When it comes to global warming, polar explorer Will Steger has seen more effects than most people -- ice caps melting, loss of permafrost and the threat of extinction of plants and animals.
Steger said that polar bears, for example, are in danger of extinction as summer sea ice continues to be lost, preventing them from securing their diet of seals and walrus.
"What motivates me is the moral issue of mass extinction," Steger told an audience at a public forum called Global Warming Solutions Sunday evening at the Holiday Inn & Suites in downtown Duluth. The event was in conjunction with the Making A Great Lake Superior conference at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center today and Tuesday.
Steger, who has explored Earth's poles by kayak and dogsled for40 years, is an advocate for cooperative work on solutions. "We're more and more socially disconnected," he said. "But I see global warming pulling people together."
Lucinda Johnson of the Natural Resources Research Institute said that the Northland feels more of the effects of climate change than other places. "Because we're in the northern part of the continent we are going to be more affected than people down south," she said.
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Scientists expect winter temperatures to climb 3 to5 degrees Celsius with a 5 percent increase in precipitation in the winter and 3 to4 degrees Celsius with drier summer weather. More frequent and intense storms and degraded water quality also are expected.
"We're going to see summers more like Kansas and winters more like Madison [Wis.]," she said.
Climate change also will lead to less diversity in the boreal forests, a decline in the moose population and an increase in deer, skunks and mosquitoes.
But if the temperature increases can be kept below about 2 degrees Celsius, or3.6 degrees Farenheit, huge changes such as loss of the Amazon rainforest and Greenland's ice cap can be avoided, said J. Drake Hamilton, science policy of the nonprofit Fresh Energy.
That means, however, that carbon dioxide emissions must be cut by 80 percent by 2050 and significant reductions must be started in the next decade, she said.
Minnesota's initiatives, from city hall to the statehouse, are leading the way, she said.
The program included a call from Bishop Peter Strommen of the Northeastern Minnesota Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on people of faith to become involved in the global warming issue.
He challenged each person at the forum to write a personal mission statement about reducing his or her carbon footprint, urged every congregation to come up with a plan to become green and advocated contacting public officials.
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People of faith can apply their peacemaking skills to frame global warming as an issue of the common good, Strommen said. "We cannot afford on this issue to polarize to red and blue," he said.
