Response to Mike

 i'm completely with you that science is fallible. actually my thesis is taking a similar stance. i feel that what science can tell us about the causes of global warming is a necessary link for policy-making, though science will never have perfect certainty in modeling the climate system, nor can it lend itself to ethical dilemmas. that facts are in: change is and has been occurring in the polar regions (if you need sources, i got you) and REGARDLESS of the causes (whether it truly is natural climate variability or if we truly are detrimentally altering the atmospheric composition that maintains all life on earth), human beings are suffering as a result of a changing arctic environment. this is now a moral and ethical crisis. for me (and many others agree), international litigation surrounding thispotentially catastrophic course we are on is best handled under the human rights umbrella and not environmental law. i'll leave with this:

“The international legal regime governing environmental harm to humans is not a unified one; the problems caused by environmental harms lie at a complicated legal intersection that poses several problems of characterization… none of the potentially applicable areas of international law – environmental, human rights, anti-discrimination – fully captures the situation” (Osofsky 2005).

that's the problem, no institution can fully capture the realities of arctic climate change. only those whom experience it can portray the realities, and that is why we need their input in international environmental policy-making.