Hans Blix, the former UN chief arms inspector for Iraq who searched in vain for weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003, say he now has reliable information about “WMD” in Canada.

Now retired, Blix was in Oslo this week for a seminar about nuclear issues and risks to the environment when he told delegates that he had once received an e-mail from a Canadian woman asking if he would object if she named her cat after him.

Puzzled, Blix said he wrote back jokingly that he didn’t mind if the cat didn’t either and would like to hear how the cat got on.

A while later he got the reply: “Blix is doing fine as a weapon of mouse destruction”.

If an economics professor had his way, the ”sweater police” might soon be knocking at your door as part of a campaign to combat climate change.

Joergen Randers, an environmental expert at the Norwegian School of Management, has puzzled for years over the question: what’s the easiest way to slow global warming?

After weighing ideas like phasing out coal-fired power plants, raising prices for energy or public subsidies for wind or solar power, he has finally come up with his answer: force people to wear sweaters indoors in cool climates. Then they will use less coal, oil or gas for heating.

If it was compulsory to wear a sweater, or an additional sweater if you already have one on, it would be pretty unbearable to have the thermostat at the current levels, he told me.

So maybe we should all get knitting or start farming sheep? The New Zealand and Australian wool industries would love his idea.

Even Randers admits its a sort of joke but reckons that, from a purely economic point of view, it would be the most effective way of getting tens of millions of people to save energy. Many governments have been telling people for years to turn down the heating but it hasnt worked, he says.

“No political party in a democracy would ever dare to make this proposal to make people wear sweaters because then you would have to have sweater police to enforce it. They would have to have powers to enter anyones home for spot checks. And to many that might sound like Big Brother surveillance or the Spanish Inquisition.

Do you agree? Should we embrace Randers’ ideas or just say “baah”?

Flying in a helicopter over the crevasses of a receding glacier in the Arctic is a dramatic way of seeing what scientists say are the risks of climate change…but getting there may be badly stoking the problem.

Last week I went to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen to report on a meeting arranged by Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy: she invited 40 politicians and leading researchers two hours flying time north of the Arctic Circle (and a few reporters).

Melting glaciers are one of the main signs that the planet is heating up, according to climate scientists, and glaciers coating much of Spitsbergen and other islands nearby have more ice than in the Alps. Loss of glaciers could nudge up world sea levels and a melting of the Himalayas, for instance, could disrupt river flows in Asia.

Crammed into a helicopter, we flew over glaciers near Ny Alesund, where the meeting was held, for views of bizarre patterns in the ice and crevasses. Many on Spitsbergen are receding, with huge chunks of ice splitting into the sea. But experts say that planes and helicopters are big contributors to global warming by burning fossil fuels — roughly 2 percent of the total from human activities.

So it is a good idea for politicians or reporters to travel to remote parts of the world to get a better grasp of the issues? 

Or should they stay at home and do their work on the phone and leave the ends of the earth to scientists who might find something new rather than just gawp?

Tell us what you think!

Indian scientists have travelled to the Arctic to study everything from air pollution to how plants might yield cures for disease.
Boxes of scientific equipment in Ny Alesund, on a Norwegian island 1,200 km (750 miles) from the North Pole, are marked “First Indian Arctic Expedition 2007″, a sign of widening interest in a region where climate change is happening twice as fast as elsewhere on the planet.
I ran into one of the five Indian scientists involved in Arctic research in Ny Alesund, where the first snows of the “winter” have fallen even though the midnight sun of the “summer” is still a few days from setting.
“We are collecting soil, water and rock samples for investigation,” said S.M. Singh, a scientist at the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research in Goa, India, showing off two samples of lichen on rocks collected from near Ny Alesund.
One of them looks a bit like a stain on the rock with a few dots, the other resembles a small piece of seaweed.
Singh, who has visited Antarctica twice, says the Arctic is a richer biological region. “In Antarctica there are only two flowering plants, here there are more than 200 types,” he said.
And living things at the frosty ends of the earth may have special survival skills and could yield clues to helping slow ageing, perhaps by production of anti-oxidants, he said. Or microbial life might help in the treatment of leucoderma, a disease that causes white patches on the skin.
“If we can know how they work it could have big applications in medicine,” he said.
Other Indian researchers are studying the Arctic atmosphere and geology during the trip. Many other nations, ranging from the Nordic nations to South Korea, have research operations in Ny Alesund.
Singh said working in the Arctic was not unlike being in the Antarctic — except that scientists in the north have to be wary of polar bears.
All visitors must be able to use a gun in case they are attacked. Singh said he had yet to see a bear near Ny Alesund, where the odd reindeer wanders down the main street.

“Passengers are reminded they are not allowed to carry reindeer antlers or fossils in their hand baggage because they are viewed as possible weapons,” a woman’s voice booms from the loudspeaker at Longyearbyen airport, about 1,300 km from the North Pole.

You already know you are getting to an exotic part of the world when there is a stuffed polar bear in the arrivals lounge of the airport, as there is at Longyearbyen, a Norwegian village of about 1,500 people.

But the warning to any would-be hijackers with reindeer antlers was the biggest reminder to me that things can be very different in the high north on Svalbard, a chain of Arctic islands just 3 hours flight north of Oslo, Norway. Like me, many others looked round in bemused disbelief at the announcement while the locals seemed not to notice anything unusual.

I then flew by a helicopter north to Ny Alesund, which calls itself the world’s most northerly permanent settlement, to go to an international seminar about climate change. The first snow of the coming winter was falling, weeks earlier than normal even though the region still has the midnight sun.

On the way, the pilot pointed through the clouds to a home isolated by a fjord and said that a man would be getting a medal this week from King Harald for long service after clocking up 30 years living on Svalbard.

Most people living on the islands, a former Cold War outpost where the economy is built on coal mining, come for short-term contracts. There is no provision for women to give birth in Longyearbyen hospital and no care for the elderly — if you are not working, the message is that it’s time to go back to the mainland. If you are pregnant, the idea is that you fly south to give birth. For older kids, there is a school and kindergarten in Longyearbyen.

Svalbard is probably the most easily reached part of the Arctic — with routine scheduled flights.

That is, of course, if some crazed fossil hunter doesn’t have other ideas.

Rains that have washed out much of the summer in northern Europe are good news at least for one remote ski resort in Norway.

Like most people, I don’t much like thinking about  winter sports after weeks of rains and floods but 30,000 people a season make their way to the summer slope on a glacier at Galdhopiggen, northern Europe’s highest mountain at 2,469 metres.

Per Vole, the head of the resort which has a single lift going up to 2,200 metres, is happy. “We’ve been open almost all summer,” he said. “And more snow is forecast for the weekend.” Rain at lower altitudes often means snow up at Galdhopiggen.

Even so, Galdhopiggen is not immune to a widespread retreat of glaciers widely blamed by scientists on global warming caused by human activities led by burning fossil fuels.

Like many resorts in the Alps, resorts in Norway have had problems with unreliable snows in recent years — some are trying to diversify in summer by keeping lifts going for bikers or hikers.

Vole said that his resort was building new snow cannons to produce 1 to 1.5 million cubic metres of snow a season to prevent skiers ending up on the hard ice of the glacier.

As for me, I’m not planning on visiting his slope any time soon — I’m still hoping for a summer.

Some people reckon that the United Nations produces lots of hot air but the good news is that some of it will end up helping farmers in Kenya to cut their reliance of fossil fuels.

I don’t know how they did it but U.N. experts have worked out that the first U.N. special session on climate change last week in New York emitted exactly 149 tonnes of greenhouse gases.
Under a drive to make the United Nations “carbon neutral”, the emissions will be offset by investments in a clean energy project near Nairobi producing edible oils. The cash will help run boilers on farm residues such as from coffee, rice or macadamia crops or by burning eucalyptus firewood rather than importing fossil fuels.
“They made the calculations themselves. I don’t know what they’ve taken into account to come up with 149 tonnes,” said John Buckley, managing director of Carbonfootprint.com which is handling the Kenyan offset project.
“I like that Kenyan project, it’s good to put money into a developing nation,” he said. He declined to say how much the United Nations was paying.
The United Nations says that all emissions from air travel and the operation of the U.N. headquarters building were being offset under the project.
According to carbonfootprint.com, 149 tonnes is roughly the equivalent of 120 round trip flights across the Atlantic Ocean. As an individual, that would cost me about $2,200.
Is this the right way to go for the United Nations? Should companies and others follow suit?

Solar-powered trash bins sound an improbable invention and one is even crunching rubbish in rainy England.

On a recent (wet) holiday to southwest England, I gawped on hearing that the council in Torbay has started testing a U.S. “Big Belly” bin that uses a solar-driven motor to compact rubbish. The idea is that garbage trucks then have to drive round less often, saving work and cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Residents are “very positive” and the bin is working as hoped. “The weather has made no difference,” according to Laura Balcombe at the council in Torbay, in a region that optimistically calls itself the “English Riviera”.

I got in touch with the manufacturer, Seahorse Power Co. near Boston, Mass., which has produced about 700-800 of the “Big Bellies” — now mashing trash in North America, Australia, the Middle East and in Europe.

“We are trying to use clean solar energy to displace truck trips. The garbage trucks are among the most inefficient trucks on the road,” said Bruce Todtfeld at Seahorse Power.

He reckons a bin, which has a solar panel on the top, can pay back its roughly $4,000 cost within 1-1/2 years in saved truck trips.

And in places such as Chicago, where trash bins often overflow in fine weather when people flock to Lake Michigan, the bins are helping keep the beaches open. Birds often raid spilt trash and their droppings are a main cause of polluting bacteria on beaches.

Todtfeld reckons the bins help raise awareness about the environment.

“People might have seen a solar panel on top of a house but haven’t had any contact with green technology. This is solving a problem they understand, right in front of them.”

Under the law of the jungle only the fittest survive, so what is this healthy-looking tiger doing hob bling around on three legs?

The WWF conservation group issued the pictures today of the Sumatran tiger limping in an Indonesian national park.

The WWF said that its staff suspect that the tiger is  one reported caught in a snare in November 2006 “that somehow scratched or cut his paw off to escape, leaving part of his leg behind in a snare”.

But how does a tiger find food on three legs, especially in the first few weeks before the injury heals? After all, there are only 400 of the Sumatran tigers left.

Maybe smaller animals that have caught something to eat get scared and run away at the sight of a tiger coming, without bothering to count the number of paws? If any tiger interrupted my picnic I’d panic and run off.

Any ideas?

With Live Earth concerts coming up on Saturday, Al Gore wants people to sign a seven-point pledge to help combat global warming.

If everyone signs and sticks to the promises, Gore reckons it would help avert more heatwaves, floods, droughts, disease and rising seas projected by the U.N. climate panel.

The pledge would also bring wrenching changes in lifestyles, especially in the United States and other rich nations addicted to fossil fuel use.

Most people, like me, can easily manage the suggested commitments on the Live Earth website such as “I will ride public transport or carpool one or more times a week” (I usually get to work by tram in Oslo).

But that will be far from enough if you sign the pledge. Some of the seven points involve hard-to-judge personal goals such as “demanding action” by the government for a 90 percent cut in emissions or “working for” big changes in society. It strikes me that point two is the toughest for individuals:

“I pledge…to take personal action to help solve the climate crisis by reducing my own CO2 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become ‘carbon neutral’.”

So let’s say you are an average American emitting about 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year and manage to cut your emissions in half –that still leaves you having to offset 10 tonnes a year to become “carbon neutral”. You can plant trees to soak up emissions but they take time to grow.

Climatecare.org, which allows you to invest in renewable energies or forest plantings to soak up emissions, advertises offsets costing about $150 for 10 tonnes.

So that’s a serious pledge. Should people sign? Please tell us what you think.