I am on the edge of the Arctic Circle…
I am on the edge of the Arctic Circle about to cross deeper into it. I am in Greenland.
Next Monday sees the publication of one of the strongest climate change reports the United Nations has ever commissioned. To be frank, it is a pretty terrifying document – although thus far I have only seen snippets of a draft.
The epicentre of concern is right here in Greenland. There had been a blessed slow-down in glacier melt for four or five years, but quite suddenly the disintegration of the two biggest inland glaciers has speeded up. Scientists up here have now been here long enough – some of the readings have now been going on for 50 years, and more intensively for the past two decades – for them to see what is really happening.
I can’t give you the detail yet. But so seriously does the United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon take it that he’s coming here in person this week to see for himself. I am priviledged to be here with my cameraman Soren Munk (fortunately a UK-resident Dane!) and four or five other correspondents and we are to be taken by helicopter and dog sled to film the evidence.
Even landing here in Kangerlussuaq, this magical place is yielding up some of the richness of its beauty. The snow is deep, the ice is hard, and temperature is low: -26C. I have been to Spitsbergen off the top of Norway before; I have been to King George Island in the Antarctic. Each has their very special characteristics.
The wildlife in Antarctica is spellbinding: emperor penguins, walruses preening themselves on the ice flows. Spitzbergen is well developed, sporting a university even. Greenland is somewhere between the two. It hosts 120,000 mainly Inuit people, living in wooden houses dotted in small communities around this island ten times the size of Britain.
Tonight we shall be in the Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, way north of here. Tomorrow – to the glaciers. We have no idea whether we can transmit in any form from up there – the curvature of the earth’s surface makes it hard to “see” satellites. Few people have ever managed transmissions from so far north, but we shall try. Either way, you will see my reports online, on Twitter, and of course one way or another on Channel 4 News.
When I asked Ban Ki-moon’s people why he’s here when Crimea is summoning so much attention, when Syria is besieged by so much death, the answer is that he sees the gathering pace of climate change and the threat it poses to an eighth of the world’s population who live in coastal areas (and that in includes places as disparate as Bangladesh and the Somerset Levels) as the greatest threat to mankind’s future co-existence.
Follow @jonsnowC4 on Twitter
