Hendrik Poinar Quotes

Siberia is a state of mind.

A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.

Anybody I'd spoken to who'd been in Siberia said 'would you please put mosquitos in your film,' that's what everybody knows about, they're big and they're nasty.

I haven't been to Tasmania. I haven't been to the South Pole, and I haven't been to the North Pole. I want to see the polar bear migration before there are no polar bears. I want to see Glacier National Park before the glacier melts.

The Moon stabilizes Earth's obliquity. Well, almost. The tilt actually varies between 22 and 24.5 degrees - and the variation is enough to induce such environmental inconveniences as the occasional ice age. Without the Moon, it might be much worse.

The area inside the Arctic Circle contains 8 percent of the earth’s surface and 15 percent of its land…. The Arctic produces 40 percent of the world’s palladium, 20 percent of its diamonds, 15 percent of its platinum, 11 percent of its cobalt, 10 percent of its nickel, 9 percent of its tungsten, and 8 percent of its zinc.

Looking at the map of the Russian Federation, one can see a country covering mostly northern areas; today more than 70 percent of our territory is or can be referred to as northern, if not the Far North. We have a rather small warm Black sea strip in the South and - to tell the truth - quite a few regions with a hospitable warm climate.

The Japanese scientists just found a 25,000-year-old mammoth in the ice in Siberia, and they're about to clone it... You think the Japanese of all people would want nothing to do with prehistoric animals after what happened with Godzilla.

One of the computer models for a four degree temperature rise would give rise to a 10 degree temperature rise in Africa. And bear in mind also that in the depth of an ice age the mean temperature drop compared to the present was five degrees.

We can remake the biosphere to be what we want, from woolly mammoths to nonbiting mosquitos. Do we want to live in nature or in Disneyland?

Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

The oil and gas sector in the North Sea does have a strong future if we do the right things now, but we've got to make sure that the infrastructure is right to support the sector, but also to support, over the next few years, diversification as well.

The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.

I've been up in the Arctic Circle where they have hockey rinks that don't have any heating. So it's - 40 C outside, it's - 55 inside. Or there's a social centre but no budget for anybody to run any programs. Stuff we wouldn't accept in Winnipeg, but we let it go on and on and on.

We need to be realistic. There is very little we can do now to stop the ice from disappearing from the North Pole in the summer. And we probably cannot prevent the melting of the permafrost and the resulting release of methane. In addition, I fear that we may be too late to help the oceans maintain their ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.

It will not be a surprise to you to learn I'm more interested in the future of the Arctic Circle than the future of the Arctic Monkeys.

We were working under very harsh conditions on 'Zero Kelvin.' We were up there in the Arctic, closer to the North Pole than to a hospital. Sometimes you had to sleep in small Arctic tents with guns to protect yourself from polar bears and stuff.

Aberrations in monsoon behaviour are not uncommon, having been with us throughout our agricultural history.

Traverse City sits halfway between the North Pole and the Equator, and our summer days are long. The light seems to take forever to vanish from the sky, and when it does, it goes out like someone folding a white sheet in the dark. A flare on the horizon. Then a rustle: Goodnight.

I was born behind the Iron Curtain, and I remember heated discussions about large-scale terra-forming projects, such as reversing the direction of the river Ob or putting up large reflectors into space to heat up Siberia.

I'm very interested in the new industrial revolution, what we do in terms of energy, developing the north, ensuring there are jobs and that kind of vision.

Everything happening at the South Pole, like the North Pole, has repercussions everywhere on the planet.

The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.