In 2007, just a year and a half ago, planet earth lost 1.2 million square kilometres of Arctic sea ice. I spend a lot of time speaking to international experts on climate change and sea ice, and we can expect a similar pace of change in the years ahead, to the point where my colleague David Barber, who holds a Canada research chair in the study of sea ice at the University of Manitoba, is predicting that in late summer around 2013 we will see an ice-free Arctic Ocean.
So the pace of change is very fast indeed. This requires not only that we get much more serious about stopping and slowing down climate change but also that we be aware that the entire Arctic is changing, which creates obligations and also opportunities.
To give you one small example, I am very skeptical that the Mackenzie Valley pipeline will ever be built, first of all because the permafrost is melting, which makes it much more difficult to build such a pipeline, but also because it is becoming very easy to foresee taking natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the Northwest Passage to Atlantic Canada.
The Norwegians have already mastered the technology in their Arctic waters. We should be preparing to do the same thing and to get beyond our old conceptions of how to do big infrastructure projects and begin to realize that the north is changing so quickly so that we need to be moving forward with new ideas.