set I found matches up with the Environment Canada historical data when I cross-referenced them, so it looks good to go. Here was the result:

There has definitely been above average warm years in the Arctic during the past five years, with the exception of 2004, which remains the second coldest year on record in 58 years of collected data. The last four years drop the 58-year mean temperature from an even -18 Celsius to -17.8 Celsius. With the new data set, six of the past eight years have been the warmest in Alert. 2006 becomes the new warmest temperature at -15.3 Celsius, beating the previous 1981 low of -15.9 Celsius.

2007 becomes third warmest at -16 Celsius; 2009 is fourth warmest at -16.1 Celsius; 1998, 1996, 2008, and 2005 round out the top eight. If you look at the previous graph, the trendline now becomes more noticeable.

What I do want to stress, however, is that this by no means confirms anthropogenic global warming. What it does, is show a very small data set that proves that the Arctic has been unusually warm for the past five years, in an otherwise relatively stable timeline from records dating back to 1951. Four years of warming does not a case for AGW make. But let’s punch in the numbers for summer and winter using the new data set as well, to see what turns up.

Now look at that. The new data has done nothing to disturb the 58 year trendline of declining summer temperatures. In fact, 2004-2007 temperatures in July were below the statistical average for Alert. The warmest summers appear to have occurred way back in the fifties. Adding the four years does nothing to the mean temperature of 3.5 Celsius for July, while the year widely cited as being responsible for the most warming, 2007, recorded the third coldest July in 58 years. So we’re going to have to look at the data added to the winter:

Because we’re fortunate enough to be in March, I managed to grab the data from this past February as well, adding five years to the chart. As you can see, all six of the past winters have been unusually mild in the Arctic. So, if anything, it isn’t the summer that is skewing the temperatures, but mild winters. By “mild” of course, I’m still referring to temperatures ranging from -28 Celsius to -32 Celsius. The previous 54 year average of -33.4 Celsius changes to -33.1 Celsius, a 0.3 degree warmth from the past five years. Three of the four warmest winters on record occurred in 2005, 2007, and 2008. The most recent February was 12th warmest from a 59 year data set.

Again, all this proves is that we are having milder than average winters, that we have anomalous temperature increases from the annual mean for five years in a row in the Arctic, but that there is nothing conclusive to point toward a long-term warming trend. I think this is backed up by the fact that summer temperatures continue to be around the statistical norm.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with any more statistics for a while. I promise.

Call me crazy, but I ran the average annual temperatures from Environment Canada for Alert, Nunavut, through a graph to see what the trendline would look like. I figured that Alert would be much more immune to regional greenhouse effects as a result of cloud cover, which Toronto obviously suffers from, as well as other large urban centres who take temperature recordings near airports.

The data record is extraordinarily consistent. The average annual temperature in the Arctic has ranged between -16 to -18 Celsius from 1951 to 2005, with a mean temperature of -18 Celsius. Which is interesting because the past five years on record have recorded temperatures ranging from -19.4 Celsius to -16.7 Celsius. That’s a variance from the mean temperature of 1.4 degrees colder and 1.3 degrees warmer, which is quite a bit on both sides. The average temperature for the past decade has been -17.5 Celsius, or 0.5 degrees warmer than the previous 54 years on record.

The warmest year on record in Alert, the high Arctic, took place in 1981 at -15.9 Celsius. The second warmest year was 1998 at -16.3 Celsius. It’s true that the nineties appear to have been responsible for the main variance along the timeline, with two of the three warmest years occurring in the nineties, while two in the top six come from the eighties. Only 2005 made it into the top ten for warmest, the time period which is cited as leading up to the great Arctic warming period in the late “aughts”. But 2004 ranks as the second coldest on record in 54 years of data, at -19.4. The coldest of all was in 1979 at -19.7.

But because Alert has a huge temperature range swing, I decided to graph average winter and summer temperatures as well, to see what the variance is there. Instead of the entire summer, I chose July as being clearly the warmest month, and February as the coldest month, even though the average difference between January, February, and March is only a degree. This gives a five month spacing between temperature readings, instead of the proper six, but it will more accurately reflect record cold and record warm temperatures.

Alert July Temperature Variance 1951-2005: Environment Canada

What’s interesting about this graph is that it shows very little variation over the long term, but perhaps surprisingly, the trendline shows a decline in temperatures over the past 54 years in Alert during the summer. The average summer temperature has been 3.5 Celsius in July, with the past 10 years showing a warming variance of an almost statistically insignificant +0.2 Celsius. The warmest July on record occurred in 1956, at 6.2 Celsius, while the second warmest was in 2003 at 5.8 Celsius. Five of the six warmest July’s in Alert occurred in the fifties and sixties. The coldest July was recorded in 1955 at 0.7 Celsius. The last year for which temperature data is available, 2005, is ranked 40th warmest from 54 years of data.

Alert February Temperature Variance 1951-2005: Environment Canada

The fluctuations for February were very surprising, particularly the massive cold snap in 1979. The trendline over the past 54 years is almost a complete flatline. If it’s getting warmer in the winter, it certainly hasn’t happened over the past 20 years. The average temperature, despite massive fluctuations from year to year, has been -33.4 Celsius. The past ten years of data has been -33.2 Celsius, which is again just +0.2 degrees warmer. The warmest February on record was -26.6 Celsius in 1978, while the second warmest occurred in the last year of the data set, 2005, at -27.3 Celsius. The top 10 warmest years have a great variety of time periods, with two occurring in the sixties, and three in the eighties. The coldest February on record occurred in 1979 at -43.9 Celsius, with the second coldest occurring during the “warmest decade” in 2002, when it hit -39.2 Celsius.

Make of all this data as you will. Adding in the years 2006-2009 is unlikely to influence the results significantly, but if anyone has that data set, feel free to pass it along.