Cool Planet

by Brooks B. Yeager
Executive Vice President for Policy
Clean Air-Cool Planet

Tromsoe, Norway, is at about the same latitude as Barrow, Alaska – well, it’s 70˚ for Tromsoe, 71˚ for Barrow – I’m sure to the discomfiture of the Norwegians.  In any case,  they are two of the largest towns of what’s known as the “High North,” but they couldn’t be more different.   Barrow has a rough, formidable beauty, perched as it is on a gravel strand leading directly out to the ice-cold waters of the Chukchi Sea.  It’s a blustery place, even in mid-summer, and polar bears are often seen in the vicinity of town; the nearest tree is over 100 miles south, on the sunnier side of the Brooks Range. There is a wonderful new science building on the edge of town; the researchers live in barracks-like housing elevated off the tundra.  As you walk to the lone Mexican restaurant, along the residential streets, most houses show some evidence of the close relationship that Barrow residents have to their natural surroundings – recently hunted ducks hanging from the roof, fish drying on racks by the snowmachines and the overturned boats waiting for needed repairs.

Tromsoe, on the other hand, is a small but cosmopolitan place, a grown-up fishing village with a top-notch hotel just off the waterfront, a beautiful new library in the center of town, a major university and research complex, and a very nice restaurant and nightlife scene.  The April weather can be wet, but most of the time I was there it was sunny and 55˚.  Looking out over the busy harbor at the strikingly modern cathedral on the other side of the channel, surrounded by snow-capped peaks in all directions, I wondered at the differences between these two northern towns.

I was in Tromsoe for the Biennial Ministerial of the Arctic Council, the forum through which the eight Arctic nations discuss issues of the environment and sustainable development in the region they all share.  CA-CP and our partner-in-crime, the Clean Air Task Force, have been working for the past two years to interest the Council in the problem of short-lived pollutants, such as black carbon, methane, and tropospheric ozone, that appear to be accelerating the dramatic warming that is changing the Arctic before our very eyes.  All of that work – the briefings, the ‘Chatham House’ meetings with high-level government representatives, the technical work with the Council’s lead working group, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) into the ministerial meetings – flowed into the meeting of the ministers, with what I can only describe as an amazing result.

Meetings among foreign ministers can be stressful at the best of times.  Nations have interests, and the ministers have to speak to those interests.  Sometimes it can get a little testy, as when Canada’s FM, Lawrence Cannon, bluntly told the European Commission that Canada would not welcome their participation as long as they continued to hold a policy against seal-hunting that he regarded as insensitive to the lives and interests of the peoples of the north.

But this meeting had a different spirit – it was as if the ministers had found a collective voice, a voice for the Arctic.  Their mood was certainly affected by the fact that most of them, the day before, had attended the “Melting Ice Summit”, hosted by Al Gore and Norwegian FM Jonas Gahr-Store.  The science reports at that conclave would have focused the attention of even the most obtuse politician.  The Arctic as we know it is disappearing – its three great ice masses melting before our eyes.  The most visible is the retreat of the summer sea ice, the home of the polar bear and the ice seals, which may be basically gone within a decade.  But the great Greenland Ice Sheet and the permafrost are melting too, with potentially catastrophic results for the whole globe.  But it wasn’t just the dire science that moved the ministers.

They also found a story to tell about what could be done.  That story is about black carbon and the other pollutants I talked about earlier.  The Council now calls them ‘short-lived forcers’ or ‘non-CO2 drivers’, because, with the exception of methane, they have not previously been considered as greenhouse gases, but they are having a major effect in pushing global warming.  But because they have relatively short lives in the atmosphere – as opposed to CO2 – if we can reduce them at the source, we can have a much more immediate effect on the rate of warming.  So the Arctic ministers, led by Gahr-Store of Norway, an emerging political star, now have a strategy that could, if we can implement it successfully, actually slow the rate of warming in the Arctic.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the difference between Tromsoe and Barrow?  Well, that’s all about the Gulf Stream, which warms the coast of Norway and brings fish to the tables of the Tromsoe restaraunts.  And the Gulf Stream is one of the things that we could lose if we don’t take every step we know of to slow and reverse climate change – in the north, and around the globe.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Arctic, Climate, Policy. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Al Gore, Arctic, Arctic Council, ice sheets, melting, Norway, Tromsoe, Warming, Warming ice