Guest post by David Middleton
From the “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” files…
Leave it to a researcher who studies icy moons in the outer solar system to come up with an out-there scheme to restore vanishing sea ice in the Arctic.
Ice is a good insulator, says Steven Desch, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. That’s why moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, among others, may be able to maintain liquid oceans beneath their thick icy surfaces. On Earth, sea ice is much thinner, but the physics is the same. Ice grows on the bottom surface of floating floes. As the water freezes, it releases heat that must make its way up through the ice before escaping into the air. The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped, which slows down ice formation. That’s bad news for the Arctic, where ice helps keep the planet cool but global warming is causing ice to melt faster than it can be replaced.
The answer to making thicker ice more quickly? Suck up near-freezing water from under the ice and pump it directly onto the ice’s surface during the long polar winter. There, the water would freeze more quickly than underneath the ice, where it usually forms.
In theory, Desch says, the pumps used for this top-down approach to ice growth could be driven by technology no more sophisticated than the windmills that have long provided water to farms and ranches on the Great Plains.
Desch and colleagues envision putting such pumps on millions of buoys throughout the Arctic. During winter, each pump would be capable of building an additional layer of sea ice up to 1 meter thick over an area of about 100,000 square meters…
[…]
Now is the time to begin detailed designs and build prototypes, Desch says. The Arctic Ocean’s end-of-summer sea ice coverage has decreased, on average, more than 13 percent per decade since 1979. “There’ll be a time, 10 to 15 years from now, when Arctic sea ice will be accelerating to oblivion, and there’ll be political will to do something about climate change,” Desch says. “We need to have this figured out by the time people are ready to do something.”
Professor Desch and his colleagues estimate that each ice-making buoy would cost $50,000 (including shipping and handling). They estimate that it would cost $500 billion to cover 10% of the Arctic Ocean with ice-making buoys…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji9qSuQapFY
Ice grows on the bottom surface of floating floes. As the water freezes, it releases heat that must make its way up through the ice before escaping into the air. The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped, which slows down ice formation. That’s bad news for the Arctic, where ice helps keep the planet cool but global warming is causing ice to melt faster than it can be replaced.
So… Thicker ice traps more heat (insulation), causing the ice to melt faster, preventing the ice from keeping the planet cool (high albedo). Makes perfect sense.
“There’ll be a time, 10 to 15 years from now, when Arctic sea ice will be accelerating to oblivion, and there’ll be political will to do something about climate change. We need to have this figured out by the time people are ready to do something.”
“Accelerating to oblivion”? Oblivion?
Since we know that the current Arctic sea ice extent is much larger than that of most of the Holocene, “oblivion” is probably not the place to which Arctic sea ice is heading. If anything, it is returning to normal. So, I don’t think these ice-making buoys would be the best place to “invest” $500 billion.
The Arctic was probably ice-free during summer for most of the Holocene up until about 1,000 years ago. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene.
Stranne et al., 2013 demonstrated that the modern day Arctic sea ice extent is more comparable to that of the last Pleistocene glacial stage than to that of the Holocene Climatic Optimum (9,000-5,000 years before present).
Funny thing about Science News…
From March 1975 to May 2017, Science News has gone from “the Ice Age cometh” to “Arctic sea ice… accelerating to oblivion”… Ohhhhhh Noooooooo!!!
References
Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.
Desch, S. et al. Arctic ice management. Earth’s Future. Vol. 5, January 24, 2017, p. 107. doi: 10.1002/2016EF000410.
McKay, J.L., A. de Vernal, C. Hillaire-Marcel, C. Not, L. Polyak, and D. Darby. 2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea. Can. J. Earth Sci. 45: 1377–1397
Stranne C, Jakobsson M, Björk G, 2014 Arctic Ocean perennial sea ice breakdown during the Early Holocene Insolation Maximum. Quaternary Science Reviews 92: 123–132.
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Insulating warm water from the cold air helps to keep the air cooler??????
Looks like this scientist needs to study some more science.
Got that backwards in my haste to have the first post. Dang.
If trapping the Warm Water beneth the ice causes the ice to become thinner, and if thicher ice traps more warm water due to the insulative properties of thick ice, then wouldn’t thickening the ice in turn trap more warm water beneth the ice causing th eice to grow thinner? Not to mention that is Salt Water they would be pumping on top of fresh water ice. The last I checked, the salt would leach out of the ice as the water freezes causing a layer of salt to remain on the surface. Doesn’t salting ice cause it to melt faster?
This is the banal “albedo” argument, which takes one parameter out of context and then refuses to look at observations to see whether ignoring everything else in the Arctic climate system makes sense as a method of prediction.
If less ice meant more net heating leading to more ice melting we would be in a positive feedback situation.
The OGM ice minima of 2007 and 2012 would have been followed by even faster melting the next year and very rapidly accelerating ice loss. This is what happens under positive feedback.
So what does the data tell us? What happened after the OGM ice melting of 2007? Was 2008 even lower and worse again in 2009 ? NO THERE WAS A REBOUND.
What happened after the OMG-OMG-I-CANT-BREATHE ice minimum of 2012? Well Cryosat2 measured a massive 45% INCREASE in Arctic sea ice volume. That is about as solid a observational falsification of the supposedly dominant positive feedback provided by ice albedo.
While the albedo principal is correct , clearly it is over-ridden by stronger negative feedbacks and is in reality insignificant. The 2016 Sept min was the same as 2007 and notably more than 2012. There is not way that is consistent with the proposition that albedo is a major factor.
These Toy-town political activist pseudo-scientists, like Steven Desch, need to go back the observational data and check their science before making total fools of themselves and having the hubris to present themselves as an authority of what policy is required.
Gentlemen, climate is complicated. Stop trying to reduce it to a single variable equation.
In 2013 I noted the presence of a circa 5y cycle in arctic sea ice data. 2012-2007=5 2012+5=2017 . This year will be to next trough in the cycle. Though I doubt it will be as low as 2012.
2018 will see a notable increase in arctic sea ice cover.
He probably doesn’t watch the ice in his soda or iced tea subliming and melting, all at the same time. We should send him pictures or something. Somebody stop him, PLEASE!!!
isn’t watching Ice Sublimate just too sublime?
“Ice is a good insulator, says Steven Desch, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. That’s why moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, among others, may be able to maintain liquid oceans beneath their thick icy surfaces.”
Steven Desch is an idiot. These moons are heated by tidal flexing as they orbit giant gas planets. That’s how they maintain liquid oceans beneath their icy surfaces:
http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/high-tide-on-europa/
One would think a ‘planetary scientist’ at Arizona State University should know that.
That would sort of ruin the plans for increased shipping through the famed NW Passage wouldn’t it?
“The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped [in the ocean]….”
So, shouldn’t that cause the ocean to heat up catastrophically and boil us all? Isn’t the companion argument, “the ‘thicker’ (so to speak) the CO2, the more heat gets trapped [in the atmosphere]”?
How much paid 4 dumb paper?
Standard rate for an LPU(*) I guess, whatever that is in today’s market.
* Least Publishable Unit – not a joke, that is what academics call such crap.
Me not surprised. Me wonders if exists climate slush pile for buying nonsense writingzes.
http://s13.postimg.org/gwlrqgsw7/make_climate_change_go.png
?counting the US500Bn or not.
Maybe we should turn Ice-breakers into Ice-makers instead? Could cover 10pc of the arctic for less, I would think
margueritaville ahoy
Salt water requires colder temps to freeze, so bring billions of bottles of Ozarka and pour that on the ice, where it will freeze more easily. And you can buy 166 billion gallons, in 2.6 trillion pint bottles, at WalMart for $500B. And we could cure the unemployment problem by hiring the homeless to open and pour out all those bottles!
Don’t forget about your $130B refundable deposit 5¢ each bottle
Let me see if I get this. Ice currently forms from the bottom up, and melts from the top down. It’s melting faster than it’s freezing, so if we pump water from underneath (which has more latent energy than the ice on top), it will then magically freeze despite the insolation which is causing the top layer to melt? Hmm….
Yes the technique has been used to make thick ice islands as working platforms in the Beaufort Sea.
“The use of ice as a support material for offshore oil and gas exploration began in 1973 at the Hecla exploration well in the Canadian High Arctic. The floating drilling pad used artificial thickening of the natural ice sheet by flooding with seawater. Build-up rates where dictated by the time required to freeze thin layers of water, which were repeatedly added to the frozen core. Close to 40 floating ice pads were successfully used between 1973 and 1986 in the Canadian High Arctic using flooding and freezing techniques in water depths up to 500m (Masterson et al 1987).”
https://www.boem.gov/BOEM-Newsroom/Library/Publications/2005/c_core468.aspx
David Middleton:
Thankyou for that report. I have a question that results from it.
Why would anybody want to stop the Arctic waters from becoming ice free?
Richard
It must be a Russian conspiracy.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-s-military-buildup-arctic-has-u-s-watching-closely-n753041
David Middleton:
Thanks. I enjoyed that answer.
Richard
Pretty cool buildings – or are those actually disguised spaceships that are sucking up all of Trenberth’s(?) missing heat?
Okay but the USGS is throwing darts at the number for undiscovered oil resources in the Arctic. The best example of that was with shale oil in the Bakken and subsequent field re-development on land in the lower 48 states (under their noses). They are totally dependent on industry to tell them the real story with real data in successive revisions of awareness and reality. They use statistical resource models in between the updates. And like other modelers they are more interested in the getting the reports out than adequately informing the reader about the ranges of uncertainty in the estimates from one region to another or potential impacts of lurches in the rate of technical change and innovation.
Perhaps it is more of a disciplinary duty station, you know like, “shape up comrade of it’s off to the Arctic you go” (they used to use the Siberia threat)
richardscourtney asks: “Why would anybody want to stop the Arctic waters from becoming ice free?”
Knowing that ice, whether covering sea or land, hinders photosynthesis. And photosynthesis is necessary to extract Carbon from atmospheric Carbon Dioxide to form the base of the food chain for all Carbon Based Life Forms. I ask the analogous question:
Why would anyone want to hinder photosynthesis?
Until late September, that is.
I presume “Accelerating to oblivion” is the new alternative to “death spiral”.
Ice – It’s what’s for winter!
OOPS!
Typo in my name! :Din”, not “Bin”
Ice – It’s what’s for Bunga Gin!
(Sorry)
That is probably the worst argument for scamming tax money I’ve run into so far, and people in Congress are so dumb they will fall for it like hail dumping out of the sky.
What is this dork trying to do besides scam money out of us? Is he looking at trying to recreate the ‘Snowball Earth’ theory thingy and put it into action? Or is he just using a lot of buzzwords to convince the idiots in Congress to vote for another useless waste of money?
We could save the planet a lot faster if he and others like him could just, for a few weeks, stop talking. Think of the drop in CO2 levels that would happen, if they did that!
“You’re going to be mean to me !!!”
“Ice is a good insulator,”
Arctic ice loss allows the arcitic ocean to lose heat. Ice loss is a negative feedback.
That’s right and warming that occurs as the result of less ice happens in the dark during the winter while summer time temperatures have remained unchanged for decades. Less ice let’s more ocean heat out.
Given that I favor more warming I am therefore in favor of this hair brained idea … if someone else pays for it that is!
They can’t even keep their little buoy weather monitoring stations and web cams working up there and this guy thinks buoyed windmills will remain functional? And those things move all over the place. Think of what your windmills are going to do.
I’ve gotta an idea professor Desch. You and your team will be responsible for the pilot project of one windmill and responsible for keeping it running year around for one full year. I wanna see you guys in a blizzard up on top of that thing trying to unfreeze the works and deice the blades. And while your at it you will have to install a capture cage at the induction for pump and replace every little critter that is caught and killed in it, one for one, just as coal fired power stations using salt water do. We don’t want any negative environmental impact from your scheme now do we?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000410/full
These are “idea” people… Not engineers.
David Middleton:
You suggest
They are not “idea people”. They don’t have a clue as is shown by their own words in the link you provided. They say there
Well, that would be true if it were not the fact that the Arctic ocean emits more radiation than it absorbs.
Yes, open water does absorb more radiation than ice, but open water also radiates more energy than similar areas of ice-covered water. Over a year the total radiation from the surface is greater than the absorbtion into the surface because the region is dark for half the year and the angle of incidence is such that much solar radiation is reflected from the ocean whether or not it is ice covered.
Remove ice from the Arctic ocean and over a year the ocean increases its radiation of energy to space by more than it increases its absorbtion of energy from the Sun. This is a NEGATIVE feedback in the climate system: it is NOT “one of the most severe positive feedbacks in the climate system”.
Richard
I didn’t say they were *good* idea people… 😉
Step One: Get taxpayer funding (Profit!)
Step Two: Hire press release writer
Step Three: ?
GOTO Step One
Well the tax payer, pays for them to come up with these “ideas” and might as well be paying for fairytales. You can get such “ideas” for free in cheap science fiction novels and it wouldn’t cost the tax payer a cent. Anyone can come up with an impractical cockamamie “idea” the practical application is impossible or financially unsustainable. And pie in the sky BS is BS no matter if the lead author has a PhD before their name or not.
And BTW they’re claim : “While a complete set of design specifications for a wind-powered pumping device and entire AIM system are beyond the scope of this paper…”
is not consistent with their other claim:
“Altogether, we estimate a cost of manufacture and deployment per device on the order of $50,000.”
David Middleton:
Thankyou for your response to me that says
Brilliant! Thankyou.
Please keep these answers coming: I am really enjoying them.
Richard
In the arctic, it’s debatable as to whether water or ice reflect more sunlight. At low angles of incidence reflectivity for ice and water are very close.
The main point of debate is that the ocean is not perfectly smooth. Ripples/waves complicate the calculations and they vary in size and shape depending on wind conditions.
Of course when they get big enough you get white caps and the refractions caused by the bubbles complicate things even further.
Of course there are also those who believe that more open water increases evaporation which in turn increases clouds and as a result of clouds, more sunlight is reflected before it even gets to the water.
What a mess. It’s almost Cinco de Mayo, time for a beer.
Gunga,
“Before they spend much time and money on the buoy design, perhaps they should run an experiment to see just how long the water would continue to flow out of a nozzle in prolongs freezing conditions.”
My older brother Jim worked on the old Alaskan oil pipeline (in the early Anthropocene), and he told me he was once working right near the waters edge in truly cold weather, and he stumbled backward into the slushy water. He freaked out thinking he was gonna die and pretty much levitated back out . . apparently the outside of his clothing was cold enough to cause a thin layer of ice to form almost instantly on contact, such that it barely penetrated his clothes, and when he moved most of it shattered and fell off . .
Yeah, might want to run some tests ; )
(pretend you didn’t read this . . yet ; )
I’ll try, John, but I’m not a Climate Scientist so pretending doesn’t come easy.
Quite obviously, the fools also don’t realize the pumps would freeze up…unless you heat them!
Not clearly addressed this in their paper…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000410/full
I wonder if any of the people that put this together could even change a flat tire on their car.
I wonder if they would even notice that their tire is flat?
Before they spend much time and money on the buoy design, perhaps they should run an experiment to see just how long the water would continue to flow out of a nozzle in prolongs freezing conditions.
They could fill a swimming pool with salt water in, say, Minnesota or Canada. Put a pump in it spraying the water back into the pool and see just how long it takes for the ice build up to close off the nozzle.
PS Isn’t the actual ice in the Arctic relatively salt free? What’s going to happen to it after a boat load of salt water is pumped onto it?
And how are they going keep the pumps from icing up? The discharge will be in the sub freezing air and will ice up quickly. Oops.
Probably the same way that ski area operators keep theirs from icing up in, say, Vermont, during the winter. I’m not defending the deployment of such a solution, but as an engineering puzzle it’s likely very solvable with off-the-shelf technology.
“They can’t even keep their little buoy weather monitoring stations and web cams working up there and this guy thinks buoyed windmills will remain functional?”
What if a polar bear climbs up there and gets injured or killed!
Windmills? Environmental issues …
Penguin choppers!
OH NOS!!!!
Rather bear choppers … 😁
The windmills are rather tall, and as everyone knows White Bears Can’t Jump.
While sea ice is decreasing in the north the ice is increasing in the south. It seems to be a zero sum system…
Here is one from 1975,
Birds and Climatic Change
Kenneth Williamson
Published in 1975
Selected Excerpt:
HISTORICAL REVIEW
Between 1000 and 1300 average summer temperatures were about 1°C higher
than today, with the mean annual temperature higher by perhaps 4°C in a
largely ice-free Arctic. Eric the Red, a renowned world citizen of that time, has
been much maligned as the first progressive publicity man for giving Greenland
a false image in order to attract settlers; but in truth, the southwest of that vast
country was warmer and greener by far than at any time until the Fieldfares
Turdus pilaris arrived there in the mid-1930s. The sea-temperature of the Atlantic
was higher than it has been since, and there appears to have been none or very
little ice to hinder the Vikings’ communications between Iceland, Greenland,
Newfoundland and Labrador (Mowat 1965). Indeed Brooks (1926) considers that
the polar ice-cap may have disappeared entirely during the summer months, to
build anew each winter.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00063657509476459
=======================================================
It is on page 2.
Ice.
Fantastic stuff in a Gin and Tonic with a nice slice of a tropical lemon.
A drink designed to remind us how lucky we are that we have abundant food, and the alternative is a sterile, cold material, that melts, and dilutes the alcohol, whilst maintaining the liquid level in the glass.
Amazing stuff really, but as far as I can gather, in the wild, it’s only useful for one thing. Boring holes, by boring people, determined to convince us they know what they are looking at.
Ice.
Brand new paper,
Holocene variability in sea ice cover, primary production, and Pacific-Water inflow and climate change in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas (Arctic Ocean)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2929/abstract
Chart based on the data they used for the paper:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Holocene-Stein-17-768×496.jpg
=====================================================================
The chart suggest that for a brief time during the LIA,the Arctic ice cap was full all year, no summer melting to speak of.
no summer melting to speak of.
====================
first step on the way to full ice age. maybe coal and CO2 is what saved us?
from wikipedia:
“The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 18th century, and later spread to continental Europe, North America, and Japan, was based on the availability of coal to power steam engines.”
The 18th century was when the Little Ice Age ended. Proof positive that Britain and the steam engine saved the world from the next ice age. Wasn’t another WATT involved at that time as well?
From March 1975 to May 2017, Science News has gone from “the Ice Age cometh” to “Arctic sea ice… accelerating to oblivion”… Ohhhhhh Noooooooo!!!
Which is why after reading it for over sixty years, I stopped several years ago.
A better idea is to do like Los Angeles did to Los Angeles Reservoir in Sylmar, 25 miles northwest of downtown , and dump 4 in. diameter plastic balls on the Arctic. Since the Arctic is about 5.5 Million sq. mi., address half of it, or about 2.7 Million sq. mi. I figure it would cost about $340,662,857,142,857.1 to cover half the Arctic with plastic balls. Spending hundreds of times the World’s GDP on the project may be an issue. See: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/08/12/los-angeles-dumps-96-million-shade-balls-in-lake-to-protect-water-in-drought/
Ice-making boys would solve a lot of employment problems, too.
Is that like soda jerks?
+10 1/2
The Swedish meteorogical office SMHI has don a reconsruction of the ice cover in the Baltic sea, since 1660.
Abstract
“The annual maximum ice cover Cmax and ice extent Amax in the Baltic Sea are important indicators of regional winter climate in northern Europe. Apart from modern-day operational ice charts, proxy data such as coastal observations, mean winter air temperature and ice break-up dates have been used to reconstruct Cmax and Amax back to 1660.
Consolidated time series were constructed by giving the proxy time series different weights. These weights were calculated as inversely proportional to the mean square errors of the time series during the calibration period 1961–1990.
The consolidated time series indicate large interannual variability as well as interdecadal variability. In spite of the recent mild winters in the Baltic Sea region, the large interannual variabilities of Cmax Amax make the calculated trends over moving 30-year windows mostly insignificant in a statistical sense.”
Nothing here, move on, please.
For 500G$ we could buy every Eskimo a double wide and a really nice pick-up.
You know, they used to harvest ice from Walden Pond in Concord, MA and ship it all over the world. Maybe we should start up the ice harvesting business infrastructure again and ship it all up to Santa. We owe him that much.
Guess you never heard of this show:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2168326/
What, pray tell, is the great benefit of having Arctic ice caps anyway? The seals can just haul out on land, and so forth. What was the sea ice level during the Medieval Warm, and what dread effects did that have?
Yet more proof that these people are certifiably insane !!
50,000 for manufacture shipping and installion of a bouy to support a windmill and survive weather and crushing ice- BS !!! Oh, and what CO2 hasn’t accomplished, this ignorant scheme could if it had the miracle of working,:kill off seals, polar bears,… Now I think his work on other planet’s is totally suspect. Note: no engineers were disturbed during the making of this fantasy.