New Delhi, June 13 -- The Arctic Circle always seemed extremely remote and disconnected from me until I came across British filmmaker Temujin Doran's documentary, North, some years ago (it's free to watch on YouTube). It's shot in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, about 1300km from the North Pole and among the northernmost places where people live, which makes it quite a novelty. More importantly, as the film shows, it's one of the places where climate change was first recorded-as early as 1918 by a Norwegian scientist who not only took temperatures but also recorded tales of warmer winters and disappearing glaciers from the hunters, fishers and whalers.

For us miles away and quite warm in India, that icy landscape of permafrost, frozen wat...