Arctic booms as climate change melts polar ice cap

[Eugene]

Arctic booms as climate change melts polar ice cap

The global hunger for oil is fuelling a new gold rush.
Alex Duval-Smith reports from Hammerfest, northern Norway

Sunday November 27, 2005
The Observer

<snip>

These are the Klondikers of global warming: men from all over the
world who have come to Hammerfest, gateway to the Barents Sea,
to make their fortune from new resources - oil, gas, fish and
diamonds - made accessible by the receding ice.

It is the dark season here - two months from November to January
when the sun never rises above the snow-laced rocks around Hammerfest,
ice-free thanks to the Gulf stream. In the horseshoe-shaped port,
trawlers from all over the world wait for favourable weather to head
back into the Barents Sea. Hammerfest, with its colourful wooden
houses, feels cosy. But it is a nerve centre of the scramble for the
Arctic's wealth that raises urgent questions.

The 14 million sq km Arctic Ocean is home to 25 per cent of the
planet's unextracted oil and natural gas. With a population of four
million, the region is much more stable than the Middle East. Global
warming, in combination with the current high oil price, makes it
ever more accessible. Yet the bordering countries - Russia, Canada,
the US, Norway and Danish Greenland - have yet to agree on who owns
what. Long-forgotten bays, waterways and islands are moving to the
top of the international agenda.

<snip>

Full article: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1651724,00.html

[Dogmudgeon]

1. This is Not A Good Thing

The damage being done to the climate will require FAR more energy to deal with than the oil we manage to suck out of the Arctic oilfields.

The Arctic is one of those critical areas for terrestrial heat transfer, involving thousands of heat-carrying ocean currents, modulation of more than half the world's weather systems, a tiny but critical amount of heat and water transfer between the stratosphere, and regulation of the Earth's albedo by the reflectivity of the ice and snowpack.

Not to mention that millions of cubic hectares of soil have gone from being frozen to being highly biologically active, releasing methane and carbon dioxide in quantities that are now probably greater than the carbon pollutants human activity now releases.

And if there's ever a "climate snap-back" like the movie The Day After Tomorrow (melo)dramatized, all those new arctic cash cows will freeze before Wall Street can even say "moo".

--p!