I’d like to share an interesting conversation I had at the Arctic Station in Ny Alesund with Max Koenig, head of the
Sverdrup Station run by the Norwegian Polar Institute. We were speaking in German, as Max is a native German speaker, so I have translated what he said.

Max finds the idea of believing or not believing in climate change a strange and interesting development. He says it has turned into a question of faith for a lot of people. But the climate change issue is not about faith, he says, but about facts on the table. He is surprised that there seems to be a lot of “false information” floating around. “If you consider that 95% of climate researchers are generally in agreement about the nature of the problem, then I really wonder where the scepticism comes from”, says the polar specialist. “On average, our planet is warming. And we understand the physics, he says. “
When it comes to the role of the media, Norway’s Arctic station chief says he is often surprised to find different views expressed in one publication, depending on which researcher is being interviewed. He sees one of the main problems in the tendency to always have a climate scientist and a sceptic placed one against the other.
“This can give the public the impression that half of the researchers think climate change is happening and the rest don’t”, he says. “Actually, almost all researchers say climate change is taking place and yes, something has to be done now.”
The debate has also become too emotional, Max says. He thinks a real discussion is becoming increasingly difficult.
Thanks for sharing those ideas with me Max, and with the Ice Blog readers. Thanks also once again for your hospitality and the coffee, looking out onto the melting snow around the bust of Roald Amundsen.

(Ny Alesund, early June 2010)
As we get ready for a big conference here in Bonn, starting on Monday, Global Media Forum
“The Heat is On: Climate Change and the Media”, these are exactly the sort of thing we’ll be talking about. I feel a huge sense of responsibility as a journalist. Of course we want to present the “whole picture”. But we don’t want to distort the facts by getting the balance wrong.

The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) in Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost higher education institution. Unsurprisingly, Arctic biology, geology, geophysics and technology are the specialities here.

(Glaciology Prof. Doug Benn with colleagues heading for field trip to Longyearbyen glaciers – and me at the start of the trip with them.)

I was glad to have the chance to meet up with some of the experts. As well as Gunnar Sand, mentioned in a previous post as Director of the Longyearbyen CO2 Lab, I had the chance to talk to Professor Hanne Christiansen
an expert on permafrost and head of Arctic Geology at UNIS,

(on the staircase outside her office at UNIS)
and Professor Doug Benn pictured in the last entry heading up to the glaciers with two junior colleages.
As well as Arctic permafrost and glaciers (more on both later)I was interested to hear their views on climate change in general and the role of the media in particular. I was not surprised to encounter some wariness from scientists working out on the field towards journalists in view of the huge dimensions the controversy over climate has taken on in the media. Let me just share a statement from Doug Benn, who runs a field project in the Himalayas as well as his work in the Arctic, on the debate – and fuss – over the wrong figure in the IPCC report and the ensuing lack of confidence in the IPCC and even climate science in general. Doug stresses the procedure by which the error got into the report shows up serious deficits, but he also sees a lot of responsibility for what followed with the media.

“The whole impact of that whole debate was amplified both in terms of the disaster scenarios and the credibility of the IPCC by the way that media covered that particular issue. And in fact what happens is that science carries on on a much more level keel. Science is not undergoing the same mood swings that the media went through on that. The majority of scientists are plugging away, gathering good data on environmental changes that are going on, quietly publishing their results in journals, and slowly a view emerges. And so I do think it would be good if the media could correct its tendencies to go for the sensation, and of course there’s a long tradition in the media that anything that’s new and exciting is going to get prominence. But actually that does not serve science well. Mostly science proceeds by slow, careful steps and gradually pictures emerge and it takes us a long time to make up our minds about what’s happening in particular systems. Now over the whole issue of climate change and the global impact of climate change both governments and the media and indeed environmental organisations have been rather impatient, and they want definitive statements about what’s happening, we want action, we want decisions made now. And the way science works is not really compatible with that. I think the headlong rush into declaring global warming as a global disaster has been rash. This is not to say we don’t face environmental challenges, but simply that the rush has been unfortunate and actually we still need to do good science, to think critically about things. And as soon as you replace critical investigation with belief and dogma, you’re no longer doing science. Science needs the media, but it does have rather an uneasy relation with it because of these things I’ve been talking about. “
Thanks for taking the time to share those thoughts, Doug.

None of the experts were keen to give an interview at this stage about a possible link between a warming planet and increased volcanic activity, although some certainly say it’s worth looking into. But as we know, these things take a long, long time and we humans tend to want results “now” – and certainly in our lifetimes. Felicity Liggins,a climate consultant with the UK met office.
Met Office Climate Change Guide
did answer my enquiry, explaining that there is some evidence from the geological record of a potential link between changes in climate and volcanic activity through changes in land ice. But the data and the level of scientific understanding of all this is still very limited, she says, so that it’s not possible to draw any firm conclusions about whether we could expect more things like this to happen as a result of human-induced climate change.
She refers us to the papers I mentioned in the last post, which look at the impact of climate-induced ice unloading on volcanic activity. The authors use examples from Iceland.
Now of course the huge impact and publicity caused by the volcanic eruption make it a fine time to draw the attention of a wider public to research like this, which might otherwise only interest a very small minority. I certainly find the topic worthy of note and would be happy if the Icelandic eruption and associated publicity leads to some more research into this.
Another “positive” thing to come out of the flying ban is the amount of CO2 emissions we saved, although given the current frenzy to make up for it, the question is how high the reduction will really be overall.
I interviewed Jan Burck from Germanwatch about this.

You can see from the picture in the background that the organisation is concerned with “North-South” dialogue and creating a fairer world.
Germanwatch
Jan took the emissions from European airtraffic per day, which amounts to an estimated one million tonnes of CO2. Taken over a whole week, he says those cancelled flights would have saved approxiamately one percent of Germany’s annual emissions, or as much as a whole country the size of Latvia emits in a year. That is a lot of CO2.
Maybe this whole crisis has made a lot of people think twice about flying, the form of transport most harmful to the climate. Estimates by Germanwatch and others say travelling just 3,000 km by air emits one tonne of CO2. By car, you could cover 7,000 km, by train between 15 and 20,000 km before producing the same amount. (Of course there are very complex calculations behind all this).
Jan Burck hopes big companies might re-think their travel policy, encouraging staff to use the train inside Europe, for instance. He also made the point to me that being “grounded” can give us a feel for distance and the size of the planet that a lot of people have lost, because air travel takes us across such big distances so quickly. Nice point Jan, good food for thought.

I have been trying to pin down some elusive scientists this morning after reading a short article entitled “Research call to study climate link” on a double-page spread in the Guardian newspaper entitled “Volcano chaos”.
It quotes scientists in a series of papers published by the Royal Society calling for wide-ranging research into whether rising global temperatures could trigger more volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes or tsunamis.
Guardian online article The article says experts say global warming could affect these kinds of geological developments because it can move large amounts of mass on the planet’s surface. It seems logical that melting glaciers and rising sea levls would shift the distribution of huge quantities of water and that that could change pressure on the ground, possibly influencing ruptures or seismic shifts.
The paper quotes “research from Germany” as suggesting the earths crust could sometimes be close to moving so that quakes could be triggered by even tiny changes in surface pressure, e.g. from heavy rain. So far, my attempts to locate these German researchers this morning have been in vain. Ideas welcome.
Of course there are those who would say some of us are just obsessed by climate change and trying to relate it to everything. But if some scientists who have been looking into the distant past and think they can discern some evidence of significant warming being linked to geological activity then, it would seem foolhardy not to consider the possibility and feed the info into models for the future.
Meanwhile, that Icelandic volcano could be doing something for the climate by stopping all those planes from flying. I’m trying to get some figures on that. If I do, I’ll keep you posted.

Your ice blogger was asked to write an editorial post for the ThInk3 website.It’s part of an EU blogging competition, which might interest you.
It’s all about development – in my opinion climate change and development are inextricably linked. Ice blog readers might find the site interesting in general – (and of course I’d be interested in your opinions on the guest editorial).
Thinkaboutit blogging website