Husky News

Three awards may have recently put us over the tipping point on the debate about global warming. The tipping point is that moment when a feather’s weight is added to one side of a balanced object and the centerpiece falls, suddenly crashing to bits.
Ely’s own Will Steger is winning two international awards for his educational efforts about climate change. Recently former Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for their work in the field.

With the moral weight of a sumo wrestler, the awards tilt the argument about global warming to those who think we should do something about it. At this tipping point, we are leaving behind persistent denial by corporate interests and the Bush administration about the human causes of climate change. On this subject we need no longer tolerate bad science, doctored reports, warning federal employees not to speak outside the party line and firing or discrediting those who do.

Last week, Steger received the 2007 Lowell Thomas Award as an arctic explorer who has been teaching about global warming issues for 20 years. The annual award has gone to notables including mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, writer Isaac Asimov and astronaut Buzz Aldrin. This year’s prize, with the theme, “Exploring Climate Change,” also recognized a climate change expert, glaciologist, polar researcher, oceanographer, film director and ozone researcher.

Next month Steger will receive National Geographic Adventure Magazine’s Annual Lifetime Achievement Award. The presentation on Nov. 15 in Washington, D.C. will celebrate Steger’s explorations, including the 2007 Global Warming 101 Expedition. The four-month dog sled trek with native hunters on Baffin Island covered 1,200 miles of the Canadian Arctic.

For Steger, climate change has become a moral issue, as he observed melting sea ice on Baffin Island. There traditional subsistence hunting on the ice formerly solid for eight months of the year, is now cut in half.

He is putting a brown, fur-lined Inuit face on the effects of global warming unseen by us in the Midwest. His 2007 expedition on the Canadian Baffin Island involved educators, explorers and four Inuit hunters who spent four months on a 1,200-mile dogsled expedition to remote Inuit villages. Students around the world kept in touch via the web where they learned how climate change is affecting the Artic.

They saw the traditional way of life unraveling in these northern regions as another kind of tipping point is reached. Pack ice is melting, glaciers crumbling. Polar bears really are starving as their habitat drastically changes. The traditional hunting culture of the Inuit is at risk. The polar regions are a canary coughing in the mine shaft.

Gore’s award followed the release of his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth, which laid out the logic that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are resulting in global warming and widespread climate change. Melting ice caps, burgeoning storm frequency and intensity, and polluted oceans, forests and air will eventually affect us all.

We’re facing a world-war sized climate threat. What are we doing about it?

Even Gore lives in a big house with an overenthusiastic carbon foot print. What inconvenient levels of sacrifice will we make to stop the warming trends?

“We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, and challenge them to think again and to say what they can do to conquer global warming,” said Dr. Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel Peace Committee in Oslo. One can’t help but remember the Bush administration’s refusal to sign onto the Kyoto treaty to cap greenhouse gases.

Steger says that we must reduce our carbon emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050. Starting with science-based K-12 education, we need to engage every student. He calls on congregations, campuses, communities, legislatures and federal agencies to get educated and take action. The government can provide incentives for the development and use of bio-fuels, cleaner technologies for fuel and energy production and use of wind and solar power.

Individuals and families can find online, in books and in newspapers dozens of ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We’ve reached a tipping point in grasping the reality of climate change. Now we need to tip the balance on doing something about it. Our feathers might just turn global warming upside-down. We could start today with just one.

Source: The Timberjay Newspapers