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rtcc respoNd

meet the climate

scieNtists ruNNiNg

aNd cYcliNg to paris

daniel Price and erlend Knudsen are travelling from the ends of the earth to spread awareness of climate change
ahead of critcal COP21 summit.

by Megan darby

For Daniel Price, the toughest stretch was cycling across the Gobi “That was the motvaton to communicate the problem in a new way.”
Desert. For Erlend Knudsen, it was running through a two-day Price fnished his doctorate studying Antarctc sea ice last year and
snowstorm in the mountains outside Bergen, Norway.
thought of breaking out of the academic bubble.
Their journeys are not over. These two polar researchers have
swapped physical science for physical exerton, on a mission to He Skyped his friend Knudsen, who was in a similar situaton on
the other side of the world. The pair had met at a summer school
spread awareness of climate change.
in Svalbard, a rugged Norwegian outpost in the Arctc Ocean, four
They are on twin odysseys from the Arctc and Antarctc to Paris, years ago.
France, where diplomats meet to strike a global climate deal in Knudsen says: “As we got to the end of our PhDs, we both felt we
December.
were spending too much tme in our ofces and not enough tme
“Following the discourse on climate change becomes increasingly communicatng our research. Independent of each other, we both
frustratng when you are a scientst,” Price tells Climate Home from had the same kind of mindset about that.”
Salzburg, Austria.
It is a common gripe among climate scientsts that their warnings
“There is this huge segment of society that doesn’t care or about the gravity of the problem are not translatng into urgent acton.
understand. I realised my parents didn’t even know what COP21 [the
21st Conference of the Partes in Paris] was and my friends really Between 90 and 97% of relevant experts agree human actvity is the
main driver of global warming, various studies have found. Yet most
didn’t understand the urgency of it either.

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