The Arctic Messenger - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 20

equally sensitive to climate change. In fact, the Arctic and parts of the Antarctic are prob-
ably the most sensitive regions on our planet. The Arctic has warmed (particularly over the
Greenland ice sheet) more than twice as much as the global average over the last 50 years.
Clearly, this is of great concern to Inuit, whose way of life depends on sea ice. However,
there is more to the story. The Arctic is a major element in a complex atmospheric and
oceanographic system that moves heat from the tropics towards the poles and keeps our
climate in a happy state of homeostasis. Later, we will look at how some of this works,
what elements of it are susceptible to change, whether there are any signals to suggest that
our global homeostatic mechanisms are in trouble and, if so, what the consequences may
be. This knowledge should be catching the attention of our politicians. Our increased un-
derstanding of Arctic environmental science enables us to listen to the Arctic Messenger.
In the last chapters, we will examine the extent to which the Arctic Messenger has been
heard.
As already mentioned, this topic is a personal selection of evidence to illustrate how
theArcticenvironmentischangingandabriefexplanationofwhattheinternationalpolitic-
al community has done or not done in response. To be practical, I have concentrated on cli-
mate change, POPs and mercury and, to a lesser degree, radioactivity, stratospheric ozone
depletion and acid rain. Others may have made different selections. I simply offer a person-
al reflection and I hope colleagues who have travelled along the same or parallel roads but
have different memories of the details will forgive me. However, I am confident we would
all share the same goal: to help make accessible to the general public the new knowledge
of how the Arctic environment is changing and the global implications of such change.
To see how the Arctic Messenger gained a voice, we need to look back as far as the
late 1980s. This will form the subject of the next chapter .
1 The range reflects different definitions of the circumpolar Arctic and of the term indigenous .
2 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an ongoing scientific assessment process
tasked with providing information to support negotiations on international policy for dealing with climate
change conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). See
Appendix I for a brief description of the UNFCCC and of the IPCC.