This text is taken from the Courrier de la Planète. Click here to subscribe.
Marie-Michèle Ouellet-Bernier is a climatologist like no other. To supercomputers, she prefers historical documents. And rather than predicting the climate of the future, it strives to draw the contours of a bygone climate.
The Quebec researcher, who practices “historical climatology”, studies the weather in the past along the Labrador coast and around the Hudson Strait. It goes back as far as possible in time, sometimes as far back as the end of the 18th century, depending on the availability of sources.
Its raw material: the weather records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the diaries of the Moravian missionaries, the documentation of the Royal Canadian Air Force, but also life stories, autofiction novels, poems and songs that inhabitants of this isolated territory – mostly people from the South – have left behind.
“Historical sources contribute to understanding the past climate,” says Ms. Ouellet-Bernier, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Laval University. Despite the uncertainty of old measuring instruments and the subjectivity of the accounts, these sources open a window on the climate as it was experienced by the population: a perspective rich in lessons.
“Inner withdrawal in winter”
Traditionally, scientists reconstruct the climate of the past using environmental markers, such as tree rings or fossils from algal blooms. They then feed this information into large climate models, which extrapolate the results to describe an overall picture.
“The growth of a tree tells us that the summer was warmer in general,” says Ms. Ouellet-Bernier. But maybe at some point that summer, something amazing happened, and the growth of the tree doesn’t reveal it. On the other hand, the human will see it, the extraordinary four-day heat wave. »
Historical climatology also helps to know the climate in winter, while most environmental markers give the pulse of summer conditions. “We see a kind of interior withdrawal in winter; there is much more instrumental data. Navigators went to sea less often, so they had time to read their thermometer at home. »
Sea freeze-up and break-up dates — which vary greatly from year to year — are carefully recorded, as the activities of daily living depended heavily on them. The researcher considers that the freeze-up preceded the first hunt on the ice of the season by five days. The ice breakup, she explains, occurred seven days before the arrival of the first kayak of the season in the village.
Modest warmings
In her doctoral thesis in environmental sciences, defended at UQAM in 2021, the historical climatologist reports certain periods of “climatic rigor”, such as “the year without summer” (1816-1817), on the coast of Labrador. It also links modest past warmings in Nunavik and Labrador to the “North Atlantic Oscillation,” a periodic climate phenomenon.
The portrait that emerges is that of a Far North still spared the consequences of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Today, climate change is hitting hardest at the poles. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the planetary average for about forty years.
“The IPCC [Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat] uses the reference period 1850-1900 to represent the pre-industrial climate, says Ms. Ouellet-Bernier. There are no Environment Canada data for this period in Nunavik. My goal is, in a way, to document this climatic reference in this corner of the world. »
Another part of his work, which relates more to literary studies, consists of poking his nose into old stories to understand the perception of winter by the inhabitants of the Far North. Like today, winter was “both expected and feared,” she writes.
One of the stories she likes is that of Margaret Baikie (1844-1940), born of an Inuit mother and an English father, who recounts her childhood memories in her memoirs. She is more dubious about the writings of Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940), a British doctor on a mission along the Labrador coast, who insists on the “heroic” nature of his adventures.
Eight years after having rubbed shoulders with historical climatology for the first time, Ms. Ouellet-Bernier never tires of it. She believes that the journals of the lighthouse keepers of the North Shore would represent a rich ground to be cleared…