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Climate Change in the Arctic

To understand climate change, you have to study more than just air temperatures and precipitation. That's according to Andrew Stuhl who'll talk about his study of climate change in the Arctic regions of Canada Thursday night at Augustana College.

Now a Professor of Environmental Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, Stuhl first read about the Arctic and climate change in college, and decided to see it for himself. He lived in the Northwest Territories for two years.

"Arctic climate change is a really troubling and difficult scientific issue in terms of observing it, measuring it, and understanding it. It's real and it's happening but in order to respond to these phenomena, you really have to understand the history of the region."

His work includes the science of climate change, plus colonialism, indigenous peoples, and economics. 

He also became interested in the different "waves" of scientists who've visited the Arctic, starting with naturalists in the 1800's, followed by explorers, biologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and most recently petroleum engineers.

"The more I dug into the historical records and spoke with people who live in the north, the more I found scientists intertwined with daily life at the village level, with political life at the national level of Canada and the United States, and at economic life at the global level."

Doctor Stuhl is the author of "Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands," published in 2016.

Sponsored by the Augustana Center for Polar Studies, he'll speak Thursday night at 7 pm in the college's John Deere Lecture Hall. 

A native of Detroit, Herb Trix began his radio career as a country-western disc jockey in Roswell, New Mexico (“KRSY, your superkicker in the Pecos Valley”), in 1978. After a stint at an oldies station in Topeka, Kansas (imagine getting paid to play “Louie Louie” and “Great Balls of Fire”), he wormed his way into news, first in Topeka, and then in Freeport Illinois.