Global Warming as Foreign Policy Catalyst

When I opened the New York Times yesterday morning, the article on page A3 caught my eye: "Canada Reinforces Its Disputed Claims in the Arctic." An accompanying photo showed two Canadian soldiers with their Eskimo guide in the far north near the Arctic Circle. Several paragraphs read like something from nineteenth-century British history, including the one I quote below, but with a twist. See if you pick up the hint that things have changed:

"The $4 million exercise is the most prominent sign to date of Canada's intensifying effort to reinforce disputed claims over tens of thousands of miles of Arctic channels and tundra. Once nearly permanently frozen, forbidding and forgotten, the region is today seen by officials from Canada and competing nations as a potential source of both wealth and trouble."

The key words are "once nearly." Read on and you'll find this gem:

"Most important, climate change has begun to make more real the dream of opening a northwest passage that would shorten ship travel between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles, over the decades to come. Canadian policy makers want to reserve the right to regulate and tax such a passage."

Even the Defense Minister can read the meteorological tea leaves: "Defense Minister Bill Graham noted that global warming had created 'new possibilities and new threats' in the Arctic that Canada must adjust to. 'We need more resources up there and we are going to look for ways to deploy them,' he said in an interview. 'The sense is now the time has come.'"

Canada isn't alone. Spurred by the belief that global warming will free up resources and passages in the far north, the Danes have also rediscovered their sense of adventure: "The patrol was Canada's response to an unlikely challenge from Denmark, which in two previous summers had landed marines from ice-cutting frigates on Hans Island, a desolate piece of rock in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The Danes believed that the island and its surrounding waters had enough fishing and gas potential for them to pound Danish flags and plaques into its rocky surface [emphasis added] and stir up a diplomatic incident that is still not settled."

An obvious question is, what if global warming is a myth? What if the variations in weather patterns are so poorly understood (think of the accuracy of your local forecast) that the considerably large group of scientists who don't buy the theory of global warming are correct?

But in many circles, including no doubt the governments of Canada and Denmark, it's at least considered a worthwhile risk to bet on global warming's veracity. Dominic Standish writes at TCS of the ways global warming has become what he calls a "secular faith." In his words, "Many responses to the swarms of locusts and other extreme conditions have been reminiscent of biblical, pre-scientific times. Most media commentators report weather-related events without recourse to the science of climate change. They employ the language of global warming to 'explain' problems in a manner common to pre-modern superstition."

I've written before on the intellectual bankruptcy of the left, something I think we're seeing played out in this year's presidential election. Absent an intellectually coherent guiding philosophy that's open to rigorous debate, positions of any group become solipsistic. The protesters in NYC don't really, I suspect, plan on converting anyone to their cause. And John Kerry seems less interested in answering the charges of the Swift Boat Vets than in silencing them through litigation and threats, just as the campus left has long since become a bastion of pro-censorship rules exercised through speech and conduct codes.

But I still have a question regarding the conflict between our allies in the far north: Were those hammer-wielding Danes wear horned hats?