Two climate scientists take the long, eco-friendly road to Paris talks,
The Arctic marathon
At about 9 p.m. in Guise, a small town in northern France, Erlend Moster Knudsen was on the phone. He sounded cheery; there was no sign of fatigue in his voice. He may as well have been at a spa all day. But he had been running all day — about 30 kilometres. “I feel good,” he said. “I’m in France, getting closer to Paris. But I still have 300 kilometres to go.”
Knudsen, 29, has a PhD in Arctic climate studies and is one half of the Pole to Paris initiative: a pair of human-powered journeys starting in the South and North and meeting in Paris for the United Nations convention on climate change.
The idea came after Knudsen met Daniel Price four years ago at a summer school in Svalbard, an archipelago between Norway and the North Pole. The two climate scientists were frustrated. They were sitting behind their desks doing research and writing papers “and there was this big challenge and yet it was not well known . . . not understood among the general public, really,” Knudsen said.
And that is how the idea behind Pole to Paris was born — to spread climate education, to get people involved in a new, adventurous way.
“People care about what is happening . . . they want their leaders to take action. They want the planet to stay healthy,” Knudsen said. “It is just as simple as that.”
His marathon started Aug. 3 just above the Arctic Circle in Tromso, Norway. Since then, he has run 2,200 kilometres through four countries.
Norway, he says, was a challenge. He was running in the mountains alone carrying a backpack weighing 15 kilograms. For the most part, he depended on the kindness of strangers for food, showers and a night’s stay.
“I would get up early in the morning, start the day by doing mental exercises and remind myself why I am doing this and why it is important,” he said.
He gave a talk almost every day and collected stories of people who have been affected by climate change.
In the U.K., Belgium and France — the other three countries he covered — his backpack has been lighter (about 10 kilograms), and food and lodging more accessible. And he has been able to run with other people. Knudsen will arrive in Paris on Friday. “What I hope to see there is that we get past this point where we just blame each other, where we have this kindergarten mentality where we say ‘I don’t want to do anything until you do anything,’ ” he said.
“We need a binding agreement and that is going to be the toughest one,” he said.
Daniel Price is biking north. Erlend Moster Knudsen is running south. The two scientists will meet at the climate talks this week to cap off their epic journeys By Raveena Aulakh
From Antarctica on a bike
By the time Daniel Price arrives in Paris on Friday, he will have biked more than 10,000 kilometres through 19 countries over seven months — the last few days of which he’s spent in the snowy Alps. “It was absolutely beautiful,” he said. Price, a British scientist who specializes in Antarctic climate, said the bike ride and his transformation from a scientist to a spokesman has been successful.
“For people to respond to a problem, they first have to understand it,” he said. “We have to reach that tipping point where enough people are saying, ‘Hey, I think we should be doing something meaningful about this ASAP.’ ”
Climate change, he said, is a particularly difficult problem because it’s abstract to many and isn’t an in-your-face issue. “But what people must realize is that eventually it will be,” he said. “Once temperature increases are locked in, there isn’t really anything we can do. And that is where the urgency of the situation comes in.”
Even though scientists have been loud and clear in their warnings that climate change will lead to catastrophic floods, heat waves and famines — which in turn will cause poverty and trigger massive migrations — studies show that many people are still not convinced. A survey in early November showed that only 54 per cent of people in 40 countries believe climate change is a serious concern. That number was only 45 per cent in the U.S. and just 18 per cent in China.
In their ambitious pilgrimage to Paris, both Price and Knudsen have tried to find new and better ways to spread the word: that climate change is happening, and that it is caused by human beings.
Their aim has been to reach as many people as possible and inform them about the urgency of climate change.
Price said the Gobi Desert and the Alps were physically very tough. There were setbacks, too. His ride should have been about17,000 kilometres long, but he was refused a tourist visa in Russia. He ended up taking a train from Mongolia to Latvia. In the last 32 hours, he has covered 350 kilometres. Once in Paris, Price and Knudsen’s plan is to give talks and hold small events. There, they’ll be joined by flags they’ve carried that will have made it all the way from the Poles. (Price’s bike ride began in New Zealand — as close to Antarctica as was feasible — but the flags had accompanied the men on earlier research trips to the poles).
“Our main focus was to raise awareness ahead of (Paris talks) over the last few months,” he said. “In Paris, we will be rounding up the journeys and hopefully engaging more people in the climate change narrative by telling our stories.”