The Sun's output has been accurately measured for the last 40 years or so, and can be inferred somewhat less accurately for the past. It hasn't changed.
I don't know what you mean by "the region of space".
There are a number of gasses absorbing IR radiation in the atmosphere and so helping the Earth stay 20 kelvin or so warmer than it would otherwise be. Only CO2 and methane have changed their contribution to this effect significantly as far as we can measure, and those two have increased dramatically since the industrial revolution, having been fairly constant over the preceding millenia.
Using multiple sources is sensible, but not all sources are equal. 100 anti-global warming websites copying each others information is not 100 times, or even one time, as useful as one peer-reviewed scientific study.
There are direct temperature records of reasonable accuracy back to the 18th century. Before that, there are a number of sources for this information -- tree rings, isotopic ratios in ice cores, which back each other up pretty well and probably more. See
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/ cu rrent/lectures/kling/carbon_cycle/carbon_cycle_new.html
for lots of pretty charts.
Ice cores give pretty accurate information back about half-a-million years.
The pattern is one of random year-on-year fluctuations of perhaps 0.4 degrees, combined with slow shifts of degrees per millenium. Plus, in the last 200 years about a 1 degree rise which looks like nothing else in the charts.
There is really quite a lot of evidence if you just look at it.
I repeat, so who do you believe? oil companies? Ford? politicians?
Seriously, think about this from the perspective of the sort of senior climatologist who gets roped in for something like the National Academy of Sciences Review. You're in your 30s or 40s, you have tenure and academic freedom, you're well enough known that you will have plenty of grant money whatever happens. Even if you and everyone else in the subject suddenly realises that you dropped a decimal point 15 years ago and the whole thing is a non-issue, the ensuing fuss, plus bread-and-butter work like understanding El Nino, will keep you in funds until you retire, even if the subject slowly shrinks. You haven't actually done global warming research before, but the NAS has asked you in for this big review. What do you possibly have to gain by being less than honest? You could distort things towards the Bush/oil companies viewpoint, that would make them love you, and might pay off in a cushy consultancy or two. Why would you distort things towards more warming? There is no plausible motive except honesty.
As for Mars and Pluto, I have no idea, but their atmosphere's are so much thinner than ours, and have so much less heat capacity as a consequence that relatively small effects could be warming them.
Regarding the cycles, your points are somewhat in opposition to one another. Yes, there are cycles (or at least variations, I have no idea how periodic they are) but they run over long periods. Changes as rapid as what we are seeing in the last 200 years do not appear to be a part of those cycles (except, perhaps when a massive volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike plays a part). So, we are left looking around for what makes the last 200 years dramatically different from other times. We have a theory for that, backed by both by plausible and fairly simple physics (CO2 blocks the IR that carries heat away from the Earth) and by a preponderence of the computer models that look in more detail at the processes. This theory has stood up to several pretty serious honest examinations (eg the National Academy of Sciences) while the competing theories basically haven't.
It's a lot more than conjecture, if not a "proof beyond all doubt" and, I think, clearly worth giving up your SUVs and air conditioning for.
I'm not sure Antartica was at the pole when the dinosaurs left their remains there.
Yes, we will adjust, probably, but it will not be fun. A sea level rise of a few metres by 2100 will cause huge expense in the rich North (builfing dykes) and huge misery in the poor South (as when the population of Bangladesh tries to fit the small part of their country which will be left). Also, while it doesn't take long for (say) Kansas to become too hot and dry to grow wheat or grass, it takes rather longer for (say) Greenland to thaw out and develop decent soil.
Your data is just wrong for b, d and e. See any of several sites linked from posts in this debate. The global temperature curve may have wandered up 0.1 degree or so in the 1000 years to 1800, but since then it has gone up at least a clear degree (Centigrade!).
I don't know about c, but Sweden is pretty far North. If warmer seas made it wetter there (ie more snow) glaciers could easily grow. Glaciers on the Alps and in Africa are retreating.
As for (a) other theories have been pretty closely examined, and the vast majority of scientists who have examined them found that they did not account for the facts.
Lots of solid data -- temperatures, CO2 levels, etc. at:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/ cu rrent/lectures/kling/carbon_cycle/carbon_cycle_new.html
Human activity produces net CO2 emission around 8 billion tons of carbon per year. While about 200 billion tons is cycled annually between plants, the atmosphere and the seas, this basically consists of two fairly balanced processes -- into and out of plants and into and out of the sea. If you look at net uptakes or releases by plants and the seas, the human contribution is huge.
The evidence for a global rise in average temperature really is irrefutable. If your neighbourhood is cooling it could be random, or it could be some weird feedback where hotter seas somewhere else makes more cloud, or diverts some wind pattern or...., but satellite and other measurements give a very exact overall picture and it is warming.
Next the energy budget. The point is that energy comes IN from the Sun mainly in visible light, to which CO2 is transparent. It goes OUT mainly in IR at wavelengths which CO2 absorbs quite well. So heat can get in just as easily, but cannot get out as easily. So we heat up.
Finally, yes, the other possible explanations have been tested and studied, exhaustively, and
(a) they don't stack up (b) even if they did, we would still want to lower atmospheric CO2 to cool the planet.
First the meta point. You can find "qualified scientists" taking both sides of practically any question you can think of. This is good, from an academic freedom point of view, and because, just occasionally, some idea will slowly creep in from "a silly point of view held by a few awkward cranks that no one listens to" to eventually become mainstream (although it is important to remember that 99+% of such ideas will NOT do this). It is precisely to ensure this breadth of viewpoints that academics have tenure, so that they cannot be fired just because their views are unpopular.
The down side of this breadth is that when the media present a scientific issue, they, wishing to be "balanced" and not understanding the issue, will look around for some one who takes the opposite view, and find someone. So, they give equal air time to someone who represents the consensus view of 99.5% of the world's scientists who have thought about the question, and a random member of the other 0.5%. The result is that the public really has no idea what is a genuine scientific controversy with the world's experts split 50/50 and what is a few oddballs railing against an otherwise solid consensus.
Global warming is a good example of this. The media makes it seem like a closely fought evenly balanced scientific dispute, which it might have been 20 years ago, rather than an issue that the vast majority of climatologists will agree is settled in general terms (although many important questions remain), which it is today. This is exacerbated when oil companies and their hirelings (like the US federal government) spend their billions to push their viewpoint as well.
On your technical points. Firstly the "drop in the ocean" thing is just wrong. We are emitting a substantial fraction (something like 30% I think) of all the CO2 released every year. The CO2 levels and temperatures have varied historically, but (a) The consequences were pretty unpleasant (rising sea levels, etc.) and (b) many of the changes happened over millions of years, not decades.
Oh go away! Climate research would carry on whether human CO2 releases are found to be warming the planet or not.
As one example among many, the US National Academy of Sciences, whose leaders have all the grant money they could ask for already, and everything to lose in terms of reputation if they distort their science for any reason at all were asked by the Bush administration to take a skeptical look at global warming. Given the administrations attitude, they could clearly have pleased their lords and masters and perpetuated their influence and funding by reporting that there was no problem, but they did not! They concluded in a detailed study, after considering a huge range of alternatives that the evidence strongly favoured human releases of CO2 as a major cause of the warming which is being observed.
If we don't believe climatologists, who should we believe? oil companies? Ford?
I've seen the USNAS report. I don't think its believeable, and neither does the Bush administration because they came out after it was released and questioned the findings.
Government orgs are not always truthful, nor always scientific. Sometimes they set out to make a case for things they want. This might well be one of those times.
The Bush administration is surely more of a "government org" than the NAS. Seriously I don't know of a serious "broad review" type study by any group not funded by the oil industry (which admittedly rules out the Bush administration) which has not more or less agreed with the NAS.
You also said:
Discretion is the better part of valor
which surely speaks for not filling the atmosphere with more CO2 than it's had for several hundred million years.
Sorry, if Global Warming cuts across the cycle that implies it has an effect.
Yes that's what I was saying. There is a 30 year cycle, and, to the best of our understanding, if we (or something else) keep on heating the planet, there will still be a thirty-year cycles, but at a higher overall level of hurricanes across the cycle.
As for your other paragraph, who is supposed to be making excuses for what? There are, indeed, many environmental problems in the world. Ozone depletion and overall global warming are somewhat special because they can ONLY be dealt with on a global basis. A messy nuclear weapons stockpile, or the Aral Sea dustbowl are regional problems with possible regional solutions (although things like global trading arrangements have a big impact). Making the atmosphere more transparent to IR can, to the best of our knowledge, only be done by taking more CO2 out of it, and putting less in. The US produces a really very large amount of CO2 (even compared to Europe or Japan) and so really has to do some things. Roughly they must do some combination of:
1. Generating more power other than from fossil fuels -- nuclear, tide, wave, wind, hydro, etc...
2. Use less power overall -- smaller cars, not living in extreme climates, insulation etc.....
Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. are also doing these things, more or less. Russia, China and India need to find a way to leapfrog the really energy intensive phases of their industrial growth, or go into non-fossil fuel power generation early. South America and Asia needs to stop burning down forests.
It really is getting hard to find credible scientific opinion contradicting this view these days, the evidence just keeps coming.
Who are the CDC? The USNAS was asked by Bush to take a skeptical look at the global warming question. They appointed a panel of top scientists with no previous links to work in the field. They produced a detailed study running for several thousand pages, in which they examined the evidence on all sides, considered a range of alternative hypotheses and concluded as I said. It's not "proved beyond a shadow of a doubt" the Earth is too complicated a system for that level of certainty, but their result was pretty conclusive. The summary is pretty good and only a few dozen pages -- try reading it.
Obviously depends on how much the Sun is increasing. I believe that global average temperature is 10 or 20 Kelvins more than it would be if there was no greenhouse at all, so there is some way to go.
As you say hurricane records are pretty spotty, but the basic connection -- warmer sea surfaces leads ot more and bigger hurricanes globally is pretty clear. Some places might end up with fewer and smaller because of some weird feedback effect, but overall, that heat energy needs to be moved and a hurricane moves a lot of it.
Try looking at the facts. Every major indpendent study for years (for instance the US National Academy of Sciences study) has concluded that beyong reasonable doubt:
A: the planet is warming faster than it has done for millions of years B: human releases of CO2 is almost certainly the main cause
and I would observe that B actually doesn't matter. If the planet is warming, we should release less CO2, to try and cool it, regardless of the reason.
The currents in the Atlantic are not simply driven by the Coriolis force. It's a LOT more complicated. In particular, there is a fairly small region near Greenland where surface water is very drastically and fairly quickly cooled by very cold winds coming of the Candian and Greenland ice cover. This very cold water sinks down deep and drives the whole cycle. I don't know all the details, but they're pretty well understood.
If you dump too much fresh water in at that point (as has happened in the past when large lakes drained suddenly, for instance) the water, although cold, is so much less saline that the surroundings that it won't sink and the cycle dies.
Interestingly, of course, even if increased solar output or whatever else is causing the global warming (and these theories are being looked at and discounted by very respectable scientific reviews), the correct response is the same -- increase the IR transmittance of the atmosphere by decreasing the levels of CO2 and various other gasses to allow the Earth to lose heat faster.
The 30ish year hurricane cycle is well established, but global warming cuts across that -- if the sea is generally warmer there will be more hurricanes compared to the same point in the 30 year cycle when the sea is cooler.
It runs off relatively low-grade heat. Solar (paint the relevant part of the pump black and stick it in the Sun) is one option. Light a small fire under it is another. For all I know it might be enough to shovel a pile of fresh buffalo-dung onto the "hot" end, or tuck it under your sleeping yak.
It's not the base. The main wind in the antarctic away from the sea is what's called katabatic. Basically the ice is cooled by radiation and the air low down is cooled by contact with the ice. The cold air flows downhill making wind.
Dome C is the top of a hill (a big gentle one, that's what the "dome" refers to), so any katabatic flow would be away in all directions.
The South pole isn't on a hilltop so there's a constant turbulent low level cold wind flowing past it.
There's a possibly even better site called Dome A, which is a few hundred metres higher than Dome C. No one has ever actually been there though.
The sites being proposed are far inland and several thousand meters up on the top of the domes of ice that make up the East antartic ice sheet. It hardly ever snows up there. It's too cold and too dry!
There's mo site in the Arctic that's even nearly as good. You need stability, altitude, extreme cold, very still air at all levels... The Arctic proper is most sea ice, which is at low altitude and not a stable platform. There might be somewhere halfway decent in Greenland, but I haven't heard of it.
This is the million dollar question. Obviously if you have trusted routers, you can just do the same thing independently on each leg. If you had working quantum computers you could use them as routers and be safe even without trusting them. You can also do quantum error correction to repair damage to the signal without reading it, which would effectively get you round absorbtion of your photons in the fibre and beat range limits.
If you have all-optical switches then you can switch the quantum channel (in a crude form, just bend the optical fibre to point at a different receiver) presumably using control sent over another not necessarily secure channel.
That's all that anyone has come up with as far as I know,
Slashdot Mirror
The Sun's output has been accurately measured for the last 40 years or so, and can be inferred somewhat less accurately for the past. It hasn't changed.
I don't know what you mean by "the region of space".
There are a number of gasses absorbing IR radiation in the atmosphere and so helping the Earth stay 20 kelvin or so warmer than it would otherwise be. Only CO2 and methane have changed their contribution to this effect significantly as far as we can measure, and those two have increased dramatically since the industrial revolution, having been fairly constant over the preceding millenia.
Using multiple sources is sensible, but not all sources are equal. 100 anti-global warming websites copying each others information is not 100 times, or even one time, as useful as one peer-reviewed scientific study.
There are direct temperature records of reasonable accuracy back to the 18th century. Before that, there are a number of sources for this information -- tree rings, isotopic ratios in ice cores, which back each other up pretty well and probably more. See
/ cu rrent/lectures/kling/carbon_cycle/carbon_cycle_new .html
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1
for lots of pretty charts.
Ice cores give pretty accurate information back about half-a-million years.
The pattern is one of random year-on-year fluctuations of perhaps 0.4 degrees, combined with slow shifts of degrees per millenium. Plus, in the last 200 years about a 1 degree rise which looks like nothing else in the charts.
There is really quite a lot of evidence if you just look at it.
I repeat, so who do you believe? oil companies? Ford? politicians?
Seriously, think about this from the perspective of the sort of senior climatologist who gets roped in for something like the National Academy of Sciences Review. You're in your 30s or 40s, you have tenure and academic freedom, you're well enough known that you will have plenty of grant money whatever happens. Even if you and everyone else in the subject suddenly realises that you dropped a decimal point 15 years ago and the whole thing is a non-issue, the ensuing fuss, plus bread-and-butter work like understanding El Nino, will keep you in funds until you retire, even if the subject slowly shrinks. You haven't actually done global warming research before, but the NAS has asked you in for this big review. What do you possibly have to gain by being less than honest? You could distort things towards the Bush/oil companies viewpoint, that would make them love you, and might pay off in a cushy consultancy or two. Why would you distort things towards more warming? There is no plausible motive except honesty.
As for Mars and Pluto, I have no idea, but their atmosphere's are so much thinner than ours, and have so much less heat capacity as a consequence that relatively small effects could be warming them.
Regarding the cycles, your points are somewhat in opposition to one another. Yes, there are cycles (or at least variations, I have no idea how periodic they are) but they run over long periods. Changes as rapid as what we are seeing in the last 200 years do not appear to be a part of those cycles (except, perhaps when a massive volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike plays a part). So, we are left looking around for what makes the last 200 years dramatically different from other times. We have a theory for that, backed by both by plausible and fairly simple physics (CO2 blocks the IR that carries heat away from the Earth) and by a preponderence of the computer models that look in more detail at the processes.
This theory has stood up to several pretty serious honest examinations (eg the National Academy of Sciences) while the competing theories basically haven't.
It's a lot more than conjecture, if not a "proof beyond all doubt" and, I think, clearly worth giving up your SUVs and air conditioning for.
I'm not sure Antartica was at the pole when the dinosaurs left their remains there.
Yes, we will adjust, probably, but it will not be fun. A sea level rise of a few metres by 2100 will cause huge expense in the rich North (builfing dykes) and huge misery in the poor South (as when the population of Bangladesh tries to fit the small part of their country which will be left). Also, while it doesn't take long for (say) Kansas to become too hot and dry to grow wheat or grass, it takes rather longer for (say) Greenland to thaw out and develop decent soil.
Your data is just wrong for b, d and e. See any of several sites linked from posts in this debate. The global temperature curve may have wandered up 0.1 degree or so in the 1000 years to 1800, but since then it has gone up at least a clear degree (Centigrade!).
I don't know about c, but Sweden is pretty far North. If warmer seas made it wetter there (ie more snow) glaciers could easily grow. Glaciers on the Alps and in Africa are retreating.
As for (a) other theories have been pretty closely examined, and the vast majority of scientists who have examined them found that they did not account for the facts.
Lots of solid data -- temperatures, CO2 levels, etc. at:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1
Human activity produces net CO2 emission around 8 billion tons of carbon per year. While about 200 billion tons is cycled annually between plants, the atmosphere and the seas, this basically consists of two fairly balanced processes -- into and out of plants and into and out of the sea. If you look at net uptakes or releases by plants and the seas, the human contribution is huge.
The evidence for a global rise in average temperature really is irrefutable. If your neighbourhood is cooling it could be random, or it could be some weird feedback where hotter seas somewhere else makes more cloud, or diverts some wind pattern or ...., but satellite and other measurements give a very exact overall picture and it is warming.
Next the energy budget. The point is that energy comes IN from the Sun mainly in visible light, to which CO2 is transparent. It goes OUT mainly in IR at wavelengths which CO2 absorbs quite well. So heat can get in just as easily, but cannot get out as easily. So we heat up.
Finally, yes, the other possible explanations have been tested and studied, exhaustively, and
(a) they don't stack up
(b) even if they did, we would still want to lower atmospheric CO2 to cool the planet.
First the meta point. You can find "qualified scientists" taking both sides of practically any question you can think of. This is good, from an academic freedom point of view, and because, just occasionally, some idea will slowly creep in from "a silly point of view held by a few awkward cranks that no one listens to" to eventually become mainstream (although it is important to remember that 99+% of such ideas will NOT do this). It is precisely to ensure this breadth of viewpoints that academics have tenure, so that they cannot be fired just because their views are unpopular.
The down side of this breadth is that when the media present a scientific issue, they, wishing to be "balanced" and not understanding the issue, will look around for some one who takes the opposite view, and find someone. So, they give equal air time to someone who represents the consensus view of 99.5% of the world's scientists who have thought about the question, and a random member of the other 0.5%. The result is that the public really has no idea what is a genuine scientific controversy with the world's experts split 50/50 and what is a few oddballs railing against an otherwise solid consensus.
Global warming is a good example of this. The media makes it seem like a closely fought evenly balanced scientific dispute, which it might have been 20 years ago, rather than an issue that the vast majority of climatologists will agree is settled in general terms (although many important questions remain), which it is today. This is exacerbated when oil companies and their hirelings (like the US federal government) spend their billions to push their viewpoint as well.
On your technical points. Firstly the "drop in the ocean" thing is just wrong. We are emitting a substantial fraction (something like 30% I think) of all the CO2 released every year. The CO2 levels and temperatures have varied historically, but (a) The consequences were pretty unpleasant (rising sea levels, etc.) and (b) many of the changes happened over millions of years, not decades.
Oh go away! Climate research would carry on whether human CO2 releases are found to be warming the planet or not.
As one example among many, the US National Academy of Sciences, whose leaders have all the grant money they could ask for already, and everything to lose in terms of reputation if they distort their science for any reason at all were asked by the Bush administration to take a skeptical look at global warming. Given the administrations attitude, they could clearly have pleased their lords and masters and perpetuated their influence and funding by reporting that there was no problem, but they did not! They concluded in a detailed study, after considering a huge range of alternatives that the evidence strongly favoured human releases of CO2 as a major cause of the warming which is being observed.
If we don't believe climatologists, who should we believe? oil companies? Ford?
The Bush administration is surely more of a "government org" than the NAS. Seriously I don't know of a serious "broad review" type study by any group not funded by the oil industry (which admittedly rules out the Bush administration) which has not more or less agreed with the NAS.
You also said:
which surely speaks for not filling the atmosphere with more CO2 than it's had for several hundred million years.
Yes that's what I was saying. There is a 30 year cycle, and, to the best of our understanding, if we (or something else) keep on heating the planet, there will still be a thirty-year cycles, but at a higher overall level of hurricanes across the cycle.
As for your other paragraph, who is supposed to be making excuses for what? There are, indeed, many environmental problems in the world. Ozone depletion and overall global warming are somewhat special because they can ONLY be dealt with on a global basis. A messy nuclear weapons stockpile, or the Aral Sea dustbowl are regional problems with possible regional solutions (although things like global trading arrangements have a big impact). Making the atmosphere more transparent to IR can, to the best of our knowledge, only be done by taking more CO2 out of it, and putting less in. The US produces a really very large amount of CO2 (even compared to Europe or Japan) and so really has to do some things. Roughly they must do some combination of:
1. Generating more power other than from fossil fuels -- nuclear, tide, wave, wind, hydro, etc...
2. Use less power overall -- smaller cars, not living in extreme climates, insulation etc.....
Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. are also doing these things, more or less. Russia, China and India need to find a way to leapfrog the really energy intensive phases of their industrial growth, or go into non-fossil fuel power generation early. South America and Asia needs to stop burning down forests.
It really is getting hard to find credible scientific opinion contradicting this view these days, the evidence just keeps coming.
Who are the CDC? The USNAS was asked by Bush to take a skeptical look at the
global warming question. They appointed a panel of top scientists with no previous
links to work in the field. They produced a detailed study running for several thousand pages, in which they examined the evidence on all sides, considered a range of alternative hypotheses and concluded as I said. It's not "proved beyond a shadow of a doubt" the Earth is too complicated a system for that level of certainty, but their result was pretty conclusive. The summary is pretty good and only a few dozen pages -- try reading it.
Obviously depends on how much the Sun is increasing. I believe that global average temperature is 10 or 20 Kelvins more than it would be if there was no greenhouse at all, so there is some way to go.
As you say hurricane records are pretty spotty, but the basic connection -- warmer sea surfaces leads ot more and bigger hurricanes globally is pretty clear. Some places might end up with fewer and smaller because of some weird feedback effect, but overall, that heat energy needs to be moved and a hurricane moves a lot of it.
Try looking at the facts. Every major indpendent study for years (for instance the US National Academy of Sciences study) has concluded that beyong reasonable doubt:
A: the planet is warming faster than it has done for millions of years
B: human releases of CO2 is almost certainly the main cause
and I would observe that B actually doesn't matter. If the planet is warming, we should release less CO2, to try and cool it, regardless of the reason.
The currents in the Atlantic are not simply driven by the Coriolis force. It's a LOT more complicated. In particular, there is a fairly small region near Greenland where surface water is very drastically and fairly quickly cooled by very cold winds coming of the Candian and Greenland ice cover. This very cold water sinks down deep and drives the whole cycle. I don't know all the details, but they're pretty well understood.
If you dump too much fresh water in at that point (as has happened in the past when large lakes drained suddenly, for instance) the water, although cold, is so much less saline that the surroundings that it won't sink and the cycle dies.
Interestingly, of course, even if increased solar output or whatever else is causing the global warming (and these theories are being looked at and discounted by very respectable scientific reviews), the correct response is the same -- increase the IR transmittance of the atmosphere by decreasing the levels of CO2 and various other gasses to allow the Earth to lose heat faster.
The 30ish year hurricane cycle is well established, but global warming cuts across that -- if the sea is generally warmer there will be more hurricanes compared to the same point in the 30 year cycle when the sea is cooler.
I think drinking water is more the issue than irrigation.
It runs off relatively low-grade heat. Solar (paint the relevant part of
the pump black and stick it in the Sun) is one option. Light a small fire under it
is another. For all I know it might be enough to shovel a pile of fresh buffalo-dung onto the "hot" end, or tuck it under your sleeping yak.
Power is not always electricity or oil.
It's not the base. The main wind in the antarctic away from the sea is what's called katabatic. Basically the ice is cooled by radiation and the air low down is cooled by contact with the ice. The cold air flows downhill making wind.
Dome C is the top of a hill (a big gentle one, that's what the "dome" refers to), so any katabatic flow would be away in all directions.
The South pole isn't on a hilltop so there's a constant turbulent low level cold wind flowing past it.
There's a possibly even better site called Dome A, which is a few hundred metres higher than Dome C. No one has ever actually been there though.
The sites being proposed are far inland and several thousand meters up on the top of the domes of ice that make up the East antartic ice sheet. It hardly ever snows up there. It's too cold and too dry!
There's mo site in the Arctic that's even nearly as good. You need stability, altitude, extreme cold, very still air at all levels... The Arctic proper is most sea ice, which is at low altitude and not a stable platform. There might be somewhere halfway decent in Greenland, but I haven't heard of it.
I'm pro-gun and pro-life.
From a European perspective this looks like a really odd combination.
This is the million dollar question. Obviously if you have trusted routers, you can just do the same thing independently on each leg. If you had working quantum computers you could use them as routers and be safe even without trusting them. You can also do quantum error correction to repair damage to the signal without reading it, which would effectively get you round absorbtion of your photons in the fibre and beat range limits.
If you have all-optical switches then you can switch the quantum channel (in a crude form, just bend the optical fibre to point at a different receiver) presumably using control sent over another not necessarily secure channel.
That's all that anyone has come up with as far as I know,
Sure. A pair of scissors will do this perfectly. A man-in-the-middle can always deny service.