It has dawned on me more and more how crucial true information is for the modern world. Not only my first encounters with propaganda, as I did my (compulsory) national service on the Soviet border at the end of the Cold War, and having read George Orwell as well as one of my favourite authors, John le Carre, made me aware of how much power that lies in swaying the public by lies. There are anectotal evidence of witch-hunts in the middle ages, which could only happened because of lies, prejudice and superstition, and when I read about ‘The Great Leap’ from the Cultural Revolution in China, I wonder how on Earth such a thing could take place. Commonplace to all these stories is the lack of knowledge, critical voices, and true information. I have also seen documentaries about how the tobacco and sugar have influenced the public information about drawbacks associated with their products, but realise that someone is twisting the truth, but one cannot be sure who. Presumably the lobby groups of those industries… But the even more recent encounter with lies in the media scared me the most: when one nation invaded another on the basis of lies. Sure, the invaded country was headed by a brutal dictator, but that argument probably could not justify a war…? After Hans Blixt and the UN had spent years searchin for evidence of WMD in country, they had come up empty handed. The country was flooded with volunteer ‘human shields’ just at the run-up forthe invasion, and in this golden opportunity for spying the living daylight out of the country, still the secret services didn’t manage to produce convincing evidence. A prominent British weapons specialist was found dead after having stated on the BBC that the Iraq dossier was ’sexed up’ (WMD could be launched within 45 minutes). Iraq relented at one point and produced a massive report to the UN, that the invading countries snatched and didn’t let anybody else read. Then there were false evidences: alleged radioactive materials from Nigeria, satellite images shown in the UN, alleged links between Saddam & Al Quaida, etc. The bottom line was that a war was started from lies. That’s scary.

What does this have to do with climate change and the Arctic? As the advent of natural science and rational thought shattered the mideval superstitions (and later challenged the churce’s authority) and brought progress and developement. Knowledge and information are key concepts. Therefore, I was concerned when I witnessed how attempts to distort information about climate change. The worst thing that can happen is if a global climate change takes place and that it’s shrouded in superstition and lies. Hence, scientists cannot let the media run the show (do they care about the truth?). There was one web site in particular, disguised as a serious provider for scientific news and information (even targeting schools), that channelled sceptics’ bogus arguments. The reason that I know this was that some sceptics had added me to their spam-lists, and that the misinformation they broadcasted was echoed on this web site. Furthermore, the misinformation often came from the US - crossing the borders in no time. Thus, when I was invited to join the RealClimate endevour, I grabbed the opportunity to try to encounter some of the misconceptions before reaching the Norwegian media.

Science is an endeavour in search for truth, and climate research is no exception. One important part of this is to make observations. One objective of the upcoming Interantional Polar Year (www.ipy.org) is to improve the observational network in the polar regions; regions with sparse empirical in-situ data. The climate models suggest that a global warming will lead to an ‘Arctic amplification’ - a faster warming due to the sea ice retreat.

-- RasmusBenestad