IT was meant to be a cultural response to climate change. The mission: charter a sailing boat in the Arctic and take 12 leading artists and writers to ponder on the perils of climate change in their work.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have explained the plot to Ian McEwan, the novelist. His new work, Solar, sends up the expedition with such glee that it has received a frosty reception from some of his fellow adventurers.

The nine-day mission started with the artists taking three flights and a 60-mile snowmobile ride to the 120ft vessel trapped in a frozen fjord north of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

Once there they were allowed to wander across the ice and respond to global warming in their own way.

Antony Gormley, the sculptor best known for the Angel of the North, made several works, including a self-portrait from burying himself in the ice and then filling the void with water in polythene sheeting until it froze. In McEwan’s novel he becomes a Spanish artist called Jesus whose speciality is creating ice statues of penguins.

Rachel Whiteread was so inspired by the Arctic adventure that she returned to London to install Embankment, a piece of art made of white cubes to represent a glacial plain, at Tate Modern. In her place McEwan has Stella Polkinghorne, who has constructed for the same gallery a “scaled-up Monopoly set on a playing field in Catford, each side of the painted board 100 metres long”.

Siobhan Davies, the choreographer whose work is included in GCSE syllabuses, becomes a French dancer who describes “a geometric dance she had planned to take place on ice”.

McEwan, who received his MA degree in English literature at the University of East Anglia, the same institution which was immersed in the “climategate” scandal of alleged manipulated figures, saves his best satire for the scientists.

He had plenty of raw material. Tom Wakeford, a biologist who was part of the expedition, told his fellow adventurers in a blog: “Today you will have almost certainly inhaled an atom of carbon exhaled by Julius Caesar when he uttered the question ‘Et tu Brute?’.”

The leading character in the book is Michael Beard, a scientist sceptical of man-made climate change who is described as short, fat, bald and just turned 53. He narrowly escapes being eaten by a polar bear as he and his fellow explorers roar across the ice, spewing noxious emissions from snow scooters as they leave a carbon footprint bigger than any paw marks.

“The guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from 20 return flights and snowmobile rides and 60 hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting 3,000 trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed,” writes McEwan.

Aboard ship, the locker room where everybody has to change in and out of snowsuits, boots, goggles and gloves when they venture onto the ice becomes a metaphor for how man treats Earth. People help themselves to each other’s boots and trample snowsuits underfoot.

David Buckland, who launched the Cape Farewell expeditions, partly funded by the Arts Council, to send artists on trips with scientists and who hosted McEwan aboard the sailing ship, said: “Does it annoy me? Yes and no. It is interesting. We do not offset with trees. What we do is take artists and introduce them to the real science of climate change. What they do with it then is up to them. Ian’s description of the journey on snow scooters was pretty close to the bone. His book is certainly going to publicise the issue.”

Gormley was “too busy” to talk about the book, but Davies, who organised a choreographed walk on the ice, said: “I don’t remember the boot locker being quite as chaotic as that.

“The boat was warm, but outside it was minus 35 degrees, so getting in and out of clothes was done in great speed and Ian did say somebody had wandered off with his boots. Perhaps if it had meant life or death it wouldn’t have been such a good idea.

“We did recognise that there was this tendency aboard ship to get too earnest. If he has been cheeky I think it is in that spirit.”

McEwan, who changed the ending of his book to reflect the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, said: “We all remember the great pronouncements made at Rio or Kyoto, but then life goes on as before. There were parallels aboard ship.

“The locker room descended into chaos like a kit room at a boarding school. There was a discrepancy between our idealistic discussions in the evening about the whole Earth, while this room the other side of the wall was engulfed in chaos.”