Last week, I spent 3 nights in the Arctic as a guest of the Norwegian Government.
My main motivation for going - with temperatures as low as minus 18 it wasn't an obvious choice - was the itinerary including a lot of meetings with experts on relations with Russia in the region. Norway is trying, with some success, to engage with Russia, whilst remaining firm on important issues like democratisation and human rights.
One other aspect turned out more gripping than I expected, and that was the impact of climate change on the Arctic, an aspect brought to international attention by David Cameron two years ago.
To date, I have been agnostic on some of the more radical claims on climate change. The evidence that it is happening is pretty clear, in my view, but I have sometimes been less than convinced by some of the more wild claims on the man-made aspects. After all, Stone Age rock drawings also found in the Arctic region show that the sea level has fluctuated substantially over many millenia, at times when our carbon emissions were no more than breathing out CO2 and creating wood fires.
I like to see evidence-based conclusions. To my mind, one of the weaknesses of the arguments put forward by the growing climate change lobby has been this - if temperatures are set to rise so dramatically due to carbon emissions, shouldn't the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere be growing rapidly? The evidence in London and other Western cities is actually that air quality has been improving in recent years.
I therefore found this graph quite compelling. It shows CO2 concentrations in Ny-Alesund, just about the closest habited place on Earth to the North Pole, on Spitsbergen, where I was. Concentrations in parts per million, as measured by Swedish scientists, have increased from around 350 in 1990 to around 375 today. There are seasonal fluctuations, which is why there is a best fit harmonic attached to show the trend. See here for more on Stockholm University's work.
Of course, this still doesn't show that climate change is all or even largely man-made, but it certainly grabbed my attention that CO2 concentrations are up 7% in less than 2 decades.
