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Abstract THE INTERNATIONAL pOLAR YEAR: SCIENCE FOR SOCIETY James W. C. White The International Polar Year of 2007–2008 comes at a critical
time. Humans are now the major agent of environmental change on
the planet, including the Earth’s climate system, its nutrient
cycles, and its land surfaces. As modern societies move from a strategy
of intense resource withdrawal and use, to a new paradigm of sustainable
development, we need a better scientific understanding of how our
planet functions and how humans can best function within its limits.
In this regard, it is critical that we improve our understanding
of the polar regions. These regions contain many of our best archives
of past environments, including historical levels of greenhouse
gases, volcanic activity, and solar activity - the key factors that
control Earth’s energy and climate. Arctic regions are very
sensitive, often providing early warnings of environmental and climatic
change, whether that change is anthropogenic or natural. Earth’s
polar regions bear a disproportionate burden of the current and
future impacts of these changes. Here, temperature shifts are larger,
ecosystem changes more pronounced, and impacts of human activity
as well as impacts on human activities can be more severe. Also,
in the polar regions we find keys to the crucial aspects of future
climate changes, including sea level rise, abrupt climate change,
and potential releases of huge amounts of carbon currently locked
in frozen soils and lakes. In this talk, I explore the basic fundamentals
of world climate change, and how polar regions are key to informing
us about how our planet functions and how it might change in the
future. |