With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

THE WATCHTOWER
Keeping climate vigil on an Arctic island
A chill wind was blowing off the glacier. Small blue chunks of ice
occasionally split from its face and floated down the fjord toward the ocean.
A strange green ribbon of light flashed across the sky above from an
anonymous building on the foreshore. And on the snow behind, a polar bear
wandered warily around a strange human settlement that had grown up on
this remote fjord at the seventy-ninth parallel.
I had come to Ny-Alesund, an international community of scientists that,
in the darkening days of autumn, numbered fewer than thirty people. The
hardy band was there to man this Arctic watchtower on the northwest shores
of Spitzbergen, the largest island of a cluster of Arctic islands called Svalbard,
because it is reckoned to be one of the most likely places to witness firsthand
any future climatic conflagration. Hollywood directors may have chosen
New York as the place that would descend into climatic chaos first. But while
the scientists here heartily enjoy watching their DVD of The Day After
Tomorrow, they are convinced that Ny-Alesund is the place to be. The place
where our comfy, climatically benign world might begin to end. Where
nature may start to take its revenge.
Ny-Alesund is a tiny town of yellow, red, and blue houses two hours' flight
from the northernmost spot on mainland Europe. It is nearer Greenland and