text: Over and over, you heard testimony from your panelists concerning the deteriorating state of the Arctic and its ecosystems, including its human inhabitants. Over and over you heard about how these systems got to be in their current conditiondecades of warming presumably caused by worldwide reliance on fossil fuels as an energy source. No one told you that conditions in the Arctic were nearly as warm, as warm, or warmer, than they are now a mere 60 years ago. Therefore, if Arctic systems are presently struggling more so than in the past, it points to factors other than anthropogenic climate change as the root cause. Below is an international list of scientists whose published work indicates that the current Arctic warmth is of the same approximate magnitude as that of the 1930s and 1940s.