In his self-published South of Sixty: Life on an Antarctic Base (Antarctic Memories $24.95), Michael Warr of Prince George recalls his return visit to the Antarctic in 2005 during which he learned husky dogs were no longer welcomed as an alien species. Since then tourism has increased to 32,000 humans per year.

Born in 1943, Warr agrees with ex-Vice President Al Gore's assertion that when it comes to global warming, Antarctica is a proverbial canary in the coalmine. Trouble is, you need to be a scientist to see the problem.

"In a few places along the Antarctic Peninsula there is a bit more rock showing, but mostly one has to rely on scientific information," he says. "For example, 87% of the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers are receding and the only two flowering Antarctic plants are spreading southwards.

"Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth showed Antarctic ice cores that indicated that the temperature and CO2 levels had risen most strongly in the last 200 years out of the last 600,000. More recent ice cores now can go back 900,000 years, and still the only exceptional rise in temperature and CO2 is in the industrial age of the last 200 hundred years."

A member of the British Antarctic Club, the American Polar Society and the New Zealand Antarctic Society, Warr first worked in the Antarctic for two years as a meteorologist in the early 1960s-for one year at Deception Island and one year at Adelaide Island. Having returned to Antarctica as a cruise ship historian in 2006, Warr is currently preparing a touring slide show exhibit.

[0-9738504-0-X. $24.95 Antarctic Memories Publishing, 2640 Ewert Crescent, Prince George, B.C. V2M 2S2]

[BCBW 2006] "Travel"