Why Saving the World Starts with Saving the Arctic

Just prior to this year's Arctic Circle Assembly — a gathering of leaders and experts held in Reykjavik — the UN, as if on cue, published daunting new estimates of the future impact of climate change on the Arctic.

According to the report by the International Panel on Climate Change, a failure to limit global warming to less than 2°C (an increasingly reasonable expectation) makes summers without any Arctic sea ice at least 10 times more likely. That, in turn, would trigger increased flooding and drought throughout the rest of the world....