It is hard to keep up with all the Arctic stories happening at the moment amidst all the other news on the environment front with Fukushima, 25 years of Chernobyl and a year since Deep Water Horizon. Let me make up for having neglected the Arctic a little while I was busy on other things by passing on a few links.
At the Oil Spill Response conference for the future in Trondheim, (see earlier entries) I had the pleasure to meet John Farrel, Executive Director of the US Arctic Research Commission. I interviewed him about oil exploration in the Arctic, which I will make available at a later date. The website of that organisation is worth following.
The English website of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for polar and marine studies has several interesting if worrying stories about coastal erosion in the Arctic, record depletion of the ozone layer over the Arctic and a significant increase in the freshwater content of the Arctic Ocean.
Icy Meltwater Pooling in Arctic Ocean: A Wild Card in Climate Change Scenarios is also worth reading on this topic. The findings are from the CLAMER project, a collaboration of 17 European institutes with the difficult but important task of synthesizing the research of almost 300 projects funded by the EU over the last 13 years, relating to climate change and Europe’s oceans.
That should provide ice blog fans with some interesting reading while I have a few days off enjoying the definitely ice-free weather of this western European April. More in May, although I will look out for your questions or comments as usual.

(Glacier covered to prevent melting in Switzerland, 2010)

I came across some interesting research results about how people’s scepticism about climate change relates to what term is used to describe it.
A study conducted by the University of Michigan says a lot of Americans are sceptical about “global warming”, but fewer of them are sceptical about “climate change”. “Wording matters” is the message from the lead author Jonathon Schuldt from the UM Dept. of Psychology. The results indicate that 74% of people though the problem was real if asked about the world’s temperature changing and a “phenomenon called climate change”. But the percentage was reduced to 68 when it was referred to as “global warming”.
This seems very plausible to me. A lot of people will make comments about a “lack of global warming” if you talk to them during an extremely cold period. But the more neutral expression “climate change” also describes cold spells or increased extreme weather events as a result of the overall changes to the planet.
The study also has some interesting conclusions about differences between Democrats and Republicans in terms of use of language and response to different terms. You can read the abstract for yourselves online in the Public Opinion Quarterly.
Let me just give you one encouraging conclusion.
“The good news is that Americans may not be as polarized on the issue as previously though. The extent of the partisan divide on this issues depends heavily on question wording”, says one of the authors, Norbert Schwarz.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had some interesting talks with US experts and journalists on a study tour to Hamburg and Copenhagen recently.
I put some of what I learned from them into a report.
There’s a short version on this week’s edition of Living Planet:
Sign of hope in US?
After the announcement that Yvo de Boer is resigning, it’s also been announced the next round of preparatory talks for the big Mexico summit at the end of the year have been brought forward to April. I’m not surprised they’re moving earlier, but it doesn’t make me feel any more optimistic.

I’ll never forget the beauty, the silence and the wonder of stepping out on the frozen Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea in Barrow, Alaska.

Ice Blog Archive Alaska 2008
Nor will I forget the tales of the Inupiat people of the changes to the ice and the consequences for wildlife, like polar bears and whales.
On the same trip, I visited Prince William Sound. That site of great natural beauty was also the location of the Exxon Valdez disaster, just over 20 years ago. At first sight, you don’t notice that, but underneath some of the rocks you find traces of oil, which takes a long, long time to break down in the cold Arctic waters.
So it’s with some concern that I follow the controversy over plans by Royal Dutch Shell to drill for billions of barrels of oil in the Chukchi Sea this year. The sea lies between Alaska and Siberia and is thought to hold large quantities of oil and gas.
The US authorities conditionally approved the plans to drill three exploratory wells in December 2009. The decision was delayed on the grounds that the area is a prime habitat for polar bears, now recognized by US law as a threatened species.
Now indigenous and conservationist groups are suing to stop the project.
Concern from the Northern Alaska Environmental Centre
The oil industry has a strong position in Alaska. It provides around 40% of the state’s tax revenue and provides a lot of funding for the University of Alaska. Shell says it is working to improve its environmental impact. But the environment lobby is not happy that enough is known about the potential impacts of further drilling and the changes being brought by climate change. With the race to get at the Arctic’s natural resources speeding up as the region warms – more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet – the risk of development without adequate research on environmental impacts seems to me to be increasing all the time.
“Shell comes under attack in Alaska” – in THE GUARDIAN

Well, they didn’t do it. The EU is sticking to its 20% by 2020 figure. They could do 30%, but only will if others take more action. So much for being a leader.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer held his first press conference since Copenhagen this week. It can’t be easy to keep going in the face of the Copenhagen fiasco. Of course he has to try to stay optimistic about the process continuing in Bonn this summer and Mexico towards the end of the year. But bearing in mind the US administration is in a even more difficult position after losing the Senate majority it will need to pass a climate bill, it’s hard to see where the impetus is going to come from.