Nina Wormbs

The Assessed Arctic: How Monitoring Can Be Silently Normative

The Arctic is an assessed region. Scientific assessments are becoming larger in number. Evaluations of the state of the art in the Arctic are made based on monitoring and data gathering. As reports are followed up by new ones, comparison is possible and change can be analyzed. Finally recommendations for action are made and put to the members of the Arctic Council. Hence, the task is really to give directions for the future. This chapter argues that this growing business of assessments, which have their correspondence in other areas, are in many ways good since they enlarge our knowledge. At the same time attention should be paid to how the produced knowledge might function in different areas of policy. If they are to function as recommendations on how to change societies and people’s behavior for the future, the basis cannot be only natural science but need to be broader. However, moving value-laden recommendations on human societies and economic development into the realm of science might work as a way of de-politicizing policy for the Arctic.

Eyes on the Ice: Satellite Remote Sensing and the Narratives of Visualized Data

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is a proverb in many languages. Behind it lies an understanding of how an image can at the same time capture and convey sentiments and complex information while speaking to our emotions and playing on our cultural knowledge of reading the visual. A picture is believed to have the ability of summarizing and explaining things in a straightforward way. The response of the viewer should ideally be ‘I see’.

A Nordic Satellite Project Understood as a Trans‐National Effort

Trans‐national technological projects display certain features compared to national projects. Drawing on earlier work, this article delineates some of these features and uses them in order to understand a specific trans‐national project, namely a Nordic satellite in the 1980s. It is shown that some of the conflicts and difficulties can be explained by the fact that the project was trans‐national, but a fuller understanding requires specificities to be taken into account as well.

Globalization, Climate Change and the Media: An Introduction

In the summer of 2011, the tanker STI Heritage left Houston, Texas and made the long, arduous journey to Thailand, eventually arriving with over 60,000 tons of condensed gas.1 What made this trip special was not the start and end points (these are two major ports), but rather how, and how fast, the tanker made the journey. Instead of the traditional route via the Suez Canal, the STI Heritage picked up the condensed gas in Murmansk, Russia, and continued its journey towards Thailand via the Northeast Passage, a shipping lane running from Murmansk, along Siberia, ending at the Bering Strait. The use of this lane is, in and of itself, not unique, as historically portions of it have been navigable for two summer months each year. What made the STI Heritage voyage special, however, was the speed with which the vessel completed the entire route: eight days.2 This was a record for the Northeast Passage (broken weeks later by a gas tanker that made the trip in just over six days), which has seen a dramatic reduction of summer ice over the past decade, making commercial use of the lane economically viable, at least if one extrapolates from the numbers. In 2009, only two commercial vessels made the voyage. In 2011, that number had increased to 18.3

Introduction: Back to the Futures of an Uncertain Arctic

The conventional future of the Arctic trope is deterministic with climate and the extraction of natural resources as the chief two drivers of change, interlinked since long. This narrative has consequences for the possibility of action in the present. In this volume, we claim that it is important to unpack the nested arguments of this determinism, where science, environment, resources, economy, ideology, lifestyle, etc. are mixed to form projections on the future of the Arctic. History is a great repository of projections about the future of the Arctic. The exploration of such past futures forms the core of this volume.

Arctic Futures: Agency and Assessing Assessments

The future is a common theme in discussions of the Arctic, whether in media, policy, or scientific communications. The future is not a given, and there are several possible futures that different actors strive to enable at any given time. At present considerable attention is given to monolithic “drivers” of change in this region, including melting sea ice, technological development, and global resource geopolitics; and although this discourse is far from new (Doel et al. 2014b), the end of the Cold War and the amplification of climate and global change have reframed the discussion (Christensen et al. 2013). The media has played a large role in propagating the “drivers” discourse, usually understating the role of human agency. While recognizing that these “driving” factors are important, this chapter will analyze some of this “future-talk”, in relation to the future of the Arctic. We would argue that there is considerable discursive power (Foucault 2002) in these images of the future, which explains why they are so visible and articulated with such fervor. It is not our intention to suggest that this talking about the future in and of itself constructs the future that actually unfolds. Rather, we hold that the genres of future-talk are closely connected to real interests connected to particular versions of Arctic futures.

Bellwether, exceptionalism and other tropes : Political coproduction of Arctic climate modelling

Bellwether, exceptionalism and other tropes : Political coproduction of Arctic climate modelling

Global Climate Talks from Failure to Cooperation and Hope: Swedish News Framings of COP15 and COP21

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to offer an analysis of how two UN Conferences of Parties, COP15 in Copenhagen 2009 and COP21 in Paris 2015, were covered and debated in Swedish newspapers. Two national and two regional newspapers were selected for the study, and a qualitative frame analysis was conducted on 309 articles. A typology of frames applicable to science-related policy and climate change debates was used and its relevance for global climate summit context was discussed. Having territory in the Arctic region, indigenous populations affected by climate change measures, and political and public sensitivity to environmental issues, the climate debate has particular significance in the Swedish case. Findings indicate a trust in the role of national and supra-national governance to address climate change problems, but also that newspapers in Sweden maintained a focus on the global aspects of the two meetings, rather than framing them as surrogate battlefields for domestic politics.