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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And then there was this silly story a short time ago:
http://www.nbcnews.com/mach/environment/how-eating-crickets-could-help-save-planet-n721416
On noes! Ice age = Melt Arctic
Oh Noes! Global warming = Freeze Arctic
A melting and advancing arctic is how all that good stuff gets to the deep ocean via deep water return.
my faith in government funded science is destroyed at this stage
“my faith in government funded science is destroyed at this stage”
What took you so long?
Where’s Mosh and Nick to comment on this STUPIDITY.
Their absence is noted.
Surely not even those two can condone this rubbish !!!
Maybe it was Griff in an “AHA” moment ???
What about Griff and seaice1? Arctic sea ice is the only thing they care about these days.
If this is “Western Science” then I have to agree with these idiot fallists (see link below):
Their plan is to spray sea water on top of sea ice already present, increasing the ice thickness, but not increasing area covered by ice. The underside of the ice will warm by being further from the cold air above, and the air above will be warmed as the freezing sea water releases heat. Melting at the underside of the ice will cool the sea underneath. In essence, this plan is to move heat from below the sea ice to above it, where it can be lost to space. If successful, and done on a large enough scale, the result would be a colder world. They must think this is a cure for global warming. (What happened to climate change?)
But if they think that CO2 released into the atmosphere warms the Earth, they should think the CO2 released by this project would negate their efforts in the long run.
Makes me think they don’t think.
SR
And then there’s the teeny matter of latent heat release……
That’s not fair….they think a latent heat release is the latest pop music video…like this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYuhMXmJeh4
Wow, what an idiotic plan.
It would be cheaper – and more effective – to simply constrict/block the Bering Straight water currents.
This would prevent a large part of the northerly energy transport and the ice would regrow naturally.
Closing up the Davis Straight (between Greenland and Canada) would help even more, but would be a much more monumental undertaking.
Wind turbines are unsightly ugly contraptions, that would be vandalising the pristine Arctic horizons. There is also the alternative win-win proposition, to be financed by silicon valley moguls.
Hundreds of thousands of floating concrete platforms about a square mile each cowered with solar panels, equipped with electric heathers in order to stop the snow/ice build-up, backed up by the Elon Musk’s storage batteries would provide electricity to light up whole of polar region 24h/24h in the winter months and cool the Arctic ocean in the summer by anything up to 10C as the recently discussed study has shown. A definite win-win for both the climate warriors and the reindeer herders.
If sea ice extent was actually a positive feedback then why hasn’t summer temperature been getting higher when the sun is shining there? Warmer temperatures are happening in the dark of winter and there’s only one place that energy can be coming from.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
That ice rips open bodies of LAND at times. Large ice floes come in and utterly destroy entire beach heads.
Those spinners wouldn’t last the FIRST summer
Let’s presume for a moment that the increased amount of sunlight that falls into the arctic ocean rather than being reflected back to space is significant. I don’t think it is, given that it’s dark six months out of the year, and the ice melt doesn’t open up much of the arctic to sunlight until well into the summer season, and then it’s over and the ice comes back, and the sun falls low in the sky. But for the sake of argument, lets pretend it matters to the earth’s heat budget.
Wouldn’t the better way to balance that heat budget be to increase cloud cover over the tropical oceans? That’s where the amount of sunlight energy being absorbed into the oceans is really huge, dwarfing anything that could possibly be coming in over the arctic. So the money would be better spent finding a way to increase cloud cover over the tropics, or decrease albedo in some fashion, using aerosols or some other gimmick. The cost would be much, much lower, and the result much more effective.
I’m not exactly sure how to calculate the budget, but someone here probably does.
“given that it’s dark six months out of the year” Yes, and THAT is when temperatures there are going above average, not during summer. http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php If there was any truth to the idea that less ice is allows more sunlight to heat the ocean in Arctic summer then we should see higher summer temperatures there then – but there is no evidence of that happening.
At those latitudes, the difference in reflectivity of water and ice is not that great.
“difference in reflectivity of water and ice is not that great” I think it is more that the surface watts/m^2 at the poles is very weak both from the angle of incidence and from the greater distance the light traveled through air to get to the surface. Those and it is very foggy over open water in the Arctic in the summer.
Of course we must Save the Arctic. Everyone knows that we must ban oil pipelines that destroy the pristine environment. Instead we will cover the Arctic with 100 million wind powered ice making machines. You know it makes sense!
I bet this ice-making effort will be run by the Italians. Maybe we even have different flavours.
It would be cheaper to have Leonardo dI Caprio and Emma Thompson start wearing aluminum foil hats. This would create a new fashion trend, and increase earth albedo by 0.002 % at zero cost.
This cannot be serious….
Surely no one with knowledge of thermodynamics would suggest such a scheme.
Have we forgotten that in a cooling system there is a condenser that releases heat and an evaporator that absorbs heat.
This would be the equivalent of a pumping system circulating water in order to drain a sea.
The condenser would have to be located in the tropics!
We are talking about climate scientists here. Not knowing thermodynamics is a requirement.
Along with not knowing anything about statistics.
I think the photo and Einstein’s comment need no further elaboration!
Eric’s nuclear knowledge is, shall we say, limited. Current light water nuclear reactors produce between 1 and 1.5 GW of electricity, not 8GWs as stated. The cost is roughly $5 billion, but if hundreds or thousands are to be built, the cost goes down, both because
the cost of building the actual plants goes down and the cost of siting and connecting goes down (which is why virtually every nuclear plant site contains at least two reactors, that share the connectivity, and lake water often (but not always) required for cooling.
Now if you step ahead a few years, molten salt reactors will go into commercial use and eliminate the market for current reactor technology. Molten salt reactors do not need massive concrete foundations, etc and cost about 1/3rd that of light water reactors. Molten Energy claims they can build for under $2 per watt, or less than $2 billion per GW.
That’s cheaper than clean coal power plants ($3.50 per watt).
Built in factories and easily deployed and fueled by either nuclear wastes or low enriched uranium or Thorium. No need for close supervision – these plants are walk away safe and incapable of spewing radioactive debris to any extent. Can easily be mounted on coat platforms and towed to where needed (the Russians are already producing such floating power plants using light water reactor technology). Molten salt reactors would be far better.
Perhaps the first thing would be to challenge these folks to prove why they think the Arctic
is going to remain a “hotspot’ in a “global warming world.”
It is always idle minds that come up with the very stupid, wind turbines ice up power stations need manpower, what is the point, just adapting to any changes that climate variability brings is the only sane way.
Let’s make a pact to send all mad climate scientists to the moon, sorted.
So hijacking the gross domestic product of half a planet is supposed to be a GOOD idea?
The greedy businessmen in the wind sector know that with Trump the writing is on the wall – so they’re desperate to find any reason to put up more bird/bat mincers.
As for the lunatic academics – they have no idea why the Arctic cycles between melting and freezing so it stands to reason that they’re totally clueless what could be done even if you seriously wanted to interfere with the climate this way.
Actual cost that will stop the Arctic melting I estimate as £300billion.
Let’s play safe and ask for $1trillion (+ 10% commission?)
On another front, in Boston some concerned types are proposing to spend billions and billions of dollars on a sea wall to protect the city against rising seas. Rising seas? The arctic scheme is sheer lunacy. But if Boston is worried, when will New Orleans and Miami get into the mix? How much is California willing to spend to save the state from climate change caused earthquakes? More importantly, how do you debate with people who have completely lost their minds?
“At current rates of warming, by the 2030s the Arctic Ocean could see its entire ice cap disappear by late summer. With that ice gone, previously reflected sunlight will then be absorbed by the open ocean, speeding the rate of global warming.”
Who writes this drivel? The Arctic Ocean doesn’t have an ice cap, the Arctic does. Hmmmm, and with all that Arctic sea ice melting, you would think the “rate of global warming” would be speeding up, but in the real world it has pretty much come to a halt, and may be reversing. Oops.
At current rates of warming summer ice will be gone in 2013 – Prof Peter Wadhams
At current rates of warming arctic ice will be gone by September 2016
At current rates of duff predictions yours is at least a way off
Would someone care to either correct my analysis of the proposal or comment on the probable consequences of adding about 20 watts/meter^2 to the arctic atmosphere? At 334,000 joules/kg of water of latent heat to form ice and about 1,000 kg of water/meter^3, this is about 334 million joules/meter^2. With only 15.768 million seconds/.5 year, I see over 20 watts/meter^2 going into the atmosphere.
Only 100 million units?
The new big idea as featured in the Guardian is to utilise the woolly mammoth to avert global warming…
There are plans to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction, as near as dammit. A team at Harvard is attempting to genetically engineer mammoth traits and combine them with those of Asian elephants to form a shaggy-haired, small-eared, cold-adapted hybrid playfully described as a “mammophant”.
The scientists say this would not only preserve the Asian elephant in an altered form, but the mammoth could also help combat global warming by preventing tundra permafrost from melting, by punching through snow and allowing cold air to get in.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/19/theresa-may-must-not-falter-on-tackling-domestic-violence
If only we’d thought of that 5000 years ago, eh.