Dear Mr. President-Elect,

Greetings from Antarctica!

I'm about to begin my mission to become the first American in history to reach the South Pole, solo and unaided. I'll start walking November 8th from the edge of the ice pack and, if all goes according to plan, arrive at the Pole just after Christmas. If you have a minute around then, I'd love to hear from you, just ring my satellite phone.

It's the least you could do, I mean, I delivered the vote for you here in the Deep South (so to speak).

30 years ago, the famous naturalist Louis Leaky agreed to send an extraordinary young woman named Birute Galdikas deep into the wilds of Borneo to do the one thing she desired to do more than anything. Galdikas wanted to study and understand the life of the 'elusive red ape' - the Orangutan.

Today Dr. Birute Galdikas is considered one of the foremost experts on Orangutans. To this day she remains in Borneo, huddled in the dense peat swap forests - surrounded by foreign owned palm oil plantations, poachers, illegal loggers and gold miners - a single voice fending off the rapidly developing world and defending the last of these great apes.

A study in the journal Polar Biology concludes that two recently discovered species of Killer Whale inhabiting the Antarctic sea are at risk due to the effects of global warming at the South Pole.

These fish-eating Killer Whales rely on the ice where fish bunch up in schools in order to evade predators. Scientists are anticipating that as the ice patterns in the Antarctic continue to be altered by climate change, the Killer Whales may not be able to adapt to their new hunting grounds.

If the 21 tourists evacuated from the Baffin Islands yesterday weren't convinced that we're near a climate change tipping point they are now.

According to a Canwest new service story out this morning the tourists were evacuated from the Auyuittuq National Park:

Arctic scientists are reporting today that a four-square-kilometer chunk of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has broken off.

Northern explorers have used the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf as a launching point for expeditions for years. But much like the changes that I have witnessed in my expeditions to the Antarctic, things just aren't right at the other Pole either.