Politics and Science

The four hours (increasing daily) of daylight here are fascinating. The snow and the sky turn so many different shades of blues and pink, it’s tempting to stand outside and watch the show.
Of course Arctic Frontiers continues inside, so a quick photo session in the lunch-break has to suffice.
There are actually 3 different elements of this conference. The first two days were policy,the rest of the week science, with a parallel International Polar Year meeting taking place. People keep saying it would be great to bring the politicians and scientists together even more and have the ministers and commissioners here all week. To some extent, I think that’s true. Then again, the scientists need their own forum to discuss technical stuff. Some of them told me they were getting impatient with the politics, although they know governance is a key issue for the future of the Arctic.
Somehow, I don’t think the fact that we feel governments are too slow to take action to drastically reduce emissions would change much even if the ministers and commissioners could sit through all the science conferences. The information about the speed at which the Arctic is melting has got through to the politicians. The trouble is the changes we will have to make to our lifestyles and the slow rate at which we’ve been developing alternative technologies. The Norwegian ministers here said quite clearly Norway, for instance, will continue to depend on fossil fuels in coming decades and try to reduce emissions using new technologies like carbon capture and storage (still at experimental stage!)
We have to reduce our energy consumption and drastically increase our use of renewables. I’d say there’s a concensus here on that amongst scientists and politicians here.
One young German scientist said to me last night everybody who understands the science and the situation should just take a stand and support the call for a moratorium on any further exploitation of oil and gas in the Arctic. Now that would be a fine thing. But what about commercial interests? Sigh.