Worth reading: Fight for the Top of the World, the cover story from TIME magazine I mentioned yesterday.

The current interest in the Arctic, in short, is a perfect storm seeded
with political opportunism, national pride, military muscle flexing, high energy
prices and the arcane exigencies of international law....Not even strict
adherence to the Kyoto accord on limiting greenhouse gases would stop an Arctic
meltdown, which means the Arctic, like nowhere else on Earth, is a place where
efforts to mitigate global warming have yielded to full-bore adaptation to its
impact. That process is freighted with irony. With gas and oil prices near
historic highs and with scant prospect of any decrease in world demand for
energy, it is only prudent to get a sense of what resources lie below the newly
accessible sea. But there is something paradoxical about seeking in the Arctic
the very carbon fuels that are melting the northern ice. "The rush to exploit
Arctic resources can only perpetuate the vicious cycle of human-induced climate
change," says Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International.