Free The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith Page B

money, perception is everything.

    Frames of the Arctic: (Left) impregnable killer of ships and brave men, ca. 1894; (Right) imperiled ecosystem or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view, ca. 2009.
    In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explorer accounts of glorious adversity shadowed by death persuaded urban donors around the world to loosen their wallets and fund expeditions to the Northwest Passage and North Pole. During World War II and the Cold War, fears of Japanese invasion, atomic bombs, and communist ideology loosened enormous national expenditures of blood and treasure to essentially open up the North for the first time. Today, scientists, through USGS oil and gas assessments and climate model projections, are convincing governments and investors that the region is a place of rising strategic value that is opening for business. And history tells us, when it comes to human decisions about spending money, this growing perception is as equally important—perhaps even more important—as the climate changes themselves.
    Viewed in this light, disappearing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is profound—but so also are the decisions of NORC governments to begin military exercises there, to start buying frigates and F-35 fighter jets, or to commit to the long and costly process of filing UNCLOS claims to its seafloor. Thawing permafrost is profound—but so also are the business decisions of private capital to snap up Canada’s northernmost railroad and port of Churchill, to buy USD $2.8 billion in Arctic offshore energy leases, and to begin developing specialized LNG tanker ships and platforms for offshore drilling in icy environments. 530
    Environmental groups around the world, horrified at the prospect of an entire ecosystem going extinct, are raising money for, and awareness of, the Arctic. And unlike most other fields of geoscience, when yet another polar ice shelf crumbles the news media actually reports on it. My colleagues and I routinely field reporters’ questions on subjects, like soil carbon storage in permafrost, once relegated to the dusty bin of academic obscurity.
    All of this publicity has spurred a massive increase in tourism to the area. In 2004 more than 1.2 million passengers traveled to Arctic destinations on cruise ships. Just three years later the number more than doubled; by 2008 there were nearly four hundred cruise ship arrivals in Greenland alone. 531 Many passengers cite the desire to “see the Arctic before it’s gone” as motivation for the pricey tickets. And while a liquid Arctic won’t arrive anytime soon, the new tourism companies, port-of-call businesses, and other new stakeholders springing up to meet this demand will.
    This tide of interest in the Arctic is being spurred by the dramatic climate-change impacts that are happening there. They are recasting the world’s perception of what the place is. By transforming its frame from empty fortress to ecological catastrophe, from military theater to business opportunity, climate change is triggering yet another powerful feedback loop in the region, a distinctly human one, that will transform it in very tangible ways. For the region’s development, its perceived strategic value, and its ties and economic linkages to the rest of the world, this may prove the most profound feedback of all.
    But does a thawing Arctic deserve all of this hype? I myself travel often to this remarkable area to study the torrid pace of climate change there. But as we’ve seen, climate is but one of four global forces driving this story of change. Furthermore, the Arctic proper (northward of the Arctic Circle, approximately 66°33’ N latitude) is actually tiny relative to the outsized attention it enjoys with news media, science funding agencies, commonly used map projections, and the public imagination. Only 4.2% of the planet’s surface and 4.6% of its ice-free land (meaning not buried under glacial ice) lies north of this parallel,