Infinite Unknown

Britain used to have 80 per cent of European fish stocks (Photo: PA)

If you think that leaving the EU would be catastrophic, take a look at Greenland. By rights its people ought to be poor. Their island is isolated, suffers from freezing weather, has a workforce of only 28,000 and relies on fish for 82 per cent of its exports. But it turns out that since leaving the EU, Greenland has been so freed of EU red tape and of the destruction of the Common Fisheries Policy, that the average income of the islanders today is higher than those living in Britain, Germany and France.

Greenland’s politicians realised that the fisheries policy was ruining their fishing industry. They had the guts to stand up against the all the prophets of doom and let their people vote in a referendum on leaving the European Community, as the EU was then called. On January 1, 1985, it became independent of Brussels – the only country ever to do so.

Greenland was, with Britain, one of only two EU countries to be heavily dependent on fishing. In fact, Britain had, in some estimates, 80 per cent of Europe’s fish stocks when it entered the EU, because our fishermen had carefully managed them, while the fisherman of Spain, France and Italy had destroyed most of the Mediterranean stocks.

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Tags: Economy, EU, Europe, fishing, Greenland, Politics

The minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers.

Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100 Photo: Getty

Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world’s politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.

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Tags: Antarctica, Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming, Greenland, IPCC, Politics, Science

A polar bear roams on the remote Svalbard archipelago ((AP Photo/Scanpix))

A polar bear roams on the remote Svalbard archipelago between Norway’s northern tip and the North Pole, Sept. 1, 1998. The thousands of polar bears that prowl the archipelago are one of the main reason visitors venture to the frozen islands, which are as far north as one can go on a regularly scheduled airline. The huge and aggressive animals rarely come into Longyearbyen, the capital of the Svalbards, but local authorities recommend that visitors who head out of town take along high-powered rifles,which can be rented at local stores.

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska. Continue reading »

Tags: Alaska, Climate Change, Earth Changes, Global Warming, Greenland, North Pole, North-West passage

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The thickest, oldest and toughest sea ice around the North Pole is melting, a bad sign for the future of the Arctic ice cap, NASA satellite data showed on Tuesday.

“Thickness is an indicator of long-term health of sea ice, and that’s not looking good at the moment,” Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center told reporters in a telephone briefing.

This adds to the litany of disturbing news about Arctic sea ice, which has been retreating over the last three decades, especially last year, when it ebbed to its lowest level. Continue reading »

Tags: Antarctica, Arctic sea ice, Greenland, Melting, NASA, North Pole

TREND: Ocean currents, global warming and wind combine to leave the Arctic ice fragile. New data this winter on Arctic winds and currents indicate that next summer’s ice loss at the North Pole may be even greater than 2007′s record-setting shrinkage. Continue reading »

Tags: Climate Change, Earth Changes, greenhouse gases, Greenland, North Atlantic, Polar ice

 
Southeast coast of Greenland

It is hard to shock journalists and at the same time leave them in awe of the power of nature. A group returning from a helicopter trip flying over, then landing on, the Greenland ice cap at the time of maximum ice melt last month were shaken.
One shrugged and said: “It is too late already.”

What they were all talking about was the moulins, not one moulin but hundreds, possibly thousands. “Moulin” is a word I had only just become familiar with. It is the name for a giant hole in a glacier through which millions of gallons of melt water cascade through to the rock below. The water has the effect of lubricating the glaciers so they move at three times the rate that they did previously.

Some of these moulins in Greenland are so big that they run on the scale of Niagra Falls. The scientists who accompanied these journalists on the trip were almost as alarmed. That is pretty significant because they are world experts on ice and Greenland in particular. We were visiting Ilulissat, Greenland, once a stronghold of Innuit hunters but now with so little ice that the dog sleds are in danger of falling through even in the depth of winter. But it is not the lack of sea ice that worries scientists and should be of serious concern to the inhabitants of coastal zones across the world. Cities like New York and states like Florida are in the front line.

Scientists know this already, but just to give you some idea of the problem, the Greenland ice cap is melting at such a fast rate it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break up. Continue reading »

Tags: Greenland, Ice Caps, Melting