http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39637/story.htm

INTERVIEW - Norway Wants US Politicians to See Warming Arctic

NORWAY: December 28, 2006

OSLO - Norway will invite US politicians to visit a group of

fast-thawing Arctic islands in 2007, hoping to win converts for

tougher action against global warming, its foreign minister says.

"Climate change may be one of the most serious threats mankind has

ever faced," Jonas Gahr Stoere told Reuters in a end-year interview.

"The Arctic is a clarion call, perhaps more than anywhere else, that

things are changing."

Stoere said the Svalbard archipelago, 1,000 km (620 miles) from the

North Pole, where melting glaciers and thawing sea ice is disrupting

the lives of people and animals such as polar bears, could be a

showcase in 2007 for the effects of warming.

"One ambition we have...is to extend strategic invitations" for visits

to Svalbard, Stoere said about Norway's plans for International Polar

Year in 2007, when many countries are planning to step up scientific

research.

"In particular we are working towards the United States, we are

thinking in terms of key advisers, key political decision-makers," he

said.

He said he had no names yet on his list.

"People change from seeing," he said. Norway also chairs the

eight-nation Arctic Council in 2006-08.

A 2004 report by 250 scientists said the Arctic region was warming

twice as fast as the global average and blamed a build-up of

greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

Stoere noted that US Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and

Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, both seen as possible

candidates for the White House in 2008, visited the islands in 2004.

British opposition Conservative leader David Cameron was among

visitors in 2006. Reached by scheduled flights from Norway, the town

of Longyearbyen on Svalbard is farther north than Alaska and has

everything from hotels to supermarkets.

In 2001, President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the

Kyoto Protocol, the UN plan binding 35 industrial nations to curb

emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels in

factories, power plants and vehicles.

Bush argued that Kyoto would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded

developing nations.

Stoere said he believed the arguments for tougher action to slow

warming were getting across to more people. "I feel that talking about

this is being listened to -- in Oslo, Brussels, Washington and New

Delhi," he said.

Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

- Ross Mayhew.

posted to ClimateConcern