The Northwest Passage

Satellite photos of the North Pole

This news is a few days old, but I felt I really had to comment on it. The fabled Northwest Passage is now open for the first time since it has been monitored in the last 30 years:

Historically, the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has been ice-bound through the year.

But the agency says ice cover has been steadily shrinking, and this summer's reduction has made the route navigable.

The findings, based on satellite images, raised concerns about the speed of global warming.

The Northwest Passage is one of the most fabled sea routes in the world - a short cut from Europe to Asia through the Canadian Arctic.

Recent years have seen a marked shrinkage in its ice cover, but this year it was extreme, Esa says.

It says this made the passage "fully navigable" for the first time since monitoring began in 1978.

This is not entirely unprecedented. After hundreds of years of attempts, the passage was successfully navigated for the first time by Roald Amundsen in 1906. Since then, ships have occasionally sailed through, but most of these were icebreakers who went through the ice, rather than around it.

He [Leif Pedersen of the Danish National Space Centre] said it was "about 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006".

"There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100, 000 sq km (38,600 sq miles) per year on average, so a drop of 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) in just one year is extreme," Mr Pedersen said.

This is what's really worrying. Assuming he's right, that's a loss of two million square kilometers, or 672,000 square miles, since 1996 - an area greater than the entire country of Mexico!

This may be an economic boon for certain countries. If it opens further, travel between Europe, Russia, and North America could be greatly shortened, not to mention bypassing the Panama Canal altogether.

But one big loser would be the polar bear. It's already finding it difficult to cope with the ice loss as it is:

[Researchers] found a striking shift in the bears' habits. From 1979 to 1991, 87% of the bears spotted were found mostly on sea ice. From 1992 to 2004, the percentage dropped to 33%. Most of the remaining bears have been found either in the ocean or on beaches, congregating around carcasses of whales butchered by hunters. In the past, polar bears were rarely seen at such kill sites, because they spent their time hunting their favorite meal -- seals -- on sea ice.

Not only is their population dwindling, but the bears themselves are getting smaller:

"[The polar bear is] not as fat as he would have been 15 years ago. He's probably 80-90 kilograms lighter than he would have been 15 years ago."

So if the passage fully opens up, what will the bears do? It's unlikely they could be transplanted in Antarctica and switch to a diet of penguins instead of seals; they are accustomed to living off their fat in the Summertime and raising their cubs in grassy fields.

Some people might call me a "green conservative", but I don't embrace that label because I don't consider myself particularly conservative, in the true definition of the word. Compared to the general trend of the current time, I do lean rather politically to the right, however. So one thing I can't understand about conservatives or other right-wing pundits - why doesn't this worry them? I admit that the science of global warming is not precise and the whole thing may be overblown. It is certainly exaggerated by some environmentalists. But the sheer volume of anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, and it would be foolish to simply dismiss it altogether. In addition, there's no way you could expect to triple the world's population in the last 100 years, without it dramatically impacting the environment (although the overpopulation issue is now taboo to the political left, for other reasons I'll mention in another article).

In other words, I'd rather be safe than sorry. I think about this the same way I do about illegal immigration - small increases every year end up with an unmanageable increase after several years... it would be better to deal with this problem right now, than trying to fix it later. And if we were wrong, what have we lost? Any attempt to clean the air and reduce pollutants is good for its own sake anyway, even if there was no global warming.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed