Endorsements and support statements from subject area specialists:
- Dr Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (Professor and Director, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland)
“The Pole to Pole campaign is an important and timely initiative that will help people understand the serious threat that climate change is posing to Earth’s polar regions. Rapid changes in temperature and ocean acidification threaten to transform these regions and eliminate many of the wonderful animals and plants that we have come to know and cherish. Hopefully by bringing attention to our delicate polar regions, global society will move rapidly to solve the climate change problem”. - Professor Mike Mann (Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director, Earth System Science Center, Penn State University)
“I endorse the zoo and aquarium community’s Pole to Pole campaign, especially the vital task of helping private citizens realize their potential to have a positive influence on policy. - Camille Parmesan, Professor and National Marine Aquarium Chair in the Public Understanding of Oceans and Human Health
“I strongly endorse the Pole to Pole Campaign. I have been involved at the science/policy interface for 16 years now, and as the science of anthropogenic climate change and its impacts gets stronger and stronger, the policy actions seem to get weaker and weaker. While we have seen little action on the global governments stage, I have been given new hope by a swell of grass-roots efforts, such as the Pole2Pole campaign, that draw their support from average citizens around the world. This campaign hits at the heart of the problem – loss of our most wild lands and some of our most extreme and charismatic species that cannot survive even modest climate change. These icons of wildlife are at the edge of climate space, just as they are at the edges of the world, and truly have no-where to go”.But it’s not just about losing the polar bear. The rapid losses of polar species sends a powerfull message of just how large an impact a ‘small’ level of global warming has. I think our only hope to avert major climate-driven disaster – for humans as well as wildlife – is for the average person on the street to grasp what rising greenhouse gases are doing to this planet. The Pole2Pole campaign provides the necessary connections between what the average person may regard as the vague concept of ‘global warming’ and the realities of what human-driven climate change has already done to our planet.”
- Prof Chris Rapley CBE (Professor of Climate Science, University College London)
“The climate is shifting. The benign state we humans have enjoyed since the beginnings of civilisation is being destabilised. Science shows we are the cause. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Polar regions, where the accelerating loss of ice, unprecedented over millennia, is truly shocking. I feel a sense of loss at the impacts on the dazzling wildlife, and I feel deep foreboding at the consequences for us all. In this complex world, the web of life is tightly interconnected, and what we do to the planet, we do to ourselves. Melting ice is our clearest warning that it is time to act” - Mark C. Serreze, Director, National Snow and Ice Data Center
“The polar regions, and particularly the Arctic, are especially vulnerable to climate change. One of the strongest weapons we have to combat global warming is education – unless the public becomes more aware of the events that are unfolding in the Arctic and Antarctic and what they mean for our future, we will see little progress towards a solution. I hence strongly support your efforts to raise public awareness of polar change”. - Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, Cambridge University
“The failure of the world to deal seriously with carbon dioxide emissions, and with the emerging threat from methane, are leading us into a frightening new situation where severe climate change is inevitable, with terrible consequences for human civilisation. Urgent action is needed now, not at some time in the future, and must involve drastic measures to change the ways in which we generate and use energy, and to reduce our impact on the planet. These painful changes towards renewable energy and radical changes in our way of life are necessary to avoid catastrophe later. I strongly support the campaign of Pole to Pole to bring this emerging disaster to public attention and to urge that we take immediate action”.