Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – just in case you thought the climate community had run out of absurd ideas to waste taxpayer’s money, here is an academic plan to rebuild Arctic ice, by deploying 100 million wind turbines into the Arctic Ocean.
Save the Arctic with $5 trillion of floating, wind-powered ice machines, researchers recommend
Tristin Hopper | February 16, 2017 | Last Updated: Feb 17 9:34 AM ET
With the Arctic warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, a new scientific paper is proposing a radical scheme to thicken the ice cap: millions upon millions of autonomous ice machines.
Specifically, between 10 and 100 million floating, wind-powered pumps designed to spray water over sea ice during the winter.
“These are expensive propositions, but within the means of governments to carry out on a scale comparable to the Manhattan Project,” reads the paper published in the Jan. 24 edition of Earth’s Future, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union.
The plan would be one of the most expensive single projects in world history, an endeavour on the scale of the International Space Station, the entire U.S. auto industry or a major world conflict such as the Iraq War.
In the most ambitious version of the plan, 100 million devices would be deployed across the Arctic.
…
Nevertheless, given the end goal, the researchers from Arizona State University call the cost “economically achievable” and the environmental impact “negligible.”
However, they also costed a scaled-down, $500-billion plan that would deploy ice machines to only 10 per cent of the Arctic.
…
“The need is urgent, as the normal cooling effects of summer sea ice are already lessened and may disappear in less than two decades,” reads the paper.
The fleet of ice machines would be designed to add an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic every winter.
The report contains no specific designs on the water pump, but described it as wind turbine and tank assembly mounted atop a buoy.
…
The abstract of the referenced study;
Earth’s Future Arctic ice management
Steven J. Desch, Nathan Smith, Christopher Groppi, Perry Vargas, Rebecca Jackson,Anusha Kalyaan, Peter Nguyen, Luke Probst, Mark E. Rubin, Heather Singleton, Alexander Spacek, Amanda Truitt,PyePyeZaw, and Hilairy E. Hartnett
As the Earth’s climate has changed, Arctic sea ice extent has decreased drastically. It is likely that the late-summer Arctic will be ice-free as soon as the 2030s. This loss of sea ice represents one of the most severe positive feedbacks in the climate system, as sunlight that would otherwise be reflected bysea ice is absorbed by open ocean. It is unlikely that CO2 levels and mean temperatures can be decreased in time to prevent this loss, so restoring sea ice artificially is an imperative. Here we investigate a means for enhancing Arctic sea ice production by using wind power during the Arctic winter to pump water to the surface, where it will freeze more rapidly. We show that where appropriate devices are employed, it is possible to increase ice thickness above natural levels, by about 1m over the course of the winter. We examine the effects this has in the Arctic climate, concluding that deployment over 10% of the Arctic, especially where ice survival is marginal, could more than reverse current trends of ice loss in the Arctic, using existing industrial capacity. We propose that winter ice thickening by wind-powered pumps be considered and assessed as part of a multipronged strategy for restoring sea ice and arresting the strongest feedbacks in the climate system.
Read more: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000410/epdf
The whole idea is absurd, but even if we accept that for whatever reason it one day becomes necessary to pump water on to sea ice on that scale, it would be much easier to use nuclear power than wind power.
The energy budget mentioned in sections 1.3 of the study is 1300GW of power, 7% of the current global energy budget. The largest nuclear reactors currently in use produce around 8GW of power. If you assume $5 billion per reactor construction cost (think mass production), the total construction bill would be $800 billion – well short of the $5 trillion estimated by the study.
In addition, nuclear plants would be less likely to ice up, like the turbine in the picture above.
I’m not even going to consider the prohibitive cost of maintaining all those wind turbines in the harsh, unforgiving arctic environment.
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These people are nuts! , sorry I just can’t believe anyone in their right mind would even think past the first suggestion.
” Let’s build a 100 millions ice machines”. Who pays these people? I am not even sure how to rate the article , no stars because it is so absurd or 5 stars because I got a (sad) laugh out of it!
I am beginning to wonder if we ought to have something like two years service in a practical field of studies for a BS, 3 years for an MS, and 5 years for a PhD. The fields of studies would be selected by a small committee of practitioners in the students’ chosen field and that same committee would decide if the results the students’ practical studies would qualify them to continue with the degree. This would for technical fields, i.e. engineering.
For liberal arts, the soft sciences, the process would be the same except that the student’s would have to their service in a field unrelated to their studies.
This may be far from what would work, but society has little or negative returns for their investment in “professionals” such as those who conducted and reported this paper study. As a taxpayer, I would like to have my share of the taxes who supported these people refunded to me and to all taxpayers who voluntarily/un-voluntarily contributed to the education of these people. And, to fostall spurious arguments, all education in this country are supported by taxpayers to some extent.
Another good suggestion might be to include a requirement that any earth saving scheme must require a proof of concept trial and that the one suggesting the scheme must run the trial at the trial site.
Marvellous suggestion. But with the grant-leeches in position of university administration, there is a small issue….having truly practicable graduates in the work stream is not part of their agenda. Too much critical thought. Ideas like the geoengineering of the arctic would never come to be, for obvious reasons.
Cambridge university in the UK awards an MA after you have been out in the real world doing something real and useful.
I am proud to have am MA (eng)
🙂
Leonard, I don’t think we should ever stop bright people from “thinking outside the box”. Your proposal would probably have prevented Einstein from getting a degree. However, we do want to influence the spheres of contemporary study. Many people have suggested that climate research should have its funding vastly reduced; if that happens then suddenly those bright people may have to find different boxes inside and outside of which to perform research.
Rich.
See – owe to Rich
February 19, 2017 at 12:52 am
Einstein worked in the patent office.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution sent scholars and bureaucrats out into the countryside for a year or two to get acquainted with the real world.
There’s a thing called a job market.
People who have work they need doing, advertise a job for somebody who knows how to do that.
Other people see a need for something out there that people want. So they figure out how to provide that and learn how to do that, then go and do it.
We don’t need some factotum telling people what they should learn in order to get a job.
With the present system, too many people with no useful skills, get pseudo jobs in institutions charging money for the institution; to teach others about stuff that nobody had any use for, when they studied it, and they still have no use for it today.
65% of ALL USA university PhD Physics doctors, never ever get a full time paying job using the specialty they were awarded their doctorate for knowing.
They often become post doc fellows looking for new victims to fleece.
G
I hear that ALL of the $132B Berkeley receives and spends for research goes to the liberal arts. The bind moggles.
I don’t know about having the proposer run the site. Too much opportunity for data finagling.
However, he/she should be on site and be required to work outside as much as possible.
Unless it’s in a location with pleasant weather. Then be required to work inside with only a small window so that they can see everyone else having fun.
There should be another rating category. Something like 5 asteroids for utterly mindless stupidity. It would be useful for these types of stories.
They are mad – unless they fork up the money themselves, in which case I admire them for the strength of their convictions.
AndyE, no, I would just admire them for their madness even more if they were going to put their own money into it…
Rich.
How does this BS pass any sort of meaningful peer review?? I work in the human physiology research space and anything that even approached the fanciful detached from reality fiction of this “paper” would be rejected by any journal I know of….even the $1000 per article pay to plays…
yes, I saw this BS covered on the Guardian a couple of days ago. There solution to the destruction of this “pristine wilderness” is to totally destroy it by building man made structures all over it.
This total contradiction between the objective and the proposed solution just underlines the irrational, obsessive nature of their mentality.
If they are free-floating stations then in 5 years time they will be complaining about all these turbines clogging up the Caribbean, cos that is where they will end up.
Very fake news or just ordinary trolling.
PyePyeZaw. LOL
Saw that, googled the name, she’s an actual ASU alumni.
Great! Round up 30 million, or 300 million, greenies to work non-stop eight hour shifts doing maintenance on the 10 million or 100 million turbines! I’m sure there’ll be more volunteers than are needed!
I’m with Griff on this one (btw where is Griff anyway?), it might be a fake news written by a sceptic The idea is so ridiculous that no sane person would consider it reasonable, but on the other hand many of the CAGW promoters have migrated to insanity years ago.
Number of web articles on the subject quote original source nationalpost.com, I looked for link to and searched for “paper published in the Jan. 24 edition of Earth’s Future, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union.” but couldn’t find one.
Can anyone verify existence of such paper?
The link is under the abstract in the article above.
Thanks. Apparently not even a ‘fake news’, but much worse, I’ve just finished reading some selective bits.
Do not to send your kid to the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University.
Not Fake News, but possibly what Scott Adams calls Imaginary News.
14 “authors” splitting the loot & the tenure cred .
Only 14 authors? That’s nothing. Neil deFraud Tyson lists in his CV a paper with 43 authors — in alphabetical order, so his name was near dead last.
He only has 14 papers listed in all, and some don’t even mention his name, he’s just part of et al.
There seems to be an important mistake in the list of those who are pushing this idiotic plan. Where are the names of Moonbeam Jerry Brown and Al Gore. They couldn’t possibly be left off something so absurd and expensive and pointless
Could this be the study where the CAGW clowns have finally “Jumped the shark” ????
Yeah, but the 100 million ice machines need to be powered by wood pellets from clear cut forests because we can pretend that CO2 produced from these harebrained scams do not exist.
Another obvious example that possession of a PhD does not necessarily mean possession of common sense.
“Those whom would destroy, they first make mad.” Euripides (possibly)
Oops. “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”
The only saving grace is no politician wanting to be re-elected would vote to fund such lunacy.
When the wind dies during the long winter night and power is needed to keep the turbines warm and able to turn when the wind resumes, where is all the maintenance power going to come from? In the UK, during such cold, windless spells, their wind turbines such power from the grid to keep themselves warm. Yeah, that’s going to work.
What was ice coverage in the Arctic in the 1930′ warm period, let alone the Medieval Warm? Beaucoup money to deal with what is probably not a problem.
With all the climate changes that have taken place through the centuries why oh why is it now the perfect temperature that must be maintained. What arrogance, stupidity, etc of those who think they can change what is continually changing anyway.
Now thats the most sense I have read for a while…. +++
Acadumbia ….perpetuating stupid …..we need to put an end to this cr@p .
What a waste of resources .
How should these wind turbines be fixed, on the ice? or on the sea ground? when it’s fixed on the ice it floats around. When it is fixed on the ground then it will be destroyed be the floating ice. I think the whole idea is trash.
Ships lots and lots of ships. To consider the details is to give some level of credence to insanity. How about first principles like .. and the advantage to having a whole lot of ice and snow is?
Makes for very expensive polar bears.
With 14 authors, several of them female, it’s likely this article was the result of a particularly mirthful TGIF get-together that went on and on, each participant trying to outdo the others in contributing ridiculous ideas. With a little more refinement, it might qualify for the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Just earlier today I noted that the Solutrian Hypothesis has reached YouTube.
is the story of King Canute not in common knowledge these days?
trying to stop planetary climate changes is ridiculous
Pump and dump scheme.
Apart from the impossible practical considerations, consider the specific heat content of all that water, it would result in warming the Arctic atmosphere, with unforeseen consequences in weather and climate.
This is flat out incompetent. A certain air temperature will maintain a certain thickness of ice. If they thicken the ice from the top, it will merely melt up from the bottom, to achieve the necessary thickness.
Commie -it actually works and is widely used in northern Canada to make drill pads on lakes, and ice roads to otherwise inaccessible communities. First, the snow is cleared off, which allows the cold to penetrate better, and if that’s not enough, water is sprayed over the ice surface to make additional ice. It takes a long time to melt the thickened ice and you can still see it when the spring thaw is under way.
It’s also been proposed for offshore oil rig platforms in the Arctic. In fact I seem to remember a couple of attempts off the coast near Inuvik, in the 1970s, so it ought to work with salt water too.
Of course, just because it’s practical on a small scale, doesn’t mean it will work with 100 million wind turbines. Spraying water over ice is quite labour intensive. It works best if the water is sprayed in a wide pattern, so it has a chance to get more chilled before it hits the ice surface. And the hoses need to be moved continually to maintain a semi-consistent ice thickness. Hoses can’t be too long or they will freeze up, so they will need to keep making fresh ice-auger holes. Hoses always freeze anyway and need to be thawed out regularly. No way you can automate it.
So I would assume a crew of six hardy souls per turbine to work in three shifts. Two operators per shift is a bit skimpy in hazardous Arctic winter conditions, better make it three per shift. That will employ 900 million people, plus the (helicopters? nuclear submarines?…..) to keep them supplied with food and stuff. And the portable buildings to house them. So with another, say 100 million to work on the supply and maintenance, that’s a round billion people. A good place to put those climate refugees.
BTW I’ve done ice-making so I have an idea what’s involved, and I don’t think that I’m overestimating the practical difficulties at all. Quite the reverse. It’s not too bad if you have a pickup truck idling to keep you comfortable between moving the hoses and fueling the pumps, but to do it in the middle of a 20-hour Arctic night with whiteout conditions, no thanks – I don’t care how much they pay.
It works because the lakes are freshwater. Ice has no salt in it. Pumping sea water (saline) onto arctic ice would dissolve the ice. Brilliant idea.
Yes, salt is the killer element as pointed out by sophocles. Pure water is eutectic but it has limited strength at freezing point. Salt water isn’t eutectic and phase separation happens on freezing making for much lower strength ice until the brine drains out AND regelation consolidates the mass. As such, the top layers become very weak in compression which will turn ice cap into a slush factory.
Building from the surface does nothing to reduce melting from currents. With the added brine trickling down, it might even reduce ice.
Smart Rock,
Thank you for your voice of experience.
Greatly appreciated.
Your final comment –
“It’s not too bad if you have a pickup truck idling to keep you comfortable between moving the hoses and fueling the pumps, but to do it in the middle of a 20-hour Arctic night with whiteout conditions, no thanks – I don’t care how much they pay.”
– almost cost a computer screen.
Hugely appreciated – and much smiled over.
And, if I may say, a billion or so mutagenic watermelons in the Artic will mean no reasonable chance of the native populations remaining distinguishable in any way.
Auto
Squirting so much warm water into the air will chill the water, but it will also dramatically warm the air.
They forgot about the other 100 million they will have to build to offset the CO2 produced when building the first 100 million ….
Not gonna happen, straight into the Trump junk idea box!
Thank goodness Obama, Lurch and Holdren aren’t still there.
This would be right up there on their bucket list !
Um, not meaning to be difficult, but Einstein was wrong about the universe being infinite so maybe there is hope that we’re not quite that stupid. Just sayin’!
“…maybe there is hope that we’re not quite that stupid.”
Not so fast, Ron. E.g. is this bloke for real?
“Pope Francis makes a speech claiming that Islamic terrorism does not exist but catastrophic man-made warming does.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/pope-muddles-islam-with-warming/news-story/dcbad4da44d941db87e22bfb29226d0d
FGS, Frank, get out more.
The Pope is conflating the rapid rise in Christian martyrdom with the rise in CO2.
Mike,
I think I’ll have a litre of whatever wine His Holiness appears to have been drinking.
Goodness!
Auto
And you know the universe is not infinite how?
Wasn’t the full Einstein quote –
“Only two thing ae infinite – the verse and human stupidity. And I am not sure about the Universe”?
Although this looks as if it may be an Urban Legend.
Well there are some of them about these days.
Have been for some time.
The Angel of Mons.
The Gunner of Cambrai.
Doubtless others, manifold others.
Auto
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/albert_einstein.html
So apparently he did say that. Be well.
Freezing of sea water ejects all of the CO2 dissolved in the water as CO2 gas and Carbonates. This is why the polar regions have the highest concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. See http://file.scirp.org/pdf/IJG_2016102714282839.pdf or Google “Oceans, Ice & Snow and CO2”
If CO2 heats the atmosphere via greenhouse effect, isn’t this freezing solution counter-productive. Or maybe these climate scientists don’t believe that CO2 has a warming effect.
These entire paragraphs from the SUMMARY you quote from at the end of that fascinating 51-page paper bear repeating in full.
Nelson, M.D. and Nelson, D.B. (2016) Oceans, Ice & Snow and CO2 Rise, Swing and Seasonal Fluctuation. International Journal of Geosciences, 7, 1232-1282. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijg.2016.710092. Published: October 27, 2016.
The insanity knows no bounds.
?w=840
Just How Much Does 1 Degree C Cost?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/just-how-much-does-1-degree-c-cost/
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer learns that he can sell grease, so he buys up all the bacon he can find, fries it, eats the bacon, and keeps the remain grease to sell for a profit. (That is, until he learns that the cafeteria at Bart’s school holds the motherlode.)
Hi Max! Finally found you.
I’ve been straining my brain to come up with a comment pertaining to this article. Can’t. Too insane.
You couldn’t possibly make this stuff up. We want our money back from this lunatics.
Five Trillion Dollar Plan to Save the Arctic Ice. Back in the 1970s they were talking about spreading soot on the snow to melt the arctic. No one holds these people accountable. They spend fortunes of other people’s money on their own nonsensical personal agendas.
…that’s what Marxist/Socialists do. They’re never going to spend their own cash.
LOL, Yep. If they had to, all this nonsense would go away.
We humans feel a need to “do Something — Anything!” in response to an immediately-present problem (real or perceived). It makes us feel as if we have some power, in situations where we generally don’t. That the “anything” might sometimes be worse than “nothing” doesn’t relieve our current feelings of helplessness. This is why we admire “cool heads” — at least, we admire them after the fact, when their restraint has proved its value. In the (anxious) moment, however, we cry for Strong Leaders who will Take Decisive Action Before It’s Too Late.
There is a reason why the ancients invoked a very particular code for physicians: FIRST, do no harm.
Yep, well said. Rush to judgement is rarely a good thing.
First thought, worst thought.
I posted that to my facebook page a while ago. It’s pure insanity. How the hell did the word ‘science’ become so corrupted to allow fairy tales about things that will not be experimentally tested? Who is so insane to propose experiments so expensive and on top of that, that can turn out very dangerous if, absurdly, would be tried? What the hell is wrong with them?
“How the hell did the word ‘science’ become so corrupted to allow fairy tales about things that will not be experimentally tested?”
Taxpayer funding. As Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address.
I have to know, is that picture real?! If so, does anyone have an educated estimate of what the net energy gain/loss would have been for the amount of fossil fuels burned by the helicopter vs the amount of energy it enabled the windmill to produce? Green energy at any cost…
Yes, some companies specialise in using helicopters to clean turbine blades…
http://helitecnics.com/en/servicios-aereos/limpieza-de-aerogeneradores-con-helicoptero/
Not to mention huge slabs of ice tipping them over if anchored to the sea floor via 2+ miles long chains or currents cramming them into the Fram strait if not anchored. What might be the annual cost of maintaining 10 -100 million windmills and turbines, employing up to half million engineers and 50,000 Chinook helicopters to transport the maintaining crews back and forth.
Check out https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/saturday-silliness-wind-turbine-photo-of-the-year/
To fix the “problem” a helicopter is employed (burning aviation fuel) to spray hot water (which is heated in the frigid temperatures using a truck equipped with a 260 kW oil burner) on the blades of the turbine to de-ice them.
The aviation fuel, the diesel for the truck, and the oil burned to heat the water, could produce more electricity (at the right time to meet demand) than the unfrozen wind turbine could ever produce. (Before it freezes up again).
The attached picture is a metaphor of the complete insanity of the climate change debate.
Has anyone priced bulk silver Mylar by the square mile?
This is a paragraph from a Guardian article on the ‘weather bomb’ that has just hit California!
No…it really is. I quote.
“It’s crazy,” said Robin Johnson, an academic adviser at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s just pouring down rain. The wind is just going nuts.”
Crazy man!
Smoking all that weed must have completely destroyed his memory.
That, or he graduated from 6th grade recently.
And where are they going to produce the 100 million rare earth magnets (@2.5 kg per) required to power those wind turbines? Currently, only China can create them, knows the four-stage extraction, separation, and production processes, except for small vertical market suppliers dotted here and there around the world. But China owns 95-97% of the world’s rare earth supply, and rations all exports. It takes 40 tons of extracted ore to produce one 2.5 kg rare earth magnet.
So they water the ice. What’s melting the sea ice now? Won’t that trigger melt the new ice as well? What’s next? Are they going to propose a wall across the upper Atlantic to prevent warm tropical waters from traveling north? And machines to turn the northward-moving tropical air back to the equator?
And who is going to produce all the aluminum required to build 100 million wind turbines? The largest solar field or wind farm in the world today CANNOT create enough electricity to run ONE aluminum foundry. Only coal and oil can do that (and nuclear). Australia’s main aluminum foundry uses 3% of the nation’s energy. It’s powered by a dam.
We all need to get together and form The Arctic Engineering Consulting Company.
Then we get behind this idea and push hard. Use any fear factor we can come up with, dying poley bears, starving penguins, cute baby seals.
We stand to make a fortune in consulting fees before it all blows over, and we do not have to actually produce anything. Perfect!
I can see it now:
Arctic Engineering – We put the Con in Consulting!
Thx for the laff, spit my coffee.
Sounds a lot like a certain bullet train I keep hearing about.
I’ve heard that a consultant is nothing more than someone who charges you an exorbitant fee to borrow your watch to tell you what time it is.
But of course, the smile is free!
Would the salt water flowing over the floating Arctic ice freeze before or after it melts the fresh water accumulated snow on the top of the ice? If it transforms the entire ice mass into salt water ice, it would melt at a much lower temperature than fresh water ice. This might just accelerate the ice loss rate (if it’s actually a loss once el Nino effects dissipate.)
The water kicks out a concentrated brine as it freezes. The brine will partially melt the existing ice. Also, remember, you are bringing up relatively *warm* water and spreading it around. Essentially, everything gets turned into a salty slush.
It is the world’s largest Snow Cone maker.
A nuclear-powered desalinator/snow machine array, perhaps, mounted on an icebreaker? /sortasarc
Tom
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanfreeze.html
For those who might not know, 0 degrees Fahrenheit is the freezing point of a saturated (50/50) salt solution. So I like to say that at 0F or below, water ice is “seriously frozen”.