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Scientists Propose Plan To Re-Freeze the Arctic (inhabitat.com)

Kristine Lofgren writes: In case you've been under a rock for the past 20 years, the Arctic is melting super fast. Certain *ahem* governments are dragging their feet doing anything about it, which means the planet could be in for a spectacular meltdown within the next 20 years. But a clever bunch of scientists have hatched a plan to re-freeze the Arctic using wind-powered pumps that will bring water to the surface, allowing it to freeze. This new layer of ice could last well into the summer, which is vital, because scientists think summer Arctic ice could be gone by 2030 -- and that causes a whole chain of terrible events that will only make our climate change problem much, much worse. The plan has a $500 billion price tag, but that's pocket change compared to the cost of dealing with an ice-free Arctic. The study has been published in The American Geophysical Union's journal Earth's Future. You can read more about the study via The Guardian.

13 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Without even reading the $500 billion plan... by Ecuador · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Without even reading the $500 billion plan, I can tell that there is no way they have though of all the consequences of using 10 million wind powered pumps to bring water to the top for it to freeze.

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    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
    1. Re:Without even reading the $500 billion plan... by Wycliffe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Without even reading the $500 billion plan, I can tell that there is no way they have though of all the consequences of using 10 million wind powered pumps to bring water to the top for it to freeze.

      And isn't the Arctic ice mostly fresh water? Even if you can get the salt water to freeze, it's going to melt at a much warmer temperature and will do drastically different things to the environment than slowly melting fresh water ice.

    2. Re: Without even reading the $500 billion plan... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As opposed to the carefully thought out consequences of burning gigatons of ancient carbon?

  2. Re:Bullshit. Ask "The Polar Ocean Challenge" by dwywit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, that settles it. Nothing to worry about, folks. Just keep consuming those finite resources and let your grandchildren worry about any problems.

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    They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  3. Re:Climate change deniers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When I get time, I'd like to use satellite photos of the arctic into a time lapse video, play it, then ask "Now, what was it you were saying about climate change being a scam?"

    The argument is that it's cyclical and happens regardless of human action. Anyone straight "denying" is just an idiot polarized by the current state of entertainment/politics. The intelligent argument against crazy ideas like this is that companies/people are making a lot of money selling what could very well be snake oil on a process we have very little data on and therefore have very little understanding.

  4. Re: Climate change deniers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They're becoming activists because the science is being ignored and putting our existence in jeopardy.

  5. Re:Sea ice vs projections by Layzej · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Yes. This uncertainty makes the problem much greater because we cannot presume that it will not be much worse than we expect.

  6. Re:Bullshit. Ask "The Polar Ocean Challenge" by Mr0bvious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, it's not "well understood", oh great, let's just ignore it then and say there's no problem hey?

    I can think of a lot of "problems" that are not well understood. They are problems all the same.

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    Never happened. True story.
  7. Re:Pure Folly: CDS by coastwalker · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Actually it was the same shit made up story junk news sources who are climate change deniers who were crying about an ice age in the 70's. Nothing other than a couple of quickly disproved papers ever suggested that an ice age was coming. The problem with man made climate change is that it is happening in a very short time frame and human systems and ecological systems are not robust against the short term change. Geological climate change would not bother us so much because it happens over a long time scale.

    The National Enquirer counts for critical thinking for morons like you. The fact that the same paid for lobby companies that denied tobacco caused cancer are now strident climate change skeptics gives the game away. Only fools who fall for propaganda are still denying the problem of climate change. The rest of the species have moved on to how to solve the problem.

    Pumping water in the Arctic is not a solution, it addresses the symptoms and not the cause. The solution is to cut greenhouse gases and everything will balance out again without flooding Bangladesh and the other problems that climate change is bringing. Fortunately human technology has the solution in hand if only the cretins shut up who insist on making that extra bit of wealth for the super rich by burning more coal and drilled oil.

    You really do look extremely stupid, consigning millions of poor brown people in the tropics to death due to flooding and crop failure for your rich overlords. What a pathetic excuse for a man you are when you spout lies and nonsense on behalf of the people who already make their excessive living off of your own back. Have you no shame? you are a disgrace to humanity. Stand up take some responsibility and learn the science instead of repeating evil propaganda from the alt right.

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    Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
  8. Re:Sea ice vs projections by haruchai · · Score: 1, Insightful

    IPCC projections are rarely worst case; they're pretty much a consensus of the AGW proponents vs the contrarians although the latter are much fewer in number and have been for 20+ years.
    The cooligans & deniers love to point out when the IPCC warming projections are too high but I haven't seen them readily point out that their Arctic sea ice decline is too low. I have heard a lot of noise about how Antarctic sea is has been increasing (slowly), not so much about the accelerating melt of some important Antarctic glaciers nor about the unexpected decline in the salinity of Antarctic Bottom Water.

    https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...

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    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  9. Re: Climate change deniers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Enough already.

    "NOAA climate fraud" is your hypothesis. Fine. Test it. Collect your evidence, share it and discuss it. What must that evidence consist of?

    "Fraud" is going to be documents that show deliberate and deceptive behavior, likely for personal gain. Ok. Youneed to find evidence that demonstrates that tens of thousands of scientists across the entire world and spanning dozens of disciplines are deliberately deceiving the lay public on climate change. These scientists are faking their data, misrepresenting it and are working together to do this to deceive the lay public. Who, exactly, is coordinating this?

    Finally, a word about how the NSF grant system works: it's really, really, hard to get funded, and once you do, you must manage the fundsyou receive with great care. It is the distribution of these federal funds that is key -- lying about _anything_ is a serious problem for thelarger institution -- let alone the NSF because Congress (and likely state legislatures) come down on these institutions like a ton of bricks.

  10. Re:Climate change deniers by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Spot on. It's perfectly normal for the climate to vary from what it was before when we've changed the atmosphere so much by adding so much carbon dioxide to it.
    Oh? You expected something else?

  11. Evidence by Tenebrousedge · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Models aren't evidence for or against a theory. The evidence for AGW is essentially that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that it exists in the upper atmosphere, and that we are increasing the concentration of it in the atmosphere. Very basic physical laws dictate that this will cause warming. You can prove the greenhouse gas part in your basement, to measure the upper atmosphere I'd imagine you'd need a sounding rocket. Your basement will also allow you to demonstrate a substantial positive feedback effect with water vapor. So, easily verified properties of atmospheric gases tell us that AGW must be occurring.

    "But wait," you say, "who says that the real world has to match what happens in the laboratory? What if there's some bigger negative feedback loop that we don't know about?" This is a cogent objection. As it happens, that is exactly what we've been looking for (at least, since Keeling). We haven't found one, and we've ruled out all known atmospheric phenomena. Some misunderstood part of the water cycle was probably all that could have saved us; the H2O feedback effect is quite strong. As you can see, the amount of water that can be dissolved in air has a really nasty exponential curve to it, as anyone from the South can doubtless attest.

    The science of AGW really is settled. What exactly will happen is where the models come in, and a large part of the modeled uncertainty is because they're giving projections which take into account human responses to climate change. I'm not suggesting that you take any particular action about this, but you may rely on the science being correct, so if your personal view is that that would be a situation requiring action, I would imagine that you would want to be thinking about what to do.

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    Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.