Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the issue of global warming has come up with greater and greater frequency in the press and is of greater and greater concern to all the people of the world and the North is no different.

Mr. Speaker, Ms. Donella Meadows of the Global Citizen gives some very sobering facts. The place to watch for global warming, a sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine, is the Arctic. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by about three degrees, which is just what is happening.

Ice now covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago. In the 1950s, that ice averaged ten feet thick, Mr. Speaker. It is less than six feet thick at present. At the current rate of melting, in 50 years the northern ocean could be ice-free all summer long.

That, says an article in Science, January 19th, would be the end of polar bears. In fact, many creatures of the Arctic Ocean are already in trouble. Until recently, no one knew that there were many creatures in the Arctic Ocean. In the 1970s, a Russian biologist named Melnikov discovered 200 species of tiny organisms, algae and zooplankton hanging around the ice floes in immense numbers, forming slime jungles on the bottom of bergs and plankton clouds in every break of open water.

Their carcasses fall to the bottom, Mr. Speaker, to nourish clams which are eaten by walruses. Arctic cod live on algae scraped off the ice. The cod are eaten by sea birds, whales and seals. The king of the food chain, hunting mainly seals, is the great white bear.

That was the system until the ice started to thicken thin. In 1997 and 1998, Melnikov returned to the Beaufort Sea and found most of the plankton species, many named by him and for him, were gone. The ice was nearly gone. Creatures that depended on plankton, like the cod, were on the ice, dens for seals or for travel like bears were gone too.

Mr. Speaker, the Arctic is changing faster than scientists can document. Inuit hunters report the ivory gulls are disappearing. No one knows why. Mosquitoes are moving north, attacking murres which will not move from their nests, so they are literally sucked and stung to death. Caribou can no longer depend on thick ice to support their island hopping in search of lichens that sustain them. One biologist who spots caribou...Mr. Speaker, I request unanimous consent to conclude my statement.