Explorer says climate change is a fact in polar regions

Cindy Card Buchholz

Will Steger paints a pretty scary picture of the effects of global warming on the north and south poles, but the adventurer, author and photographer offers his own solutions to protect those regions and the rest of the planet.

Steger spoke about his polar explorations and his views about global warming and climate change to an audience of about 200 people last night at the Surbeck Center of South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Steger was invited to deliver his “Eyewitness to Climate Change” program by members of the Sierra Club, Repower South Dakota and School of Mines’ Norbeck Uni group, a division of the Norbeck Society for college students.
Jim Margadant, Sierra Club regional conservation organizer, said the joint effort was about educating the public.

“He’s been an Arctic and Antarctic explorer for 40-some years, and he has eyewitness testimony of what’s going on in those polar regions with regard to climate change and that it is accelerating like crazy,” Margadant said.

Cody Hahn of Rapid City remembered Steger making a classroom visit to his elementary school years ago to talk about dog sledding. Hahn attended the program last night to hear more of Steger’s stories as well as to earn extra credit for his sophomore science class at Stevens High School.

Hahn’s parents, Bonnie and Kevin Hahn, attended to hear more about global warming and climate change, which they said deeply concern them. Bonnie Hahn said her family recycles, but she wants to do more.

“I believe there is major climate changing coming,” Bonnie Hahn said, adding that we all must do our part.
Steger began his presentation telling how he had managed to become an explorer with parents who had never camped a day in their lives. His desire to travel was fueled after reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a child and “National Geographic.”

He showed photographs and video from a polar exhibition to Antarctica 20 years ago and pictures of the same areas today. An area called the Larsen Ice Shelf, where he once ran a team of dog sleds, is now open ocean. What is happening has alarmed ice scientists, he said.
Steger said the first step to solving global warming is to be aware that there is a problem with carbon dioxide. “The denial and looking at this as a hoax doesn’t fly with the people living in the north who are literally seeing their ice and their glaciers and their permafrost thaw,” Steger said.
He said he believes one problem with discussing global warming is that the subject has fallen into the political arena. He said the public has a right to expect that elected officials are up on the science and that their sources are coming from real science.

Next, Steger said, is recognizing there is a problem with climate change. “And what’s causing this is predominately the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.” He said carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, which acts like putting a sweater on the earth and causing it to warm up.

Steger said the solution is to build a clean energy economy. He said ethanol will evolve over the next five or six years from food stock to grass-based ethanol, which will be a real boon for South Dakota.
“With the conservation of energy, we’re looking at just not only saving polar bears, we’re looking at saving ourselves lots of money because energy is a very serious cost for most of us,” he said.

Steger sees the crisis as threefold -- the climate crisis, a recession and a national security issue of relying on foreign governments for 95 percent of our petroleum.
He believes a clean energy will bring the economy back.
“A billion dollars a day of our hard earned cash goes to the Persian Gulf countries and places like Venezuela, where they don’t agree with our way of life here.

“The win-win situation here is bringing America back to being self-reliant on energy, which will give us a perpetually stable economy as we get more and more self-reliant.”

See the online article from the Rapis City Journal website - April 20, 2010