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Vice President Al Gore Speech Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much ladies and gentleman and thank you Bill Allen for that very nice presentation and very generous introduction. Im delighted to see so many of the folks that I had the privilege of working with during this long project. Some of them I was in the Arctic with, I see Admiral DeMars right out there and want to congratulate you on your recent retirement, again, admiral. When we were at the North Pole together he thought I was frozen stiff. (laughter) I resemble that remark. (more laughter) Before I begin, I want to also acknowledge the heroic efforts of so many visionary men and women who have made todays announcement possible. Not least of whom is Gil Grosvenor and Reg Murphy and all of our friends here at the National Geographic Society and magazine. Ive had the privilege of working with Gil and his team over the years and I have always admired their commitment to disseminating knowledge about our world and in recent years, their determination to present information about the nature of the changes taking place in the global environment. I want to also thank Robert Sims, Senior Vice President of the Society, and especially Don Belt, Kurt Muchler, and Chris Scaptura whose work you can see reflected in the pages of next months issue. I also want to acknowledge two of our Russian colleagues who flew from St. Petersburg to be with us here today. Sergey Priamikov, who is a director of Russias Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, and professor Leonid Timokov, a renowned Arctic researcher and chief scientist at the Institute. Thank you gentlemen. And let me also welcome Mr. Lev Muchin, the science and technology counselor for the Russian embassy here in Washington. And is Mikhail Shchenev here as well? Yes. The first secretary for Sciences and Technology. I would like all four of you to stand together so that we could thank you. (Applause.) We are very grateful to you for joining us today and for the wonderful shared work experience that my colleagues and I have had with you and your colleagues. And I want to welcome the many men and women here today from the U.S. government, our military and research institutes here in the United States. John Garamendi (sp), Deputy Secretary of the Interior is here, and John Cannon the C.I.A.s Deputy Director for Intelligence and I want to say, John, that I look forward to working with you and others closely as the C.I.A.s new environmental center gets under way. Also here are a number of representatives from the United States Navy, the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the White House and others. And let me also offer a special acknowledgment to a person with whom I have had the chance to work closely over the years to make this day a reality, she always defers the credit to her superiors within the structure of the Central Intelligence Agency, but she has worked with a single-minded passion for the environment and deep devotion to the highest ideals of duty and country, Ms. Linda Zall of the Central Intelligence Agency. And I want to thank you, Linda, for everything that you have done on this project. Members of my staff have worked very hard, I wont try to mention them all, but Leon Fuerth who is out at Secretary Perrys ceremony today, and Jonathan Spalter whos worked very hard on this aspect of the project. Well, Im here today to announce what I believe is truly an important and, indeed, historic new step for science, for the relationship between the peoples of Russia and the United States, and also for our common efforts in nations around the world to safeguard the environment of the Earth. Were announcing today the formal release of the first volume of the Russia-American Atlas of the Arctic Ocean. As Bill mentioned, for decades groups of intrepid scientists have ventured into the cold of the Arctic to uncover new truths about this mysterious part of the Earths landscape. Both militarily and commercially, the Arctic and its ocean have been some extremely important real estate both for the United States and Russia. The region has been a key throughway for much of the worlds sea-going commerce, a northern lifeline, particularly for Russia, and the former Soviet Union. Militarily, the Arctic had long been one of the key potential Cold War battlegrounds for a future World War. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent by our militaries for its careful exploration. Over the years the former Soviet Union and Russia and the United States have amassed vast quantities of data about virtually every corner and every crevice of the Arctic Basin. But for military reasons this potential treasure trove of information remains strictly off-limits. It could not be shared with the worlds scientific community, nor could it be put to peaceful use on behalf of environmental research. In the new climate of openness that followed the end of the Cold War, it seemed to me that surely some of this data could selectively be released to world science, while insuring that information important to our national security was carefully protected. My interest in pursing this possibility was heightened after I had the opportunity to join research expeditions to the Arctic Ocean on two separate occasions aboard U.S. Navy submarines, first under the Beaufort Sea, and then to the North Pole itself. In the first figure here, youll see the surfacing of our submarine at the North Pole, well I wont go into the details of that, but it amazed me how thewhat do you call those wings on top of the tower? Sail planes, are specially designed for these submarines so that when they start to surface straight upward, they rotate down into the vertical position as you see there to form a blade, as it were, to help crash upward through the ice. I remember the extraordinary thrill of being asked by the Admiral and the Captain to take the helm when we were under the North Pole and look at all those zeros come up on the navigational read-out there. And in fact, the Commanding Officer of that submarine, the U.S.S. Pargo (sp), Captain Dave Hurting (sp), is here today in the audience, and thank you Captain, good to see you again. I learned through these voyages and the trip up there, there we are on, I guess thats the twin otter isnt it, Admiral? We went up to Greenland and then farther north to an ice station. We transferred to progressively smaller planes along the way and landed on an ice runway off the northern coast of Greenland and then flew farther north in this little twin otter out to an ice floe where an ice station was, and we spent the night in tents and the next morning took snowmobiles the last leg of the way to the rendezvous with the submarine and went out, put an X on the ice, and waited for the submarine to surface. And underneath, theyre down there looking up for that X. In the earlier picture you saw what it looked like when the submarine surfaces. The data collected on these voyages turns out to be very powerful, indeed. And it did seem to me that if this then-secret knowledge could be shared with the worlds environmental scientists, quite possibly we might find new answers to profound questions about the nature of our planet and its future. As a result I began to work closely with colleagues in the Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency to see whether some of our own data here in the United States could be released to science without in any way jeopardizing national security. I cant possibly tell you how impressed I was with the professionalism and dedication of the individuals in the Intelligence community and in the United States Navy who have put their minds to the efforts of solving this problem, how to simultaneously release the data that could be released and would be extremely useful to environmental scientists, and at the same time make absolutely sure that there was no compromise whatsoever to our national security. It was really a wonderful experience to work with these men and women and to see their minds at work. As a first step we were able to secure the release of over a million carefully selected pictures from our early satellite recognizance program. And we also negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the Navy for the release of additional important data about the Arctic region. But despite these initial successes, I knew American data alone would not be sufficient to fully understand the Arctic or its relationship to the ecosystem of our plant. A substantial portion, perhaps the lions share of the worlds oceanographic data of the region, still was held by Russia. You can see here in this graphic a representation of the information, represented by blue dots of the U.S. program. And here you can see in the red dots the information collected in the Russian program. If you look closely you can see a vast area toward the east that had been explored almost exclusively by the Russians. So, its obvious that only when these two data sets are combined, can they convey the entire picture. The opportunity to assemble the two pieces of this important puzzle looked like what Yogi Berra referred to once when he said what we have here is an insurmountable opportunity. Because I knew from the energizing task of convincing our own intelligence community to release this data, how time consuming it was. And the prospect of convincing the K.G.B. and its successors to do so was a problem that I wasnt totally sure could be solved. But the opportunity became available in 1993 when President Clinton asked me to work closely with my counterpart and now my very good friend, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Stefanovich Chernomyrdin, to promote technological and economic cooperation between our two nations. Our binational commission has taken on almost the full gamut of U.S.-Russian relations, but from the beginning we worked on this issue as well. There is Prime Minister Chernomyrdin on the right. And as Im talking to him, Jim Baker of NOAA is right in the foreground, and thats a sure tip-off that what were talking about at that moment is this Arctic research program. Our binational commission has met twice a year in Moscow and in Washington We alternate every six months. Mrs. Chernomyrdin and my wife Tipper finally got us to change the rotation so that we meet in Washington in the winter meeting now. And we meet in Moscow in the summertime. (Laughter) And in fact the Prime Minister and his delegation will be coming just in about two weekswell, three weeksfor the eighth round of the commission meeting. Well, we brought together experts on both sides to work on common environmental concerns. And after about a year we added a new element to our commission, a joint U.S.-Russian environmental working group to work on securing the release to world science of important environmental data held by our militaries. You know, when the scientists and the military people and the intelligence people from both of our countries got together and focused their common efforts on this interesting challenge, boy they really hit it off. And they found they shared a common language about these issues. They were energized in ways similar to what I felt when I engaged with the U.S. intelligence and military folks. And they really developed a wonderful working relationship all the while protecting the respective national security interest of both countries diligently. In any event, what they have produced is what we are here to release today. This is the graphic of the CD-ROM cover, I have one right here, and it is going to be available as of today. This is the Russian-American Atlas of the Arctic Ocean and it is the first in a series of atlases that we will be publishing. And this CD-ROM right here more than doubles the scientific holdings of data on the Arctic Ocean available to the scientific community. As of today that data has been increased by a hundred percent. It contains over 1.3 million individual observations on the Arctic Ocean collected over the period 1948 to 1993 from both Russian and U.S. sources. All told, this data represents a virtual time machine record of the Arctic Ocean environment over the past five decades. And with this new material, at long last, scientists around the world can begin the important work of understanding the true character of the Arctic depths. Only time will tell what this once forbidden treasure trove will reveal. But we do know that buried in these hundreds of thousands of observations can be found clues to the puzzle of climate change, which I believe is one of the most important challenges we face as we enter the 21st century. In a moment, some of my colleagues who have been working with me for many years on this project will join me up here to answer questions that you might have about the scientific implications of what can be found in this CD-ROM. But before we get to your questions, let me give you a very brief overview of what new truths this data might begin to illuminate and how our scientists might begin to put them to work. Here, for example, you see a view of the Arctic Oceans submarine landscape, that we have been able to establish through the observations contained in our Atlas. Youll note that the Arctic Ocean lies bounded by the large land mass of North America, Europe, and Asia, of course. A submerged mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge separates the two basins of the Arctic Ocean. The water in these deep basins shows little movement and is virtually separated from the world ocean except for a narrow deep channel between Greenland, here, and the archipelago of Svalbard to the east. At the surface of and at shallower depths the Arctic Ocean communicates with the World Ocean along several paths. As the arrows in this picture indicate, warm Atlantic water enters the basin west of Svalbard, and cold water Arctic surface water exits southward along the coast of Greenland. Smaller currents enter through the Bering Strait and exit through the maze of the Canadian Archipelago. The data contributed by our Russian friends, when coupled to the American data, now at last allow us to draw this impressive picture. This is a transect, actually a slice, across the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Sea, or the Iceland-Norway Sea as the scientists call it, approximately following the zero meridian. You see the red line here, that is, and notice the A there, because it will show up in the next one. Thats the transect. And now lets go back to it. It shows the, and this space is just a shift in the scale from the two halves of it. Youll see there another representation of the line and the transect and the distance from the North Pole measured there. The A that I referred to earlier shows up here. Now, what this shows is the water temperature from the surface to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. What deserves special attention is that all across the Arctic basin the color layers are horizontal, indicating that the water layers are stable and there is little mixing in the vertical. But here in the Greenland Sea, north of Iceland, you see a wide column of water at the same temperature from the top to the bottom. That column is the result of many events which some in science call chimneys, during which the ocean has turned over from top to bottom as if stirred by a gigantic spoon. It is these overturning events that form a certain kind of water mass that the scientists call North Atlantic deepwater, a water mass that was, so to speak, imprinted in these northern seas and that oceanographers can trace all the way down to the South Atlantic, and even to the South Pacific. How much water forms, how much heat it transports, and how it effects the circulation of the world ocean, is a matter of deep and keen concern to climate researchers. And if we can better understand how these complex processes work, scientists can move closer to drawing a more accurate picture of global climate change. Thats why this CD-ROM is nothing less than historic. With this collection and through our collaboration today, some of sciences most sought after data literally has come in from the cold. As of today, you can find this data on the World Wide Web at the address that is underneath it right there. It will also be available by writing to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. The address for that center is noted at the end of the National Geographic magazine article. Well, this is just the beginning of the work before us. In addition to this CD-ROM, which covers observations from the winter period, we also are developing atlases addressing conditions in the Arctic Ocean in summer, sea-ice cover, and Arctic meteorology. As you know, understanding our environment and the strategies to protect it are deeply important to President Clinton, to me, and to those in our country who work on this problem. This is particularly true for the Arctic region, which we know serves as an early warning system for global climate change. Sharing information and sharing ideas are the essence of good science in the service of humankind. Just a few days ago, I was out in California, and in the state of Washington, and in Idaho, talking with residents there who are fighting the flooding and the events related to very large rainfall and snowfall. And all the scientists say, of course, you should never ever try to look at a single weather event or series of weather events in connection with a global climate change. But the researchers at NOAA have pointed out that just as the models predicted would occur with the warming of the Earths climate, the percentage of annual precipitation which now falls in intense storm events has increased by 20 percent. An intense storm event is defined as two inches or more in a 24-hour period, if Im not mistaken. And if more of the annual precipitation, both rain and snow, falls in these intense storm events, then the implications for blizzards and flooding, also for drought, for reasons that the scientists go into, are obvious and clear. If the changes predicted by the models earlier now begin to conform with the changes we already see in weather patterns, what about the changes the models predict with continued warming in the future? Well, in order to better understand the implications, and in order to better deal with this enormous challenge facing the United States, Russia, and the people of every other nation, we need the kind of information that these scientists have been working diligently to produce. Sharing information and sharing ideas represent essential strategies to coming to some successful response to the challenge we now face. It is my hope that our efforts and that of the many scientists and explorers who have done the hard and often perilous work of collecting all this information will bear fruit. Im confident that the scientific community will make good use of the data that we now release to them and that they will bring us a step closer to understanding better this marvelous planet that we all share. Now, let me say in conclusion that this achievement would not have been possible without the dedication and ingenuity of our colleagues in Russia. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to mention it again and underscore it. And I want to give credit to the vision of Russian science. And again to my friend Prime Minister Chernomurdin, and of course, the wonderful men and women of the United States armed forces, our intelligence community, and our scientific community here in the United States. To those of you here and in Russia who have devoted your lives to opening our minds to the secrets of the Arctic, I salute you. And finally, again to my friends here at 17th and M, I am one of millions who grew up reading the National Geographic. In Carthage, Tennessee, we received the magazines in the mail, and we were one of those families that kept the old issues carefully. Any other families here like that? I bet weve got more than a representative sample in this crowd. And then, in the years when I was in school up here, I used to go down to the DAR building, was it every two weeks, or every three weeks thereabouts? Thered be a National Geographic lecture with slides and movies and like millions of other young people, I found it a very enlightening experience. And I salute the magazine. Yours is truly a unique publication. Your credibility, your reputation for fairness and accuracy, your commitment to exploration, to global issues, and to stewardship, are all values that are fundamentally life-enhancing and important for our future. Yours is a high standard for us all. And I know I speak for many others in saying that we need more than ever the kind of journalism that National Geographic and that so many others of you that are here today offer. We need to make sense of a world that is increasingly complex. We need you to sift through the various realities of this earth, to identify and then preserve in words and pictures what is worth remembering. So please keep up the good work, the world is counting on you. Now, Id be happy to do my best to take your questions, but I want to first invite members of the Medilla scientific team that worked with me to release this data, to join me here on stage. Medilla is a group of scientists that I helped to establish a few years ago to determine what data in our secret Cold War archives could be important to environmental science. Medilla has been working closely with our national security community to release such data in a manner that does not compromise our nations security. And I want to credit the former director of Central Intelligence, Bob Gates, for having the vision to begin this process inside the intelligence community during President Bushs administration and all of his colleagues. And so, it is my personal privilege to introduce Dr. Norbert Untersteiner, from the University of Washington, Dr. James Baker, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, and Rear Admiral Paul Gaffney, head of the nations oceanographic command and chief of naval research. (Applause) We are ready for your questions. Im going to were ready for any questions that you might have, yes sir? |