By Evan Ramstad Climate change is seen almost universally as a
bad thing, but there’s one potential outcome that is very
intriguing for South Korea and other countries of northeast
Asia. It’s the prospect that global warming will create a sea
passage to Europe for part of the year. On Tuesday, government
officials and industry experts from two countries that will be
hugely affected by that prospect – South Korea and Norway – met
to talk about it. The reason for the excitement is easy to
understand: the distance between the ports in western Europe and
those in Japan, eastern Russia, northeast China and the Koreas
is 40% shorter by way of what’s called the Northern sea route
than by the typical route around southeast Asia, through the
Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea and Suez Canal and through the
Mediterranean. In just a few weeks, a Norwegian company, Knutsen
OAS Shipping, will send an LNG carrier through the Northern sea
route to Japan. It’ll be the first time an LNG carrier has made
the crossing. The ship, call