Global warming report on Arctic: Canada has ‘more to lose than it realizes’

By Margaret Munro, Postmedia News
30 May 2011 Canada’s fabled Northwest Passage will not open up to shipping anytime soon, according to a study that warns global warming is a double-edged sword for northern transportation. “And Canada is going to be feeling the harsh edge of the sword more strongly than other Arctic states,” says Scott Stephenson, lead author of the study that forecasts that the Northwest Passage will be the last Arctic shipping route to become ice free. It also predicts huge swaths of Canada’s landscape will become inaccessible by road by mid-century. The implications could be “profoundly negative” for remote communities and mining, energy and timber operations that now depend on winter ice roads, says the study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, that was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The Tibbitt-Contwoyto “diamond road” in the Northwest Territories, said to be the world’s most lucrative ice road, is projected to lose about 17 per cent of its eight to 10 week operating season by 2020. And 400,000 square kilometres of Canada — most of it in the southern Northwest Territories and the northern Prairie provinces — is predicted to become inaccessible by road by mid-century because of milder winters and deeper snow will prevent the ground from freezing solid. “This study would suggest that Canada has more to lose that it realizes,” senior author Laurence Smith, a UCLA climate researcher, said in a telephone interview. “Popular conception has it that the Arctic is thawing, that it is opening up, and we’ll go in there and get the resources,” he says. “This study shows it is not as simple as that. In fact much of the landscape will become less accessible.“ …

Canada has ‘more to lose than it realizes’: global warming report on Arctic