JANIE LEASK: Good morning. Thank you all for coming out. I hope it would be safe to drive for all of you this morning. I'm Janie Leask, manager of community relations for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company and president of the board for Commonwealth North, and fresh back from 80 degree temperature in Maui. Sorry. Before we start this morning if you do have cell phones we would appreciate you, if you would please turn them off or put them on silent. And I did mine just a couple minutes ago.

Today we're going to hear from a very knowledgeable panel about what's happening and what's going on in global climate change and what's happening within the private sector. I would like -- and before we get started, to thank Susanne Fleek with the Alaska Conservation Foundation for coordinating this morning's presentation.

I'd like to now introduce our head table and speakers and then turn it over to Mead Treadwell, who is then going to moderate the program and handle the questions today. So to my immediate left we have Mead Treadwell. Mead, you're on a different page.

MEAD TREADWELL: Quite often.

MS. LEASK: You're quite often on a different page. That wasn't mean to be a political statement. Mead is our moderator today. And he's CEO of Venture Ad Astra, a Commissioner of U.S. Arctic Research Commission and senior fellow, Institute of the North. Mead is a board member of Commonwealth North, has been a board member for a long time, as well as the co-chair of our program committee.

Next to me is Robert Corell, one of our panels today and a former speaker at Commonwealth North. It's great to have you back this morning. Thank you. He's a senior policy fellow at the policy program of the American Meteorological Society, and recently completed at appointment as a senior research fellow Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of the the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Dr. Corell is currently engaged in research concerned with both the sciences of global change and with the interface between science and public policy, particularly research activities that are focused on global and regional climate change and related environmental issues, and science to facilitate understanding of vulnerability in sustainable developments.

He is the chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and International Assessment of the impacts of the climate variability change, and UV increases in the arctic region. And chair of the International Long Range Planning Committee for the Arctic. He is chair of the board of the Digital Service Foundation that oversees the design of the next generation internet web browser that focuses on planet Earth, with a special emphasis on the arctic region and its people.

Dr. Corell received his degrees at Case Western Reserve University and MIT, and has held appointments at the Woods Hole Institutional of Oceanography, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the University of Washington and Case Western Reserve University.

Next to Dr. Corell is Charles Christopher, another one of our panelists. He is a CO2 program manager of BP-Americas in the upstream technology group of BP in Houston, Texas. He has over 30 years industry experience in all phases of improved oil recovery and is an internationally recognized expert in the area.

He is co-leader of the Sequestrian Monitoring and Verification Team of the CO2 Capture Project and has initiated international networks in association with the IEA Greenhouse Gas Program on the subject of monitoring and verification of geological sequestration. He is the BP surface liaison for the BP-Ford Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University that involved carbon science, hydrogen economy, CO2 capture, and subsurface storage.

Next is Kellee James, another panelist. An economist with the Chicago Climate Exchange. A self-regulatory exchange that administers a voluntary greenhouse gas reduction and trading program for North American. Prior to joining the Chicago Climate Exchange, Ms. James worked as a consultant for the World Bank as well as for the Inter-American Foundation where she evaluated the programs that included both corporate and small business interests in Brazil, Mexico and Honduras.

In addition to her work in Latin America, Ms. James contributes to the field a corporate social responsibility. She is currently serving on the board of Net Impact, a non- profit membership organization that promotes socially responsible and environmentally sustainable business practices. Ms. James has completed an MBA with a focus on international finance and a masters of arts in international development from American University in Washington, D.C.

And next to Ms. James is Bob Loeffler, our final panelist and lone Alaskan, currently with Jade North, a small Alaskan firm that specializes in mining and natural resource consulting. He has a masters degree in civil engineering from Stanford University and a masters degree in regional planning from Harvard University. He has lived in Alaska since 1977 when he began working for the U.S. Geological Survey and then moved on to the Department of Natural Resources.

In the early 1990s he was planning director for the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council, the federal state agency that worked to restore Prince William Sound after the 1989 oil spill. He came back to the Department of Natural Resources to coordinate permitting of large mines in 1996 and in 1999 became director of the Alaska Division of Mining, Land and Water, a position he held until November of last year. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome our head table.

I'd also like to welcome three new members of Commonwealth North this morning. Stacy Schubert, president of the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, Baxter Burton is the CEO of the Alaska Heart Institute, Brenda Shepard is the chief financial officer of TelAlaska. So welcome this morning. And thank you all for joining Commonwealth North.

Before I turn it over to Mead, on your table are question cards. Please, if you do have a question of any of our panelists, take one of those, hold them up and a staff member will come around and collect them. So let me turn it now over to Mead.

MR. TREADWELL: Janie, thank you and good morning. Jeff Lowenfels, who picked me up wandering around the Cook wondering where our meeting was this morning, reminds me that one of our first speakers of Commonwealth North was a professor, we think from MIT, named Browning, who came and predicted that volcanic activity was going to cool the earth in the next 20 years. So here we are.

I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Bob Corell to our podium. Bob was here to give us a sneak preview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment before it was released to and accepted by the eight arctic nations in the Arctic Council in November of 2004. Since that time the arctic nations have committed to increasing our monitoring of weather, working on mitigation of impacts and taking the case to the globe. I've said it was an important factor then that the United States actually signed on as a grieved party to global warming because of our status as an arctic nation. And Bob, I know you've clocked a lot of frequent flyer miles since that time and I hope you can give us a quick report. Thank you.