The northwest passage is a sea route through the arctic ocean connecting the atlantic and pacific oceans, across the northern edge of North America. The route is normally extremely difficult to navigate, due to a hell of a lot of ice being in the way. Nobody was more aware of this than Roald Amundsen, who was the first person to navigate the route in 1903-6. He wrote in his diary – “This northwest passage stuff is a little tricky with all this ice in the way. The quicker we get a bit of global warming and melt all this bloody ice the better.”(1)
Well it seems that Amundsen got his way. At the end of August the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre reported that the northwest was opening up, and would soon be open for nice new shipping routes to further escalate the problems. Whoopee! Now we can sail from the UK to San Francisco over the top of North America (2). Just what I’ve always wanted. Oh and the arctic ice has just melted to its lowest level ever too, by a lonnggggg way, which is a little scary (3). So we can add that to the list of nasty things we have done through global warming.
In other news recently, George Bush has excelled himself again by telling everyone that will listen that he is extremely concerned about global warming and reserves his right to do absolutely nothing about it (4). Unless people want to. But they certainly shouldn’t be forced to change. Oh no.
Bush’s announcement (basically that he is sticking firm and not supporting binding targets for carbon emissions) infuriated lots of people (5), and so it should. You can’t expect carbon emissions to reduce worldwide if you just ask nicely. Nobody really wants to cut their emissions, but everyone knows that it has to happen, which is why targets have to be binding. And as I pointed out in my previous post/rant, even targets which are soon to be law aren’t necessarily going to be met.
But maybe I’m being a little too pessimistic. The whole problem is apparently going to be solved by putting lots and lots of fancy pipes in the sea (6). Time will tell whether this might actually help, but to say I’m sceptical would be a massive understatement. Not that I’m a climate scientist. If it does work then it’s going to take about 400 million pipes to take up all the man-made carbon each year (6). We’d better get going then………..
References
1. Okay, he didn’t really say that. But he might as well have.
2. North west passage is now plain sailing – Gwladys Fouché, The Guardian online, 28th August 2007.
3. Arctic sea ice melts to its lowest level ever – Michael McCarthy, The Independent online, 22nd Sept. 2007.
4. Bush prepares for ‘greenwashing’ climate summit – Leonard Doyle, The Independent online 27th Sept. 2007.
5. Europeans angry after Bush climate speech ‘charade’ – Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian online, 29th Sept. 2007.
6. Lovelock urges ocean climate fix – Richard Black, BBC.co.uk, 26th Sept. 2007.
