Clive Tesar's latest posts

The boat strained at the anchor, as gust after gust ripped off the cliffs and slammed rain into the windows. For almost two days that had been our view at the sheltered Anchorage north of Qaanaaq.

One of the Arctic Tern’s mascots made a long journey just to join us here.

Oil and gas development will play a key role in Greenland’s future.

We had just stepped ashore in Qeqertat when the small boat approached the beach, dodging its way in between icebergs.

After the relative lushness of southern Greenland, the first glimpses of the north of the island are shocking.

The Arctic Tern is joined by a crew from Al Jazeera.

WWF’s Global Arctic Programme is at the International Polar Year conference in Montreal, Canada.

Academic conferences such as this one are filled with experts. Experts in anthropology, law, sociology, education and several more disciplines. How do we know they’re expert? Because the vast majority have letters after their name that tell us so – there are more doctors here than in your average hospital (though I wouldn’t want these doctors performing surgery on me). But when it comes to telling the world about the Arctic, are these the right sort of experts?

Climate change would be called undeniable, if it wasn’t for the fact that so many people do deny it. In southern Alaska, large percentages of republican voters deny that it’s happening, according to a large phone survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire. The survey was presented here at the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences in Akureyri Iceland.

One of the struggles at the heart of discussion of the Arctic is over who has the right be there, and to use arctic resources. Most of the governments that ring the Arctic Ocean are busily working on claims that will extend their rights to the sea bed. The question is, who else has the right to be there once all the claims are adjudicated? The UN convention on the law of the sea doesn’t settle the questions of shipping, or even all the questions about fishing.