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388 A $270 million proposal is pending to build a port road from Bathurst Inlet, which would help the diamond mines to offset decline of the Tibbitt-Contwoyto ice road as well as enabling other mining activity in the area. G. Quenneville, “Bathurst Inlet Project Reconsidered,” Northern News Services, June 15, 2009.

389 Obviously, in terms of sheer numbers, most of the U.S. increase will be in southern states. However, the United States as a whole is still a NORC country and the +15 million figure for its northern states is probably conservative. Alaska today has fewer than a million people, for example, but is one of the fastest-growing U.S. states, projected to grow nearly 40% by 2030. In contrast, New York is projected to grow less than 3%. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Interim State Population Projections, 2005, www.census.gov/population/www/projections/projectionsagesex.html. Table data are from United Nations Population Division: The 2008 Revision Population Database (medium variant), http://esa.un.org/u/npp (accessed July 26, 2009).

390 This calculation is from GIS analysis for land area of the northern quarter of the planet, i.e., between 45° and 90° N latitude. About twenty-one million square kilometers is underlain by some form of permafrost, and eighteen million were glaciated in the last ice age, leaving a smoothed landscape (except in mountain belts) that is relatively easy to get around on. Adding in all the coastal and low-lying areas (here assumed simply as land elevations three hundred meters a.s.l. or less), because they are warmer and more accessible than high-elevation terrain, yields about twenty-seven million square kilometers, of which thirteen million is currently in some stage of permafrost. Subtracting the permafrost areas leaves roughly fourteen million square kilometers of ostensibly livable land.

391 Unlike North America and northern Europe, Eurasia was not extensively ice covered during the last ice age. Most of modern-day Russia has been occupied by humans for at least the past forty to forty-five thousand years and perhaps longer. Even in the high Arctic, new archaeological discoveries at Mamontovaya Kurya and the Yana River indicate human activities thirty to forty thousand years old. See Pavel Pavlov et al., Nature 413 (September 6, 2001): 64-67, and Richard Stone, Science 303 (January 2, 2004): 33.

392 They are loaded with ancient gene haplogroup U, especially U5B1B1, the so-called “Sámi motif,” dating back fifty-five thousand years to the Iberian Peninsula, from where they migrated north at the end of the ice age. T. Lappalainen et al., “Migration Waves to the Baltic Sea Region,” Annals of Human Genetics 72 (2008): 337-348.

393 Country-averaged population densities for Canada, China, and India are 3,141, and 369 persons per square kilometer, respectively, equivalent to 82.4, 1.75, and 0.67 acres of land per person.

394 This has to do with the generally clockwise rotation of gyres in the northern hemisphere oceans, transporting southern ocean water north along the western edges and northern ocean water south along the eastern edges of the Atlantic and Pacific Basins. Thermohaline ocean circulation is also vitally important, as we shall see shortly. Finally, prevailing wind directions are westerly for much of the northern hemisphere meaning advection of warm ocean air over the land moves generally from west to east rather than east to west.

395 In the northern hemisphere. Ibid.

396 For more on how physical geography can influence human settlement, see Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, (USA: Oxford University Press, (2008), 304 pp.

397 This was done under the U.S. Lend-Lease program to supply massive amounts of military material to its allies during the war. P. 42, K. S. Coates, W. R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 309 pp.

398 All told, the United States poured