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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.
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.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Here's how arctic sea ice has fared relative to IPCC projections: http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6...
Russia needs ice free Arctic. For shipping and future oil rigs.
Here's the chronology:
1) You're being alarmist, there's no issue.
2) You're being alarmist, this isn't worth spending 500 billion on.
3) The environmental impact of attempting this could be worse than allowing things to progress naturally.
4) Too expensive, nobody goes there anyway, and we don't need polar bears to survive. Shame, though.
5) Well, now it's too late anyway.
I'm actually kind of on board with #3, but I think we really ought to be getting our asses in gear and looking at the impact of mitigation strategies at the 'global environmental engineering' scale, and maybe doing a few local-scale tests to help build better models to aid in the assessments.
Here ya go: https://scratch.mit.edu/projec...
Well, that settles it. Nothing to worry about, folks. Just keep consuming those finite resources and let your grandchildren worry about any problems.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
They're becoming activists because the science is being ignored and putting our existence in jeopardy.
Didn't you get the memo? The resources aren't finite, they're infinite. Oil grows back because it's not fossil fuel. Silly evolutionists, how could it be fossil fuel, the Earth is only 6000 years old!
Well DUH!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Never happened. True story.
The Ice level in the arctic is a symptom, not the cause. Otherwise, is this story from the Onion or something?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Normally, the sea ice freezes over the water, capping it off and insulating it. Heat soaks only slowly through the ice, cooling the water under the ice and freezing it, slowly.
Instead, if we pump seawater up and drop it on the top of the ice, it will freeze quickly. So we can increase the thickness of the ice, so it will, hopefully, last longer.
If done on a large scale, however, it will warm the arctic winter, as heat is added to the system in the form of liquid water to be frozen, water surface that is 0 degrees C instead of solid ice at maybe -20 degrees C. The increased ice is probably a net positive for the artctic, but I dislike all these goengineering kludges.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
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?
It's a fraud because he doesn't like the conclusions. End of.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.