In the century and a half since the beginning of the industrial revolution, man’s ability to influence his environment has grown ever greater. This has come with the statement of, “man is conquering nature!” often hanging in the air as a statement of great triumph. As time passed, we came to realize that we weren’t only conquering nature, we were causing ever increasing amounts of long term damage to it. More and more as we progressed, we came to discover some of the dangers and damages we were visiting upon the environment and ourselves. It is said that the environmental movement began in the 1970s, with the collective realization spawned by incidents such as the Cuyahoga river fire. The sheer scale of our capacity to influence the environment via small actions became apparent with the realization of the dangers of CFCs and its destructive effect on the ozone layer.

Another problem has been brewing for the duration of the industrial revolution as well, which is the result of our carbon intensive civilization. Global warming is a worldwide effect of the same area of effect as CFC release, but with more dramatic effects. Even with the high rates of temperature increase of the last few decades, we didn’t feel the change happening, but the environment already began to react. Many organisms and features of our world are, apparently, more sensitive to these changes in temperature than we are. The higher latitude and polar regions of the globe have shown and continue to show themselves to be the most vulnerable to the radiative forcings due to increased greenhouse gases. The vulnerabilities of these polar regions and the organisms which live in them makes them an important area for study and examination.