Opening statement at Melting Ice: Regional Dramas, Global Wake-Up Call

• Main Author: Støre, Jonas Gahr
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; Magga; Tromsø; Antarc*; Climate change; inuit
• Online Access: http://library.arcticportal.org/522/; http://library.arcticportal.org/522/1/Store_Speech_Tromso_28042009.pdf

Fellow Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen - and my distinguished co-host, Nobel peace prize laureate Mr. Al Gore, I want to welcome you to Tromsø. And I want to welcome you to these discussions on the global phenomenon of ice melting, on the impact that it will have on our lives and around the globe; and especially on the message we must to send to the world community on the urgency of addressing it. A special welcome to Dr. Ole Henrik Magga, who will also give some introductory remarks, and to Dr. Robert (Bob) Corell, who has kindly accepted the invitation to moderate the discussions we will have later today. We, who live at the polar extremes of this planet, or at high altitudes of the Andes or Alps or the Tibetan plateau, live with snow and ice in our daily lives. Some resent its arrival in winter. Others long for it each year, as we head out with skis in hand to our winters. Others still, like the Arctic’s Inuit, live with ice and snow year round and have built their lives around it. All of us see it as a natural part of our lives. But what if we are among the last generation to do so? Climate change is happening faster and in a dramatically more visible way in the Arctic and Antarctic than anywhere else on earth. Here, in the very region hosting this meeting, the average temperature has risen over twice the rate of the rest of the globe.