Arctic Ice Cap

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, we are deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Jay. I am sure that he is right in saying that this is just the first of the debates we shall have on the Arctic. He mentioned the pace of the melting of the ice. This is nothing new. When Nansen’s “Fram” drifted across the Arctic Ocean, it took three years to get from the Bering Strait to clear water off Greenland. When the French boat “Tara” did it in 2006, it took just two years. Indeed, the Arctic flow is twice as strong as it was 100 years ago, and that is a pretty dramatic change. In 2007, the summer ice shrank to half the level that it was in the 1950s and 1960s, as the noble Lord said. I would like to draw to the attention of the House another phenomenon, which scientists call the Albedo effect. The sunlight shining down on ice or snow is almost all reflected and only about 15 per cent goes to warm the seas underneath. If there is clear water, 95 per cent of the sunlight warms the water. Therefore, as the amount of clear water in the summer increases, so the Albedo effect has an accelerating impact on the melting of the ice. This is the reason why the Arctic is growing warmer faster than anywhere else in the world.

The noble Lord raised a number of questions, but there is no doubt about it: this has greatly encouraged the huge search for minerals. There is a difference. Off Alaska, the American environmentalist movement has now made it extremely difficult for international oil companies to prospect for oil with any prospect of being allowed to do so. Shell, one of the big companies there—a British company— is at the moment marking time on this. If one looks across to Siberia, however, the Russian experience is very different. There are, as I have heard described, staggering quantities of gas as well as oil. During the Soviet era, there were enormous and immensely damaging changes to the environment. That is now being corrected by the new Russian administration. The Russians have at least three very major projects offshore of the Siberian coast. Much the biggest is the Shtokman gas field, which is—noble Lords may be surprised to learn— the second largest gas field in the world, though in immensely challenging, hugely deep water.

The noble Lord referred to the ice cap; but of course, there is no land under the North Pole—it is all ice. It is immensely deep water, sometimes four or five miles deep. There are huge icebergs, but in Alun Anderson’s book After the Ice, which first attracted me to this—and I really recommend anybody who is interested in this subject to read it; it is a fascinating compendium of facts, history and forecasts—the author described the Shtokman field as,

“the hottest groundbreaking project in the entire Arctic, and Russia is driving it forward”.

That is something of which we really need to take account. If one looks at the deeper water further north, it is even more difficult. The combination of accelerating warming and this advancing technology poses, as the noble Lord has said, huge challenges for us all, and I, too, look forward to my noble friend’s reply from the Front Bench as to what we are doing about it.