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…
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.
I have a truly radical idea – let it get “cured” the same way that the Great California Drought got cured.
And my plan is cheaper, too!!!
Windmills and pumps operating at -90C. Yep, can’t see anything wrong with that plan.
[Usually no colder than -35 to -40C up around 80 north latitude. It is the high elevations on top of the Antarctic ice cap that can get that cold. Sometimes. .mod]
Ah my mistake. My brain saw ‘Antarctica’, not Arctic, and wikipedia told me it can get as cold as -90C there, although I’m sure that’s a rare extreme also.
Please be advised that building and installing $500 bilion worth of windmills would be very profitable for certain companies, and thus would be a really really good thing for America and the world. How do we send more funding to this guy?
sincerely,
Warren Buffet, Vestas, Siemens and General Electric
Oohh, oohh, how do I get in on that?
Elon
New York Stock exchange is open 5 days a week.
And, of course, they’ll need backup solar provided by Solyndra.
Instead of covering the Arctic with tax credits in the form of windmills built by lobbyists, it might be easier to get educated on natural cycles of ocean heat content.
I would think that this attempt to change a large geographic area’s albedo would be more easilly done by covering rooftops with mirrored sheets of aluminum alloy and reflecting the rays back to space in a far more efficient manner than ice could ever do, Those alloy sheets would also have the energy saving benefit of requiring far less energy to run the A/C in the summer. We don’t know what the benefit of those ice making windmills will be – perhaps none at all if not really needed, whereas the benefits of reflective roofs would be there , irregardless.
I’ve facetiously claimed that if we painted all roofs and all cars in our big cities white, we could eliminate global warming.
More sunlight reflected equals cooler air temperatures.
Less sunlight absorbed by buildings and cars means less energy being discharged from AC units equals cooler air temperatures.
These cooler air temperatures mean AC’s don’t have to work as hard, equaling cooler air temperatures.
And since most of the ground based thermometers are located in and around cities …
In winter I love getting a load of warmth from the sun on my roof. Summer not so much.
So have a black cover for winter, and a reflecting one for summer. And employees to change it over, of course 🙂
“Since we know that the current Arctic sea ice extent is much larger than that of most of the Holocene”
Well in the early holocene there was very little ice at all – but! there were very special conditions then, due to the stage of the Milankovitch cycle the earth was then in – the orbital orientation was such that there was much, much more insolation falling onto the arctic during the arctic summer.
Once we’d moved out of that part of the cycle, the ‘ground’ conditions were very different -so there is no comparison between now or even the last 2,000 years and the earlier part of the holocene.
If you look at ‘recent’ sea ice history, certainly we are at the lowest extent since 1850 (according to the recent collation of all available records since that date – and I do mean all)
We are far lower than the low in the last ‘cycle’ around 1943
And the trend is still lower… this winter saw record low extents thru the winter and thin, broken ice is now spread out, being exported and set to go in yet another record melt season
Actually we aren’t, but thanks for playing.
Griff is worried about this loss because he misplaced his recipe for ice cubes.
Perhaps you’d like to set out your reasons for believing the arctic sea ice won’t challenge 2007/2016 or even 2012?
Hey Paul – should I be grilling them or frying them? Frying is unhealthy, right?
Griff,
you post this crap again,as you were answered at another blog on this. You are indeed a dishonest person and stupid too, because as YOU admit that it was, I quote: “Well in the early holocene there was very little ice at all…” ,yet you seem to understand that such conditions didn’t cause any visible ecological or biological disaster.
Meanwhile here is that chart AGAIN you ignored yesterday,where it shows that currently, it is well above the average for the entire interglacial.:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Holocene-Stein-17-768×496.jpg
I’m posting the science Tommy…
For example this:
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/bradley2003x.pdf
“On the very longest, multi-millennial time-scales, the main factors affecting Holocene climate change are related to orbital forcing (changes in obliquity, precession and eccentricity). These changes involved virtually no change in overall global insolation receipts (over the course of each year) but significant re-distribution of energy, both seasonally and latitudinally.”
“In the Early Holocene, precessional changes led to perihelion at the time of the northern hemisphere summer solstice (today it is closer to the winter solstice). This resulted in higher summer insolation in the Early Holocene at all latitudes of the northern hemisphere (ranging from ∼40°W/m2 higher than today at 60°N to 25°W/m2 higher at the Equator). Thus, July insolation (radiation at the top, or outside, the atmosphere) has slowly decreased over the last 12,000 years”
Insolation in the arctic summer was massively greater than now, thus melting the ice.
We don’t have the same orbital forcing now -yet we do have declining ice levels.
You can’t compare then and now without acknowledging there was a particular influence then we don’t have now
Holocene Optimum has been shown to be world wide.. shown to YOU many times..
You just ignore the facts.
Your Milankovitch cycle crap is meaningless.
Arctic sea ice extent has been LOWER than current for around 95% of the Holocene.
DON’T PANIC, griff, your pee-brain with have a tanty !!
In the NH, the waters continue to warm into September which is when they are the warmest even though the maximum energy from the Sun was received way back in June at the summer solstice. But even though there is less energy received each day forward from then on, the net accumulation into the NH is still positive until September so the waters keep warming till then. So we are in the August of the interglacial. Earth will continue to warm, albeit less and less as we move forward until such time that the Milankovitch cycles create conditions to produce a net loss of energy received. So just as the waters warm into September, one should expect the conditions on Earth to continue warming until the very end of the interglacial.
Or more simply, it is always gets warmer until it starts to get cooler.
If you look at ‘recent’ sea ice history, certainly we are at the lowest extent since 1850 (according to the recent collation of all available records since that date – and I do mean all)
____
In 1850, earth was starting to emerge from the Little Ice Age. How could sea ice be low at the end of this period of extremely low temperatures? I suspect a cut and paste job from some publication that specializes in fools and the gullible.
When they splice high resolution instrumental data onto low resolution proxy data, they always get hockey sticks.
The good news is that windmills never freeze. Oh wait…
https://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2011/02/15/new-brunswick-wind-turbines-frozen-solid/
Now that.is very funny…. cheered me up no end.
I know, I know. The buoys can be designed to capsize every couple of days and that would cause the ice on the blades to melt.
The thicker the ice, the more heat gets trapped
===========
so, strange as it might seem, the solution to making more ice is to have less ice. no windmills required, as the ice melts it becomes easier to make ice, keeping the whole thing in balance. negative feedback in action.
In other words, you are for allowing nature to follow its natural course.
The problem is, (from the warmist perspective), loss of sea ice is a SYMPTOM of a warming world. It doesnt cause warming, in fact its very presense tends to inhibit the loss of heat. So taking an action to treat this symptom can only make matters worse (by trapping even more heat).
Ironically, a rational true believer (if there is such a person) would advocate the artificial destruction of sea ice. To let the extra heat out you see.
This whole discussion is crazy talk nonetheless.
David Middleton.
None of my criticisms were aimed at you. It’s just that this arctic windmill pumping idea ranks right up there with solar panel roads in my book. And the problem is that some people believe this kind of thing is practical because some guy with a PhD says so.
There is another problem I see with these kinds of articles. Though they provide plenty of material for you guys here at WUWT and on some other blogs and we can laugh at them as so many knowledgeable posters and authors here tear them apart I believe they cause a kind of cumulative damage.
Being constantly bombarded by this kind of stuff makes it easy to for people to become rather jaundiced skeptics and so when the occasional feasible idea that may actually be of some benefit for the people or their environment in general comes along a tendency can develop to be overly skeptical.
During WW II the great engineer Barnes Wallis ran up against this very kind of thing in the halls of British war bureaucracy trying to get his dam buster project and later his huge bombs approved for development and production. The officers in the bureaucracy had been so inundated with silly ideas for weapons and suggestions that they had become overly skeptical.
It can lead to a variation of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
http://s22.postimg.org/x8stykczl/chicken_little_boy_cried_wolf.png
RAH, TV producers, novelists, engineers… get flooded with ‘wonderful’ ideas from viewers, readers and interested laity. It tends not to prove an inspiring resource for ideas. Engineers have a kindly affection for their professors of science who taught them and don’t tend to poke fun when they take an excursion into engineering, which they are fascinated with. The oxymoron ‘rocket scientist’ (er… that would be ‘engineer’), born at the start of the space programs, arose from this fascination with the work of engineers. Everyone wanted a piece of this wonderful discipline. Early dish or laundry soap ads of the period, even said their soap had been engineered to do it’s wonders on your dishes and clothes (this actually is a bit more true than the fabled rocket science).
In Canada’s Dept of Nat Resources many years ago, it was decided that government scientists should have more of an economic basis for their research. A committee was duly constituted. The geological survey flooded the mineral resources/mining agencies with loads of naive stuff (eg: a geologist whose specialty was the petrology and structure of granite pointed out that granite had abundant potash that might be exploited. That the K was in insoluble silicates like feldspar and mica didn’t phase him). Not too long afterwards, the committee was dissolved because of the flood of nonsense that had to be replied to.
I’m a geologist and engineer and had argued against such a committee. Note, however, that engineer Wallis, a practical man by training, did succeed in selling his idea to the war department. This icing up the Arctic would probably kill off seals by filling in their holes and kill off polar bears, etc. all this to prevent a problem that hasn’t even been established. The Arctic variability goes well beyond anything we are seeing today and models for CAGW theory are already running 300% to warm. Do nothing (please!!). A plea from an engineer and scientist.
Gary Pearse
If Sir Wallace had not been so stubborn in pounding on doors and keeping at them none of it would have ever happened. He met that resistance despite the fact that he was the lead engineer that had developed the geodetic (geodesic) air frame for the Wellington bomber that was still in front line service with bomber command when he was working on getting the dams project off the ground. It got so silly that after his idea was first officially rejected he wrote an open paper on how the dams bomb would work. He got a visit from British counter intelligence asking why he was publishing such highly classified stuff so Wallace told them he had been told officially that it was rejected as unworkable and asked how could it be classified or sensitive under those circumstances?
The problem is, (from the warmist perspective), loss of sea ice is a SYMPTOM of a warming world. It doesnt cause warming, in fact its very presense tends to inhibit the loss of heat. So taking an action to treat this symptom can only make matters worse (by trapping even more heat).
Ironically, a rational true believer (if there is such a person) would advocate the artificial destruction of sea ice. To let the extra heat out you see.
This whole discussion is crazy talk nonetheless.
I used to daydream about a “device” which could be used to quickly call the warmist’s bluff. This magical device would automatically regulate the entire planet’s atmospheric CO2 concentration to 250 ppm, just like the warmists claim they want. Once activated, the device cannot be altered.
I always assumed that when confronted with a choice of giving them what they wanted, they would quickly come to their senses and admit to their foolishness. Today, however, I see a different breed, the true believers, and realize they would sacrifice us all in the name of global warming, without batting an eye.
These are scary people.
Is it just me, or are there a large amout of contradictions in this piece?
Solving non existing problems by illusory means;
bad influence of ‘peer review’ !
Hey, I have an idea; how about millions of solar-powered refrigerators set on buoys, and just leave the doors on them open? Problem solved!
Obviously ‘peer review’ is the minor profeteer of climate wars.
To make a difference, they should cover the entire Arctic Ocean, with a price tag of $5 trillion. Still a pittance compared to projected costs of climate change mitigation.
But wait. Pumping large amount of salt water on the upper surface of ice floes is the best way to melt them completely.
Unfortunately there is a physical phenomenon called brine exclusion. It means when salt water freezes, the remaining fluid is enriched in salt, because ice crystals do not like it. If it happens on top, that very salty liquid is forced to trickle down to the ocean through the ice floe, making a gazillion of channels along the way and leaving it really rotten, subject to melting during the next summer.
Never mind.
Sea ice is mainly fresh water if it is thick enough, so heck of a way to make fresh water out of salt water using the cold of winter. Would work anywhere it is cold enough to freeze salt water. I read somewhere that some cities freeze water in winter, and use that melting ice water for summer air conditioning in downtown office towers.
An interesting ‘thought’ article about possibly providing a solution…if there was a problem with diminishing arctic ice levels. But just think of all the bats that would be killed with 1 million of these bird choppers.
Maybe the Climate Seance mediums have realized one of their prophesies needs a little help from Man to come true?
It didn’t seem to have the effect you claim when they actually did it multiple times in the Arctic.
They did no experiment whatsoever, they only propose to do so. It’s modeling all the way down as usual.
Arctic ice management
“Questions about the feasibility of the device and its local effects are probably best solved by building a prototype and experimenting with it in the field.”
Berényi Péter May 4, 2017 at 6:28 am
They did no experiment whatsoever, they only propose to do so. It’s modeling all the way down as usual.
Wrong, it’s been done multiple times before:
“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).”
I am somewhat confused. I have always thought sea ice freezes from above and melts from below. (If I am wrong about this I hope someone will take a few minutes and teach me. I don’t want to remain stupid.)
Cold winter air chills first sea water and as ice forms chills the ice so that ice in contact with sea water causes the sea water to freeze adding to the thickness of the ice. Or to put it another way — during winter when sea ice is forming — sea ice is always colder than the sea water.
During summer the sea ice gains temperature from the air and is no longer able to freeze the sea water around it. Instead the sea water begins to melt the ice from below. The sea ice melts from the bottom up.
Have i misunderstood how sea ice forms and dissolves? Its what i have always thought.
If what i have said is true it seems pumping up water from just below the ice to let it freeze on the ice surface only causes lower warmer water to replace what is removed — probably, at a certain ice thickness, causing the ice to begin to melt from below. (Not to mention that this water poured on top of the ice would lower ice temperature slowing the chilling process of the sea water below.) Perhaps, at the beginning, this method might cause ice to thicken quicker but I can’t see how it would increase total thickness past a certain maximum.
So if all sea water below the ice maintained the same low temperature all the time we would have a perfect relationship between air temperature and sea ice thickness.
What seems to screw this up are ocean currents. Warm water from the south flows to the north and it seems the majority of it can go one way or another. If it heads into the arctic you are going to get thinner sea ice, that warmer water being harder to freeze. (And quicker melting of sea ice in the summer.) Now that is a very old idea.
So there is a relationship between ice thickness and air and water temperatures. (I suspect the arctic air and arctic water temperatures vary independently of each other.) Cold air and cold water produce the most ice. Warmer air and warmer water produce the least ice.
Anyway that is what i have always believed.
Eugene WR Gallun
On deeper inspection most problems are more complicated than simple models suggest. The growth of ice is a classic problem (Stefan problem) in heat transfer–the result is an ice thickness that grows with square-root of time. However, the Stefan problem does not account for the issue of a freezing temperature that changes according to the mechanism which Berényi Péter lays out in his post above. And the melting of ice is far more complex than just drawing heat from a warmer body into the ice. Pools of water appear on the ice surface and descend through fissures and fractures. The Stefan problem does not account for the resulting convective heat transfer during melting.
That most problems are more complex than simple models suggest doesn’t often bother scientists who are after a general understanding of a problem. Yet when the issue becomes an engineering problem of trying to make some scheme work in a practical sense, then the complications do become important. This silly scheme is an engineering problem–one looking to solve a problem that may not be a problem at all.
One of the key problems with this scheme is that freezing salt water ‘squeezes’ the salt out the bottom of the new ice that is created on top of the fresh water ice that is already frozen. Then that concentrated salt brine sandwiched between the two ice layers would rapidly melt the original fresh water ice below it. Might make this project self defeating. More thought is required on this project before implementation.
But it is a interesting thought experiment, and as David M. says, we shouldn’t be too fast to just outright ridicule everything we think is stupid or funny. For every 100 questionable thought experiments, there will be 1 that is a hit and solves problems or makes money. Keep ’em coming….next?
It’s not possible to be “too fast to just outright ridicule everything we think is stupid or funny.” I wish I could be even faster at ridiculing things that I think are stupid and/or funny.
When it comes to these climate geoengineering schemes, I don’t think there are any hits that will solve any problems. The problem is that they all involve cooling the Earth. I have no doubt that most of these schemes would cool the Earth… I just don’t think the cooling can be controlled once initiated.
I see I mistakenly stated this was your comment but was actually RAH May 3, 2017 at 8:46 am. My mistake.
I think your reply point below his was not ‘to cry wolf’ at every lame idea, since some ideas may have merit, or can be built upon to be successful. For the record, I am also against any schemes to make the planet any colder. We already in an ice age the last 1.5 years, and only in a temporary interglacial that will undoubtably end fairly soon in the scheme of things.
I would also suggest the following paper, which I think is excellent:
The dynamic Arctic , Martin Jakobssona, , , Ólafur Ingólfssonb, c, Antony J. Longd, Robert F. Spielhagene. Here is one excerpt:
I think it would be wise to have dual purpose buoys, just in case. So I suggest we make the buoys so that they could both make ice and melt ice as well.
Also should add — if Europa and Enceladus have liquid below their ice then their cores must be generating heat. How this core heat is generated might not be the same way Earth’s core heat is generated.
Eugene WR Gallun
You want me to do what?
Pump near freezing water on a below freezing windy day in the open ocean near ice flows so you can pump water with a metal windmill onto the ice.
The first set of conditions produces frazzle ice particles in the water which will glob onto to the metal parts of the pump and clog it up with ice.
Retired Kit P — You are a brutal man. — Eugene WR Gallun
Retired Kit P
Quite obviously you need an auxillary heating system to heat the water enough so that does not happen. That can be supplied by solar panels. Then everything is hunky dory.
Eugene WR Gallun
Solar panels, in the Arctic winter? Who are you really, Bill Nye?
One of these would fix that problem:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/zoom/htip_back_to_future_mr_fusion_replica.jpg
Let me get this straight. One group of scientist whacko’s says that arctic is losing sea ice and that is bad. They point to the loss of multi-year sea ice and scream bloody murder. Another group of scientist whacko’s says that sea ice doesn’t let heat from the water escape to the atmosphere. They say that too thick of sea ice(multi-year) is bad because it slows down the formation of sea ice.
And they wonder why sceptics don’t believe them.
” McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high”. As Dr McKay points out- We’re possibly starting the real fall into the next glaciation. The timing is right. Almost all the ice core data points to a long, slow, sporadic fall from the maximum temperature down to the gradual extension of the ice cover over ~100,000 years.
Does pumping salty water on top of the ice have any effect on the ice?
[Other than locally melting the sea ice under the salt water? .mod]
OBLIVION in unix = /dev/tty/null
Where’s
/dev = device, devices
/tty = connected with, connection
/null = empty, useless
So OBLIVION in unix is needed when there’s superfluous data processing output:
call it ‘cloud 9’
I have a counter proposal. Give me just 1/500th of the 500 billion and I will fix the problem in just 30 years. What a deal, eh? /sarc just in case
“Accelerating to oblivion”?
(Rocky Horror Picture Show)
Riff Raff: “Say goodbye to all of this; and hello to oblivion.”