If only Prime Minister Scott Morrison had journeyed to the Arctic instead of the tropics ahead of the 2019 federal election. If only he'd ditched Christmas Island in favour of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, he might have been moved to instil in the electorate a genuine fear of climate change instead of a concocted dread of refugees.
In Svalbard, Morrison would have encountered a threat that puts Australia's so-called refugee 'crisis' firmly in context: evidence of a hastily warming and irreversibly polluted planet; confirmation of a looming catastrophe that will unleash species extinction and a flood of refugees so numerous they will swiftly surpass Australia's current, begrudging intake.
Lying midway between the North Pole and continental Norway, Svalbard is a mountainous, glacier-swept collection of islands inhabited by endemic species like polar bears, walruses, reindeer, Arctic foxes and vast colonies of seabirds. Human settlements are small; fittingly, coal mining, once the archipelago's key industry, has been gradually phased out (although signatory states to the Svalbard Treaty of 1920 have the right to exploit local natural resources). Tourism is filling the void, but administrators are grappling with the task of balancing a growing industry against the threat it poses to this fragile environment.
High above the island of Spitsbergen, summer's never-setting sun is blazing down from a blue sky, bathing the frigid realm in warm light. Occasional lumps of ice float past our vessel, the National Geographic Explorer, cracking and sizzling as they thaw, melting into wispy smudges on the indigo sea. This might be the Mediterranean were it not for the snow-lacquered mountains abutting the fjord we're sailing through. But no, it's the Arctic in summer — or, more precisely, the Arctic in the summer of 2019, when the climate emergency is at its zenith and the region is expected to record the lowest sea ice on record.
There's still some ice around Svalbard and Franz Joseph Land — young, thin sheets, probably driven here by winds blowing in from the icier north, says Lindblad Expeditions' naturalist Bud Lehnhausen. But last summer the ice here melted fast, allowing the ship to reach 82.5 degrees north in early May — exceptional access for that time of year at a latitude which should still have been ice-packed.
Our journey takes us 79 degrees north, just under 1000km from the North Pole. Icebergs and sea ice are scant; glaciers are retreating. Remote shorelines are speckled with plastic detritus