January 3, 2014 4:42 pm
A cruise that will cost the climate campaign dear
By Christopher Caldwell
The rescue of passengers from a Russian ship is a setback for those who warn of global warming
When a
Chinese helicopter rescued 52 passengers from a Russian climate-science cruise ship trapped in ice off Antarctica, it was a skilfully managed end to an ordeal that had begun on Christmas Eve. It was also a debacle for
climate change activists. The 233-foot Akademik Shokalskiy, a Russian meteorological ship leased by the Australian tour outfit Aurora Expeditions, had been on a mission called the “Spirit of Mawson”. It aimed to replicate part of a gruelling voyage the explorer Douglas Mawson had made in 1912. The ship carried 22 scientists looking to perform various experiments, led by Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales. They were joined by 26 tourists paying for the adventure, along with journalists for The Guardian, BBC and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Amid the worldwide relief that the passengers are now en route to Tasmania on the
Australian supply ship Aurora Australis, another note is audible. Many websites where readers normally take climate change for granted have been inundated by posts from gloating disbelievers. The Australian group belittled the winter that nearly killed them and got a comeuppance, say the detractors. Such posts appear on the many YouTube videos uploaded by passengers (“For all your self-aggrandising bluster, you will go down in history as Turney’s turkeys . . . You are an international laughing stock”), on the Spirit of Mawson Twitter feed (“If the #spiritofmawson has taught us anything it’s the low level of intellect among those who have ‘settled’ the science”) and even on the New York Times’s Dot Earth blog, where the writer Andrew Revkin notes that the incident has “energised climate change contrarians”.
Of course, a scientific dispute cannot be settled by one near-tragedy on the high seas and a week’s worth of online invective. But the episode is a setback for those making the case for what used to be called global warming – probably the largest such setback since emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in 2009 cast doubt on the scientific neutrality of several climate researchers.
A beset ship is like a skint bank, and we can draw certain parallels to the financial crisis of 2008. The voyage of the Akademik Shokalskiy mixed public and private purposes, and all such enterprises nowadays invite scepticism. Those who stood to reap the benefits of the voyage were able, when things went sour, to pass on many of the costs.
These were of three kinds. The first was a cost in danger. Precipitation and wind complicated rescue plans in the week between Christmas and New Year’s day. Andrew Luck-Baker of the BBC called his own 15-minute rescue flight a “white-knuckle ride” – but the Chinese helicopter had to cover the distance between the Russian vessel and the rescue vessel eight times over the course of four hours. The second is a cost in money. The Xue Long, the Chinese icebreaker that sought to free the stricken vessel, became stranded itself, and will now lie idle until the weather changes. Twenty-two Russian crewmen will remain aboard the Akademik until help arrives weeks from now. French personnel and equipment were involved, too. The final cost is to science. The Aurora Australis had to delay offloading supplies to other, more purely scientific projects along the Antarctic coast in order to respond to the emergency call.
That is why the generally sympathetic Revkin found “vexing” the “devil-may-care” attitude of the ship’s passengers, who videotaped their raucous and self-referential New Year’s eve singalong. Nerves could be an explanation for that, but there was something unseemly in press reports of crew members dragging sleds with the passengers’ luggage to the helicopters. This looked like pampering. It made Mr Turney’s tweet of thanks to his rescuers – “for all their hard work” – sound less like the acknowledgment of an unrepayable debt to someone who has saved your life, and more like something you would say when tipping a barmaid.
How to keep well-meaning but overconfident people from imposing on others when they fail is a familiar problem. In his healthcare reform, Barack Obama sought to solve it (for better or for worse) with the “individual mandate”, which requires people to buy health insurance even if they are certain nothing could ever go wrong with them. The state of New Hampshire has a controversial “negligent hiker law”, which bills lost hikers for the cost of their own rescue, should they require one. In the world’s deadliest waters, that approach would be neither charitable nor fair. But that does not make it reasonable, in any walk of life, to confer the rewards of risk on people who need never heed the costs.
