Cold weather speak

edit

With a little editing to remove the weather reference, one of your sentences is:

He mentioned that when he was out in far northern Alaska for several days [...], he noticed that English speakers began to speak a lot farther back in their throats, becoming similar to Inuit-type voicing.

This makes it sound like it could be a straightforward case of substrate influence, i.e. whereby Inuit-influenced English could be recognized as a distinct variety. If so, then you might have an explanation that has nothing to do with the weather. I'd be more persuaded by this kind of 'language-internal' explanation than the 'language-external' one based on the weather.

Of course, the question would then become what specific attributes of Inuit are leading to that specific outcome in this particular variety of English. That's not something I have an answer to, but it seems like a tractable problem to investigate.

To me it sounds kind of like a meteoro-phonological Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Consider French as spoken in (the arguably cold in the winter) province of Quebec. It's clearly a different language (accent-wise) than Continental French. Must be a weather correlation....

... not really. It's closer to how French was spoken by the French aristocracy back when Quebec belonged to France.

Et cetera. There is no quantitatively "nice" sounding language: for every pot there is a lid.