Last night we gathered at the Hilton Hotel near the Copenhagen airport, for a two-hour briefing on the trip ahead. There I met for the first time, my travel companions. They are absolutely terrific! Multi-national and from different sectors of the global society, we all share one objective: learning more about the effects of Climate Change to become more empowered in the fight against it.

Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, lectured on “what we can learn from the ice”. He reminded us of some interesting facts I want to share with you:
1. There are three massive ice caps on the planet: the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the Himalayas. All three play important roles in the Global Climate System.
2. The Arctic is water (ice) surrounded by land. Antarctic is land surrounded by water.
3. The Arctic region has four million people, and no penguins. The Antarctic has no people, and twenty million penguins.
4. The Arctic ice cap plays two vital roles with respect of climate: it acts as giant mirror that reflects the sun’s rays thus avoiding heating, and it cools the winds that blow over it towards the north Atlantic where they cool the water currents.
5. This ice cap is shrinking. In the summer of 1978 it measured 8.4 million square kilometers. In the summer of 2007 it measured 5.3 million square kilometers.
6. The Arctic ice cap is also thinning at a scary rate.
7. The Arctic Ocean surface temperature was -2’C back in 1985. Last year it was +.2’C.
8. If the present trajectory holds (which means we do nothing or little to stop mitigate Climate Change), within a decade or two we will have an ice-free Arctic every summer!

All these facts point to one conclusion: what’s happening in the Arctic is worse than the worst-case IPCC predictions!

After the presentation, and the usual 200 e-mails that were waiting for me, I managed to sleep four hours before waking up this morning at 06:00hrs. Shortly afterwards we where at the Airport, ready to board Greenland Airways’ four hour flight to Kangerlussuaq. I took a picture of the plane – bright red – for you to see below.

I also took some pictures of the route we followed.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 19:03 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.