DR. ROBERT CORELL: Yeah, I apologize for that, crook necks. I was a little apologetic about the screen that you've been seeing, on the other hand I just told your chairman -- Joe, thank you for this opportunity, that that's actually a model that we run on anyplace we go to tell people what it's going to look like, and that's 2104 on Cook Inlet.

I'm really pleased to be here -- and we can go ahead, and share with you the results of the past three and a half to four years of work by about 300 scientists from all over the Arctic region, all eight countries plus the UK and a number of other countries have joined together in this thing called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

Can you gentlemen and ladies hear me at the other end? I'm an old college professor so, you know, your voice has to carry in the classroom or you lose it.

The Assessment was put together under the Arctic Council and a group called the International Arctic Science Committee which is a committee of academies of science, about 20 of them from around the northern hemisphere. Many of you know about AMAP and CAFF, they're a part of the Arctic Council arrangement. AMAP deals with contaminants and CAFF deals with the conservation of our flora and fauna. But it's this 300 authors that I want to share with you their work, give you a little progress report, tell you how this is going along. And if we could go to the next slide I'll do so.

I don't need to tell the residents of this region that over the past decade we really have witnessed some substantial changes in the character of our climate. And in our study we also are looking at the increase of UV radiation, ultraviolet radiation due to the depletion of ozone in our atmosphere. We're looking at the entire region of the Arctic, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Canada, ourselves. And so I welcome this opportunity to share with you some of the things we've learned during this past three and a half to four years.

We set out to do two things and we were asked to do this by a meeting of ministers of the eight Arctic countries, usually ministers of foreign affairs or in some cases ministers of environment. Colin Powell's deputy was the representative for the United States when we started this. And we wanted to assess carefully what it is we know about the changing character of the climate all the way from the near term, Jackie, seasonal sorts of changes that we've observed are not quite the character they used to be all the way out to things that occur over many decades and maybe even centuries.

But from a science community perspective we really must go beyond, we have to put that insight, that knowledge in a format and in a framework that allows communities of industry, governments, state governments, citizens, to take that information and integrate it into their policy making or just decision making about the nature of the work here in the north.

I -- we often use the word policy, but it really is about decisions. Many of you in this room make decisions about capital investments that have time scales of 10, 20, 30, 40 years and it's on that time scale that we're seeing some massive changes in the character of the climate of the north. If we can go to the next?

So to do that we're looking at four things. One, what has happened in the past over the last say 100, 200, 300 years. What's happening now and what are the projections, what's the likelihood of things to change over the decade ahead on out to around 2100 and what are the impacts of that, how does that effect everything from human health to ecosystems to the roads and transport systems that -- upon which we all rely for our daily commerce. And then put this in a format and a set of recommendations that can be read by all of you and your counterparts in government and in the local communities around Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Greenland and the like. Okay.

Time scale. We began this enterprise in 2000, it took about three years of planning so the concepts were put in place in about 1997. And here we are in early 2004 and we are obliged to submit formal documentation of all of this at a ministerial meeting of the eight Arctic countries and the six indigenous people organizations like the Aleuts and the Gwich'ins or the Inuits, all the way around to Russia and countries like Sweden and Norway that have major populations of Sommies or what we used to call Lotlanders.

And if I could have the next slide what I want to do now is share with you what have we learned. And we're putting this into two major documents. One which is a -- well, we call it the brick, it's 1,800 pages long, it's an analysis across all kinds of sectors, tell you a little bit about that in a minute. And then a very short, less than 100 pages, hard hitting document that says of all the things we've learned these are the biggies, these are the things you have to worry about. And they're put in, we hope, a very readable form, we have journalists working with us and others to get this out of the scientific vernacular into a language that everybody can understand. So my job in the next few minutes is tell you a little bit of what's going on. Next slide.

First thing, if you look over what's gone on in the recent past, you'll find many things happening. Increases in surface and oceanic temperatures, large scale reductions in sea ice and glacier bog, tell you more about in a minute. Increased river runoff and increases in sea level. Overall increases in precipitation although there are regions in which it's droughting, so you've got a lot of variability. Jackie can tell you that the variability of the weather systems are really remarkable and more so today than they were a decade or two ago. Thawing in the permafrost, shifts in the range of plants and animals and major impacts on the residents of the north.

So we looked at a whole host of sectors and this is not a complete list, but it gives you some idea of what's happening in the ocean and climate, what's happening over grasslands and forest, permafrost, wildlife, human health, indigenous communities, freshwater and the like. Go ahead.

And we tried to do something unique, something never done before and that is to bring the indigenous community with their kind of own history of knowledge about what's going on. They pass this on generation to generation and they have their own peer review system very much like we do in western science, but it comes out differently. And the thing that's fascinated the science community is what they're saying here is almost 100 percent consistent with the scientific knowledge that we dig out of the past through a variety of things. Like we can look at ice cores and many of you probably don't know this, as a glacier forms and transforms itself from snow to ice it makes little tiny spheres, little tiny spheres and they're hollow. And that transformation from snow over to ice captures the air that was present at that moment that the sphere was formed. And we can dig back 4 or 500,000 years in the ice columns, say in Greenland, and then we can go into those little tiny spheres, actually take quite a few of them, and we can tell you what the composition of the atmosphere was, tell you how much CO2 was in there, how much methane, whatever the composition was. But one other beautiful thing is that the atmosphere adjusts itself in temperature by changing the ratio of some radioisotopes. So if we look at those radioisotopes we can tell you what the temperature was and we can do that to parts of a degree. So we can go back 400,000 years and tell you what the temperature was at that location, what the composition of the atmosphere was. So we have a library of the past, tells us what's been going on. Next slide.

Let me read this to you. And I've got two things going on. We talked to hundreds of indigenous people in the north and those of you who can read it, it says nowadays the snow melts earlier in the spring, the lakes and rivers and bogs freeze much later in the autumn. This is from a woman who's an elder in the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Reindeer herding becomes more difficult, you can read the rest.

I have on the background one year picture of snow cover of the northern hemisphere. I wanted to show you this because it tells you the incredible library of facts that we have at our disposal. It tells us where the snow is, the composition of the snow obviously coming from our satellites and we can get fine scale coming down in the Sierra Nevadas, or we can go down at look at the Brooks Range or we could look over in the Canadian Archipelago and see the fine detail of snow cover. Well, that gives you some sense of the kind of data available, we couldn't have done this thing 10 years ago, could not. I could not be here 10 years ago and give you the factual background that's present in this kind of situation. You can go to the next slide.

But when we talk to indigenous people we get these kinds of things. These are not -- they don't tell you how many degrees, but they'll tell you there are more persistent clouds, they'll tell you that the shift in winds are so dramatic that the things they used to rely on are no longer there. I talked to one of the communities here just a couple days ago and they went off several years following the wind 'cause they knew if they went by the wind they would get to where they want to go. And when they got there they were coming back into Kotzebue because the wind did a 180 on them and they could no longer rely on the persistence of weather because weather is the daily expression of climate. And so they're getting confused and you get these constant things about it's not the way it used to be. So let's go to the next slide.

What I want to do now is pretend that you have the opportunity to sit with a CEO, maybe one of you are already one of those or the chairman of the board of your company or the president of the United States or the prime minister of Norway and you have a little time to tell 'em what are the big facts. And I'm going to give you 10 of them. Ten things that are the big issues of change here in the Arctic.

First, we know that climate is changing more rapidly in the Arctic and that much larger changes are projected in the future. Picture over here, I can't remember -- give me the next slide? No, backup. Sorry. This is a picture of the last 1,000 years, here's the last 150 years. And what you're seeing here is the temperature. And this is the temperature of the northern hemisphere, it's even more extreme here in the north, but I had this available. So what's happened is that these temperature changes that you hear all about in the literature are really a product of the last 150, 200 years. Very consistent with the evolution of the industrial revolution and very consistent with our increasing dependence on oil and gas as the energy of commerce, the energy of life and the energy base on which we have grown and developed.

If you then ask yourself what's going to happen in the future, these are five models, we have one from Germany, one from England, one from Canada and two from the United States that tell us pretty much what's going to happen over the next 100 years. And you'll see there's some variability, but out to about 50 years they're all telling us pretty much the same thing, a little divergence and out here we're seeing a temperature increase on the average of three to six degrees here in the Arctic. You're saying well, that's not a very big number. It is two to three times the temperature change that the rest of the planet will feel. And if I asked you what was the difference in the average temperature between now and when this was all glaciated in the glacial period, it's only eight or nine degrees. So three to six degrees is a gigantic number, a huge number. But it doesn't feel that way because it's averaged over every hour of every day of every month of the year. Let's go to the next picture.

It's having an effect on glaciers. I think all of you know here glaciers are melting rapidly. There are no glaciers accreting here in Alaska and if you take the amount of meltwater that comes from every glacier on the planet that's been melting over the last 30 years that goes into the ocean, it accounts for 50 percent of the sea level rise, it's due to glaciers worldwide. That's Alaska. This is a hot spot, one of the hottest spots in the climate change arena across the globe or across the Arctic. Next slide.

But even over in Greenland which we tend to think is more of a big, huge, gigantic ice cube, here's a 10 year picture between 1992 and 2002, you can see the changes. These are the (indiscernible) in the summer, in September, massive increases. You fly over Greenland now you see melt ponds all over the place we didn't see 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time on the dome in the '70s, we never saw melt ponds in August and September. There are melt ponds everywhere. And Greenland, I see it, has come down about 16 percent in the last roughly 20 years. And I made that note about Alaska. Let's go to the next slide.

So if we do a reconstruction of that temperature that I noted to you before, the 1,000 year picture, you see this rapid increase in (indiscernible - background noise) that line across the top is the measurements in 1998, I could put them -- it goes up about a tenth of a degree. And you'll notice if you look -- really squint, you'll see some shaded color here, those are the statistical differences, the fine scale. When she tells you about the weather today she's often talking about things up in here because what we do then is average it over a day or a week or a month. And you'll see this rapid increase across the planet and you'll see an increase of this nature for Western Canada and Alaska, three to four degrees already. Now if you go in your newspaper they'll tell you it's a half of a degree centigrade so it's 10 times more here in Alaska than the global average over the last 30 years. That's a big, big number. Go ahead.

This is more of the same, let's go ahead. But it's patchy. As I tried to tell you, things here in Alaska are a bit different. And this will give you some idea. You'll see that -- let me go to the next slide, that the warmth is here in Western Canada and Alaska and Eastern Russia. Go to the next slide. But if you go around the whole planet you'll still get a rise of a few degrees all the way up to about eight or nine degrees centigrade. And this is a projection for a period of about 2060 to 2089, that's our grand kids when they're in this room. Let's go.

But it's all in the winter, here's those temperatures for every month, see how warm it is -- how much warmer it is in January, February and March and then in October, November and December. The summer not a lot of change. But the real warming is that it doesn't get as cold in the winter. And so we're not going to get a lot hotter in the summer, it'll be somewhat hotter, but the bigger change is in the wintertime. Go ahead.

Some people, well are these models any good, are they toys for scientists or are they really serious enterprises. I can tell you the nations of the world have invested substantial sums of money. You've all heard about super computers, there are really two reasons we have super computers, one is for our national defense and the other is for climate and weather. Because both of those arenas need really powerful computers to do the job. And even with that there's still a long way to go.

What's in this picture? All right. The black line over the last 100 years is how the planet really behaved, the global. The blue line says let's take out the CO2 that was put in by our energy policy and run the models and ask ourselves what would it have looked like if we didn't do that and that's this line down here. And you see the break point is near about 1960 because if you put back all the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses and aerosols and things that we humans have put in the atmosphere that's the red line. And you'd have to agree they're not too bad, not perfect, but in the last three years we've gone -- gone to the point where I could give you -- I could not have shown this picture two years ago because our models weren't that good. They are now very, very good for global averages, we can't tell you what's going to happen here in Anchorage. Let's go to the next picture.

Secondly, that this whole change here in the Arctic has profound implications for the rest of the world and probably the most important is the ocean conveyor belt. There's a unique condition that occurs on planet Earth because there's on the surface a massive movement of water, warm getting warmer and shallow. But until it gets up in north Atlantic, it gets to a very unique condition because this -- it becomes the Gulf Stream. Energy is being released, as the water is cooled the energy is being released in the atmosphere and that's why Europe is so much warmer than you are here in Alaska for the same latitude. But something else happens because when it gets to that point it's also much more saline because it's evaporating so there's more salt in the water, it's heavier, it's the coldest it can get and what does it do, it sinks and it pulls all that water behind it, goes down to the bottom, circulates all the way back and then it comes back up here. But as it's circulating what's it doing, it's absorbing nutrients and that's why the fishery of the North Pacific is so rich. If this thing doesn't work that fishery's going to go away. Backup a slide.

This is a picture of the models they're telling us. One of them says (indiscernible) going to happen, four of them are telling us it's slowing down. And you'll read more and more about this because for example the defense department said let's look at the fact -- possible fact of a shutdown of that, what are the security implications and you may have read about it in the Wall Street Journal or in Fortune Magazine, it will dramatically change the world. I don't think it's going to happen, none of our data suggest it's going to happen in the next 100 years, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. So that's one of the most important facts we've got to deal with. Let's go to the next one. Next. Oh, there's the same thing. Go ahead.

Vegetation's going to shift. This is a simple slide, but it has a powerful message. We have the capacity with our satellites to measure the greenness of the Earth and the greenness is a very, very good measure of the changing character of the vegetation. So if the planet is warming you're going to get an increase in vegetation because it's going to move northward. Tree lines are moving northward. We're finding birch in the north of Norway, they never were there before. But we can measure that from satellites and what you've got here is if you look at this violet color, that violet cover says that during the period 1980 to 1990, one 10 year period, the greening of that region -- these regions, went up by 25 percent. Big numbers. Another evidence of warming. Go ahead.

Species diversity is changing, you're going to see species here in this region of north of the Brooks Range that you never saw before, you're going to see species in the Brooks Range that you never saw before. When you talk to reindeer herders in Scandinavia, they'll tell you they've never seen moose, the moose are there. They've never seen red deer, the red deer are there. The beaver populations in Alaska are just expanding northward and with that comes some side effects some of which carry diseases that you don't want to know about. So this warming has the effect of moving species northward.

Well, some of that will be good, but some places there will be no place to go because you get to the edge of the coast and you can't go into the sea. So we're going to see some changing patterns of our wildlife and our plants. Go ahead to the next picture.

Coastal communities. I don't need to tell you what's going on on the coast. But probably the simplest way to think about it, why do you hear about Shishmaref and places like that, it's because two things are going on. One, the ice is forming much later in the fall and when are the bad storms, they're in the fall. And so what we used to have is sure, fast ice and the storms couldn't get at the coast because the ice was there. The ice is not there so you're going to have Shishmaref and places like that losing their coastal regions at the rate of anywhere from three to 10 feet per year. I think you've all seen pictures in your newspaper. So it's going to have a pretty dramatic effect on the coast. This is a hard picture to see, but squint your eyes you can see a lot of red along the coast, these are the places where the vulnerability's going to be high. Get us over in Alaska you see it here, out here. Go ahead to the next slide.

I want to take a little bit of time on this one. We know that the sea ice is receding in the Arctic basin. Until now it's come down probably of the order of 10 to 12 percent in aerial extent. We know for a fact in the 30 year period in the center where we've actually had submarines going and measuring it, it's come down 40 percent in thickness. On average the ice cover is reduced by about 18 percent to date. And these are pictures of our five models projecting the average and they're indicating that by the end of this century that we're going to have -- this is summer, we're going to have a very open ocean.

The Canadian model says it'll be open in 2040. 2040 is our children in this room.

So let me talk a little more about this and I -- is Lawson Brigham here Lawson -- the slides I have -- Lawson has become our real expert on this issue. Let's go to the next slide.

This is what it looked like last September, already you can see that except for this area, the north -- the northern sea route is opening up and you'll also see that there's an opening up in your region to the north of Barrow. Let me talk a little more -- this is real data, current. Let's go to the next slide.

Now if we run those models over the next 100 years not a lot of happens in the winter, it freezes up, there's a little reduction, but it's pretty much like your lakes, they freeze over. Okay. So you'll see some freezing, but here's that same time series in the summertime and summertime from sea ice is about mid September is a minimum of sea ice. Now let's carry on and look a little more. Go ahead.

Taking those same models and looking at -- asking the question where's the action going to be initially, it's going to be in Russia because the sea route opening through the Canadian Archipelago is not going to open up as fast as it is on the Russian side. And I just brought this picture for you because there's already some elements of the northern sea route that the Russians have had for years, but they're going to open that up, open and open, open and there's going to be a passageway that probably by 2030 or 2040 will increase our access to the Arctic as a navigational pathway. Let's go to the next slide.

You can see the issue, the red line is the option for the future to move goods from the Far East to Europe and Atlantic ports or the other way around and the yellow line is what we do now, we go through the Suez Canal or we might go through the Panama Canal. Those routes are dramatically different. Next slide.

This gives you -- it's a little technical, but this is 75 percent open water, here's a 50 percent open water, 25 percent open water. 50 percent open water, you can ice strengthen vessels and you can see we're going to be out about 120 days. What do we have today, 10 or 20 days. So we have a factor of five for reasonably easy changes in our shipping around.

25 percent open water is an icebreaker and you know the Russians have massive inventory of icebreakers and that takes you up to about 150 or 160 days. So we're approaching it toward the end of the century if you believe all five models. If you believe the Canadian model it'll be a half century.

So you can argue about time, but it's going to happen by every estimate we have during this century in which we now have the privilege to live. Let's go to the next slide.

So we're going to -- we know that the ice is receding, we know it's a real fact. Our GCMs or our -- those models, global climate models indicates steady increasing of surface air temperature in the Arctic and there's going to be opening of the water. The sea route projections for the sea route are pretty substantial, et cetera.

Our models however are not good at the fine scale so we really have to improve. We don't know where things are going to open up in the Canadian Archipelago, in fact, it may open up too, but the models aren't good enough to tell us that. Go ahead to the next slide.

Permafrost story. This is Fairbanks, the three colors are -- this is looking at the temperature about eight centimeters down, you know, three inches. The blue is a meter, a yard. Okay? There's been a substantial warming on this same time scale, last 50 years. I think you've all seen in your newspapers the rapid changes in permafrost. I think this is the next biggie because your state has already reduced the time available on ice roads from 200 days per year to 100 days. And if you rely on ice roads for your commerce or your development, oil, gas exploration, you've already cut. So while the ice is opening up and making it easier to do off shore development or near shore development we've got a counterbalance that our ice roads are going to become less and less and it's already been cut in half. And this trend is not only true here in Alaska, but it -- I met with the geotechnology guys in Greenland, I told them, I said well, you guys are going to wait another 20 years and he said no, we've had massive permafrost melts along the coast and that's where the commerce and the living space is in Greenland.

So somebody says well, what's this, why did it go down here. The best estimate is we've had a change in snow cover. And if there's a lot of snow, permafrost will melt faster. Snow cover actually provides an insulation so if there's no snow cover and it's cold this would have gone on and we think that's pretty much what's going on - back up - in the last couple years. Let's go ahead.

Indigenous communities. We've been meeting with them extensively, the Shishmaref story is one, access to belugas is another. Polar bears which rely on the ability to move around the ice and hunt for seals, if you go to Hudson Bay they'll tell you they're coming ashore, they do not know how to forage, they don't and they die. There are projections that the polar bear will disappear from the northern hemisphere by mid century because they just don't -- they have not been able to adapt to a terrestrial base and that's where they're being forced. Whether that's true or not we know the polar bears are stressed, disease levels in polar bears are up, they're also much more emaciated in many cases. So the indicators are really not very good for indigenous people who rely on that. Let's go to the next one.

Say just a word or two about ultraviolet. This is a picture of the -- it's really hard for you to see, Greenland, Alaska, Russia. We all think of the depletion of ozone as an antarctic phenomena, but in the last 10 or 15 years it's come to our region. It's nowhere near as well behaved. In the Antarctic it's a hole and that's because of the character of the weather, there's this big circumpolar current, it just keeps it, constrains it. Here and shifting patterns, this thing may move around from year to year, but this is over Russia, a 20 percent depletion of ozone due to CFCs primarily which are coming off the line but not everywhere. Probably the Russians are still making CFCs, we are not. 15, 20, 20 percent, 15, 15, but the rule of thumb fairly simply for every percentage decrease in ozone you get a 2 percent increase in UV. So this will be 40, 30, 30. That's the kind of picture you have.

So what does that mean? It means that young people born today, by the time they're 18 years old, will get about 30 percent more UV exposure in the Arctic than their parents did. Glaucoma, skin cancer are the effects on humans primarily. Increased levels of those, but they have a profound effect on the phytoplankton and the zooplankton which are at the bottom of the food chain and they have strong affects on the immune systems of animals particularly at the beginning of life.

So this is an area where we're working hard, a lot of unanswered questions, but the indicators are not terribly exciting. Next slide.

But all of this sets in a bigger picture, other things are happening. Governments are changing the character of their regulations about fisheries or how roads can be used. But the one I wanted to just say a word or two about is that virtually all of the tough contaminants, DDT, PCBs, lead, mercury, cadmium, they're all migrating northward. And they're all migrating northward because of the weather and climate patterns. They either move in the ocean or they move in the atmosphere. And we know that over the last 30 or 40 years with the increase use of some of these chemicals and the changing patterns of weather, that this is moving northward. The highest concentrations of mercury are found in animals in the north, highest concentrations of the whole planet. We don't do it here, all that mercury comes largely from southern sources. Some natural, but probably 80 to 90 percent of the mercury we have up here in the north or the PCBs or the DDT all came from the south and all because they came by transport mechanisms that are both weather and climate dependent. So when we look at these things there are other factors conspiring to join with climate change to put some stresses on our system. Go ahead.

So in -- we're experiencing some pretty dramatic changes here and this is the heart stone of change and here in Alaska we're going to see that occurring in the decades ahead, major physical changes, meteorological changes, societal changes, economic impacts, many of which have already started particularly here in this region and where we've got a high level of vulnerability. Next slide.

So a simple -- if you want to tell your children -- if you want to know what's going to happen on planet Earth about 25 to 30 years from now, watch what's happening in Alaska and the rest of the Arctic over the next decade. We are the canary, we are the indicator, we are the window of the future for climate change. Last.

To do this we will release the reports in the end of this year with a big conference, it'll all be done in Iceland because the Arctic Council right now is chaired by Iceland.

And I'm thrilled and delighted to have the chance to talk to you. Thank you.