Last April, two experienced polar researchers set off from the remote Canadian outpost of Resolute Bay, planning to ski 400km across the high Arctic. Their destination was a frozen expanse that could be described as the world’s last stand against climate change, one of the few spots expected to remain impervious to melting in the summer months beyond 2050.
It was already so warm the pair were obliged to ski in their underwear, Marc Cornelissen, the Dutch researcher joked in his last communications with the outside world. A day later, a Canadian rescue helicopter responding to a distress signal, found the researchers' sled dog, alone, in an area of thinning, patchy ice and open Arctic water. There was no sign of the two explorers.
The Arctic is changing twice as fast as the rest of the planet because of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Barack Obama, in the second term of his presidency, has made a mission of directing US and global attention to the threat of climate change.
He visited Alaska in early September. Using the spectacular scenery as a backdrop, the president hiked across a shrinking glacier, put a rush on an existing order for a new icebreaker, and visited a remote community increasingly exposed to severe storms because of climate change.
The itinerary, captured on White House social media, worked brilliantly at amplifying Obama's main theme. As the president explained, the changes unfolding in the Arctic pose an urgent threat to local populations and the rest of the world, and leaders assembling in Paris in December need to buckle down and reach a deal to stop climate change.
And then Obama stepped all over his own artfully crafted message by continuing to promote the discredited idea that it is possible to fight climate change effectively and drill into new reserves of oil and gas at the same time.
It’s not.
The Arctic is Exhibit A of climate change. Winters are warming, sea ice is thinning and retreating, permafrost is thawing, and coastlines are crumbling into the Bering Sea. As coastlines erode, native Alaskan villages – some on slender barrier islands – are confronting exile from lands they have hunted and fished for centuries. Wildfires burn up millions of acres of tundra and boreal forest each summer. Wildlife is out of whack, after being forced off the sea ice that was their feeding platform. There have been instances of polar bears mating with grizzlies and preying on dolphins instead of seals.
Jet stream thrown off course
The changes in the polar region are not confined to the Arctic. Scientists believe the loss of Arctic sea ice may have thrown the jet stream off course, putting
North America
into a wintry deep freeze, but bringing record heat to
Europe
.
And it's not just the physical landscape that's changing. The advent of an ice-free Arctic in the summer months – possibly as early as the 2030s – has set off a scramble for control of new and faster shipping routes between the Americas and Asia.
There is talk of a new cold war. And there is the promise and the threat of oil.
As Obama Instagrammed his way across the majestic terrain, Shell was preparing to wind down its first full summer season of drilling for oil in the Chukchi Sea, potentially tapping into huge reserves of oil and gas that – as the president well knows – can not be burned without triggering a climate catastrophe.
After seven years and $7 billion of investment, Shell ultimately decided it would abandon Arctic drilling “for the foreseeable future” after disappointing results at its test well in the Chukchi Sea. But the Obama administration said this month it was going ahead with new oil and gas regulations for the Arctic.
The US Geological Survey has estimated that about 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 per cent of undiscovered oil is waiting to be found in the Arctic circle. And yet it can’t be burned without exceeding warming of 2 degrees, a temperature the international community has deemed as the gateway to dangerous and irreversible climate change.
Scientists have long known there are about three times more fossil fuel reserves in the world than can be exploited without triggering a climate catastrophe. An influential research study published earlier this year found there was no chance of avoiding that catastrophe unless the oil in the Arctic, as well as other unconventional oils, stayed in the ground.
Obama, who was president during the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 – when it took three months to contain a blow-out in an offshore well – also knows that drilling is not risk-free. That is especially so in the Arctic, where extreme storms and remote geography make it an especially dangerous proposition. An oil spill in the Arctic would destroy one of the last areas of untouched wilderness.
Burning more fossil fuels
But Obama, during his time in Alaska and throughout his presidency, has stuck to his argument that it is possible to open up more sources of oil and gas, burn more fossil fuels, spew more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – and somehow still fight climate change.
Even as he devotes the second half of his presidency to fighting climate change, he has allowed new oil, gas and coal projects across the US, undermining his environmental legacy.
Privately, White House officials have told campaigners they don’t dare take on the oil and gas companies.
But it’s time that Obama said out loud what has long been recognised: waging an effective fight against climate change while developing new fossil fuel reserves just can’t be done.
The Arctic and the rest of the world would be a safer place for it. Until then, we are all skating on thin ice.
Suzanne Goldenberg is US environment correspondent of the Guardian