How is global warming impacting Greenlanders and Polar Bears?
From his trawler that motors along the Nuuk fjord, fisherman Johannes Heilmann has watched helplessly in recent years as climate change takes its toll on Greenland. Global warming is occurring twice as fast in the Arctic as in the rest of the world. Heilmann, in his 60s with a craggy, rugged face from years of work in the outdoors, says he and his colleagues can no longer take their dogsleds out to the edge of the ice floes to fish because the ice isn’t thick enough to carry the weight. And yet the freezing waters with large chunks of ice are too difficult to navigate in their small fishing boats, making fishing near impossible. “We can’t use the sleds any more, the ice isn’t thick enough,” laments Heilmann, saying he now has to rely on bird hunting, and sometimes seal hunting, while waiting for the summer months to go fishing. At Ilulissat, more than 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of the Arctic Circle, Emil Osterman tells local daily Sermitsiaq how “in 1968, when I was 13, we went f
