News
Steger Sees Global Warming As Galvanizing Issue
WCCO, MN – February 2nd, 2006
Don Shelby Reporting
(WCCO) Explorer Will Steger says he's witnessed global warming firsthand, and he wants to do something about it.
"I'm a builder and a designer, a dreamer and a doer," Steger said. "This is basically part of my personality and my spirit, I think."
Steger is more than just one of the only people in the world to have gone to both the North and South poles. Now in his 60s, he's starting a new part of his life.
"A lot of these areas that I've crossed are no longer there," Steger said. "The vast ice shelves, the Larsen Ice Shelf -- which has a length of Minnesota, 350 miles -- the majority of that is broken off now."
Steger showed video of an ice shelf in Antarctica he said took three weeks to cross in 1989.
"There's a set of satellite photos, I believe it's from NASA, that shows the disintegration of this piece," Steger said. "When you look at this disintegration as global, and you see this ... like it's a science fiction movie. This is actually happening.
"The Arctic Ocean is totally changing. The climate is changing in the Polar Regions -- a lot of much earlier springs, later falls," he continued. "As the climate destabilizes and becomes warmer, there's whole vast ecosystems that are now migrating north in kind of a futile attempt to find stable, warmer temperatures.
"I've seen this firsthand," he said, "and I've also seen it through the eyes of the cultures."
WCCO-TV asked Steger how he would respond to people who would say, "This is just a cycle we're going through. Relax, it's not that bad."
"We are emitting carbon dioxide from vast petroleum reserves, and our utilities are using coal," Steger said. "We're also starting to see the signs of the climate definitely starting to destabilize. We see one of the symptoms of global warming is extreme weather events.
"You can't say a single issue, like the massive hurricanes, the whole series of hurricanes we saw -- you really can't say that is definitely global warming. It's a fingerprint of global warming," he said. "But the first sign of global warming is the ice core of the earth melting. That is a sign. That is what is happening.
"I, as a person, have been ... I don't know, fortunate," he said. "But it's something I never thought I'd ever see: the globe melting. But I'm a person that crossed both polar areas by dog team. I've dogsled tens and tens of thousands of miles, foot by foot, across the North and the South Polar (Regions) and the arctic regions and Greenland.
"I've seen it firsthand -- before when it was normal, and I've seen it now destabilize before my eyes in two decades," Steger said. "This is very alarming to me."
It has motivated Steger to build a center at his Ely home in northern Minnesota where he hopes to gather world leaders to work on what he sees as a crisis for all of us.
"If there was an asteroid heading for Earth, and we knew it was going to hit in 100 years or 50 years or 10 years, we would definitely mobilize ourselves to get the technology," Steger said.
Steger has hopes and dreams for his center, which took him 17 years to build.
"The center has actually been a dream of mine almost all my life," Steger said. "Since my 20s, I wanted to build a center where I could bring key leaders in the environment (and) education together with the inspiration that comes when you get common thinkers together, and to facilitate that onto, let's say, developing better policies which would include our local economy.
"Global warming, I think, is a project, a challenge that will either unite us or separate us," he said. "If it separates us, I think it's going to doom our species. But I really have strong faith that it's going to unite us and allow us to activate these ideals of international cooperation."
On Wednesday, Steger joined St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman as he signed the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement, a commitment to cut air pollution in the city.
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