Nobel Physics laureate in Cape Town urges Antarctic scientists to ‘push back’ against secretive geopolitics

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) made science history this month by hosting its biennial meeting under African skies for the first time since being founded 105 years ago. The hybrid general assembly, held in Cape Town, South Africa, from August 6 to 15, drew about 2,000 in-person delegates and 600 virtual participants from around Planet Earth.

The event struck a coup for transparency: presentations by leading astronomers and astrophysicists, who shared their advanced results and other data, were beamed to nearly 5,000 unique viewers tuning in online. 

The world’s largest professional astronomy body of some 12,000 members, the IAU is the international authority for naming and classifying objects in space. This was the union’s first “open-access” public event – an idea proposed and rolled out by the South African organising committee. 

“We thought it would be really cool to get the public involved, and not just engage them when we do outreach education activities,” Dr Joyful Mdhluli, an organising committee member and particle physicist at the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development, told Daily Maverick.  

Among the keynote speakers was Brian Schmidt, co-laureate of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics and an astrophysicist at the Australian National University. Known for his groundbreaking work in discovering the universe’s accelerating expansion, Schmidt’s insights, alongside those of his colleagues, have fundamentally reshaped humanity’s understanding of the nature of the cosmos.

In an exclusive sideline interview, Schmidt noted that transparency ought to be a lodestar for major scientific meetings, and suggested that other fields could learn from the IAU’s approach.

“At the highest level, astronomy has always been very open and transparent,” Schmidt remarked, highlighting an aversion to closed-door policies – “except for under exceptional circumstance”.

“Generally speaking, there’s not a tolerance within the community for those types of things … that enables us, therefore, to be trusted,” the astrophysicist observed, recalling one of astronomy’s most awkward moments: the IAU’s decision to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet. “But it also means we can open things up and have conversations about the issues, [such as] Pluto – very famously in 2006, we had to go out and talk about the future of that object’s designation.”

Schmidt also praised the IAU’s outreach efforts: not only in terms of the Cape Town conference which received about 1,000 school children, but also rooting space, a region remoter than Antarctica, in the public imagination.

“We expect our researchers to do this. We spend some of our money with respect to outreach, so it’s resourced. And so in that sense, I think we set a pretty high standard for what we do.”

Despite the landmark African event, work remained ahead to reach all corners on the Pale Blue Dot. “We’re still learning to get to all eight billion people on the planet, not just the billion most developed.”

When asked about the links between the IAU’s transparency policies and the closed diplomatic meetings governing Antarctica – which offers some of the world’s most fêted outdoor laboratories for celestial studies – Schmidt called for “pushback” against the opaque nature of these talks. 

“This is sort of a geopolitical thing that’s coming in and layering on top of all the science that’s done. And I do think there needs to be a bit of pushback on this,” Schmidt stated, advocating for a more public discourse that could potentially force political leaders and diplomats to engage in more open dialogue about the Antarctic’s challenges, such as deadly bird flu infiltrating the region for the first time in October 2023.

“Scientists are going to make much better decisions about the future of Antarctica than geopolitical leaders because they have very different intentions,” he said. “One is almost a pure expression of power, and the other is an expression of humanity.”

‘Scientists don’t like being in closed-door meetings. Geopolitical leaders do’

How would an ionospheric researcher, or say, a neutrino physicist, dependent on Antarctica’s stable and undisturbed conditions, “push back” effectively?

“That’s about getting the scientific community to talk about [the issues] more in public,” Schmidt offered. “And if the geopolitical people don’t want to be part of that, well, they won’t be. Except they will be forced to be if you talk about it enough, because the narrative will be set outside their meetings … 

“I think you want the whole Antarctic community more deeply involved in what’s going on in that room,” Schmidt proposed, “rather than it being done at a very high geopolitical means.”

The Nobel laureate added: “Scientists don’t like being in closed-door meetings. Geopolitical leaders do. So, the pushback is having conversations about what does the scientific community actually think should be going on and creating an alternative narrative. To say, ‘This is what we think.’ At some point that forces people to have to answer.”

What do astronomy and Antarctica have in common? Hard problems

The significance of Schmidt’s challenge to fellow scientists is hard to overstate.

Climate observers have described “extremely warm daily temperatures” during the 2024 Antarctic midwinter – more than 4°C above average for large parts of the continent.

Over time, the heating bottom of the world holds 58m of sea level rise. Even best-case greenhouse gas emissions commit us to 40cm — turning a once-per-century coastal flood into an annual thing.

Despite the overwhelming public interest of a region with global impacts on the climate system, no journalists are allowed during the course of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM). This is the annual governance forum where South Polar states make the big decisions about the vast, threatened, geopolitically fraught wilderness that sweeps around 10% of Earth. The same situation applies to annual meetings of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), a treaty companion body.

Media, in-person or virtual, get zero updates as the events unfold.

At the 2023 ATCM in Helsinki, Finland, the global environmental NGO community was restricted to 25 people – under pressure to say the right thing to avoid upsetting the leaders of the treaty’s authoritarian wing (China and Russia). The 25 stage-managed public minutes of the opening plenary, the kick-off to the biggest diplomatic negotiations in contemporary Finnish history, were observed by one news journalist – this reporter. 

By contrast, nearly 2,700 journalists and 14,000 NGO delegates were registered to attend the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, UAE. Here, the latter received daily press updates on the general contours of the confidential diplomatic negotiations.

Schmidt’s comments echo a growing sentiment within sectors of international geopolitical and environmental governance that greater transparency is important.

In July, the International Maritime Organisation announced it was “stepping up action on transparency and access to information” by making the call to livestream its plenary meetings. 

What happens when the ice curtain drops? 

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty and its companion agreements devote the continent and surrounding seas to peaceful activities like science and tourism. Yet, apparently still spinning in some Cold War-era polar vortex, decisions made behind closed doors continue to receive little to no real-time attention.

These include good decisions worth a nod: such as diplomats from the treaty’s 29 consultative states reaffirming Antarctica’s mining ban at the 2023 ATCM after Daily Maverick uncovered Russia’s 25-year-plus search for Southern Ocean oil and gas via Cape Town.

They also include the bad decisions the public need to know about as they happen, including:

• Since 2022, blocking Canada’s application for decision-making status without offering substantive public reasons (China and Russia);
• Using polar bear blogs to thwart rescue plans for emperor penguins facing likely functional extinction by 2100 (China);
• Or the same actors objecting to marine-protected areas since 2017.

Bird flu ... 36 cattle herds in 9 US states infected. And Antarctic Treaty talks conceal looming bird flu catastrophe. https://t.co/LTIj6a7Nbg

— Antoinette Louw (@Toinettelouw) May 8, 2024

In the defence of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), some information is drip-fed. 

The discussion documents – submitted ahead of the ATCM – are released at the end of the 10-day event. However, the 90,000-word discussion minutes – the real-time record of the live talks – are usually issued up to six months later at the height of the festive season without media-friendly formats. This is how, in 2023, details of the ATCM talks about bird flu hurtling towards Antarctica hit the public domain only half a year later, and two months after the virus was confirmed in wildlife.

Quantifiable reasons are hard to discern – especially since the independent Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) is hosting its biennial open-access conference with limited live-streams from Pucón, Chile, this week. (SCAR also shared its