Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Seems obvious right? The ice is melting, so build a series of big mobile freezer boats to produce new blocks of ice.
Iceberg-making submarine aims to tackle global warming by re-freezing the Arctic
Alyn Griffiths
A team of designers led by Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha proposes re-freezing sea water in the Arctic to create miniature modular icebergs using a submarine-like vessel, in a bid to combat climate change.
The Indonesian designer worked on the prototype with collaborators Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa for an international competition organised by the Association of Siamese Architects.…
“The main goal of this idea is to restore the polar ecosystem, which has a direct effect on the balance of the global climate,” said the designer, adding that in this scenario “it is better to prevent than cure“.
…
The submarine-like vessel would submerge to collect sea water in a central hexagonal tank. Turbines would then be used to blast the tank with cold air and accelerate the freezing process.
During this process, the vessel would return to the surface of the sea and the tank would be covered to protect it from sunlight. A system of reverse osmosis would be used to filter some of the salt from the water in order to speed up the process.
Once the water is frozen, the vessel would submerge again, leaving behind an “ice baby” with a volume of 2,027 cubic-metres. These miniature icebergs would then cluster together in a honeycomb pattern to form a larger ice floe.
…
Read more: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/27/refreezing-the-arctic-geoengineering-design-climate-change/
The concept video;
There is a slight flaw with this idea.
Refrigeration, reverse osmosis, pumping heat, all takes a lot of work. Both the latent heat of fusion extracted from the water to turn it into ice and the waste heat from the freezing process will have to be dumped somewhere.
If they dump the waste heat into the Arctic ocean, or the air, it will probably melt the ice their submarine just finished freezing.
Update (EW): tweaked the wording of the last few paragraphs.
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I have just spent 279 nanoseconds analysing the economics of this scheme.
It is with great pleasure that I announce that it is an absolute crock of sh*t.
Ice 9 was invented back in the 60s. The problem back then was it was a runaway chain reaction. But it could be improved over what Kurt Vonnegut conceived.
Shockingly stupid.
So long as they never come up with something that might actually work then they can do no real harm. We should applaud this scheme.
Wrong! They can do the real harm of wasting gobs of taxpayer money.
Now, if some billionaire wants to finance this scheme with his/her own fund, then great! The world would benefit from both a little more CO2 and a little more warming.
SR
There might be the makings of a joke here. Selling refrigerators to inhabitants of the Arctic, or something like that.
Geoengineering
One popular geoengineering strategy proposed for countering imaginary global warming/climate change is through reducing net solar heating by increasing the earth’s albedo.
This increase is accomplished by various physical methods, e.g. injecting reflective aerosols into the atmosphere, spraying water vapor into the air to enhance marine cloud brightening, spreading shiny glass spheres around the poles with the goal of more reflection thereby reducing the net amount of solar energy absorbed by the atmosphere and surface and cooling the earth.
More albedo and the earth cools.
Less albedo and the earth warms.
No atmosphere means no water vapor or clouds, ice, snow, vegetation, oceans and near zero albedo and much like the moon the earth bakes in that 394 K, 121 C, 250 F solar wind.
These geoengineering plans rely on the atmosphere cooling the earth thereby exposing the error of greenhouse theory which says the atmosphere warms the earth and with no atmosphere the earth becomes a -430 F frozen ball of ice.
Zero greenhouse effect, Zero CO2 global warming and Zero man caused climate change.
Arctic sea ice extent at lowest for date again today… looks like we might be needing these!
As usual Griff, you ignore the part where the CURRENT sea ice extent is well above average for the Interglacial period.
You have been shown a lot of published papers attesting this, yet you go on with your lies and distortions over and over, you are not here for the reality but promote a delusion for the purpose of political propaganda.
And what are the real world consequences of that, Griff? Maybe you could go to the Arctic and interview the polar bears. There area a record number of them apparently.
LOL!
This is right up there with the old proposal that would remove air pollution from the Los Angeles basin by creating tunnels through the San Gabriel mountains, then employ giant fans to suck the polluted air from the basin and blow it to the desert.
Shouldn’t it be “The Association of Conjoined Architects?”
The thermodynamics of this proposal makes it totally foolish. The energy demand for the heat of fusion for such as ice floe combined with the available efficiency of any refrigeration method far outweigh any possible benefit.
I do like the idea of desalination in the proposal, in that it is effectively making MYI and it is reasonably configured to make a block more than 3 meters thick. These features would at least make a floe that is likely more resistant to melting than thin FYI.
In principle, I think geoengineering grossly overestimates mans influence on the environment. Every proposal I have seen uses gross amounts of energy for negligible potential benefit.
Nevertheless, in the interest of saving the world, I propose a few revisions to this scheme that will improve the energy useage.
Ignore the plan to refrigerate the ice and control its size and shape. Use a nuc-sub to desalinate the sea water and pump it onto the ice surface during the midst of the winter when radiation to the night sky will do the freezing. (Think giant sprinkler). Stay at one spot until your AMYI (Anthropogenic Multi-Year Ice) segment is 6 – 10 meters or so thick [optimization calculation needed here], therefore resistant to annual meltout, and then move to a new spot.
A gang of robotic AMYI subs could be coordinated to form ice dams or corrals to influence the movement of larger FYI fields. Some carbon fiber, or carbon nanotube, ropes can be use to tie the segments together, improving the tensile strength of the AMYI. Annual refurbishment of the field can create persistent islands for research. Solar panels can be used to shade the ice during the summer and power the motors to position the field in the most advantageous locations.
Then you can control shipping and TAKE OVER THE WORLD…..Ahem.
Crashex
Didn’t I see this plan in an episode of Pinky and The Brain?
Oh yeah. A reference to my hero. Thanks so much.
Why put the foam polystyrene sheets in the arctic where they reflect little heat from a low sun? Much more effective to put them in the pacific ocean at the equator if you want to cool the planet.
Dear Mr. Kotahatuhaha, if you manage to find someone willing to finance these vessels, please let me know as I have many, many bridges for sale.
In the immortal words of Johann Sebastian Bach, what the fugue? What the hell do we “need” that ice for? Are we seriously at the point of discussing *preventing* the end of the last Ice Age?
If you really want more ice in the Arctic Ocean it would be vastly simpler to divert the Mississippi into the Hudson Bay or Mackenzie River. That would freshen the Arctic Ocean nicely and freeze it up solidly.
Elsewhere accused me of being stuck with 70’s science, out of date & touch.
Arrhenius proposed the RGHE in 1896. Spencer Weart noted that Savante’s contemporaries considered him full of beans back then. In 1909 R. W. Wood debunked RGHE through experimentation. Classical science back when it had some semblance of integrity.
RGHE is over 100 years old. How current is that?
Now for something completely contemporaneous: UCLA Diviner mission.
Point the First
They consider 71.4 F to be the earth’s “average” temperature, about 22 C. That doesn’t mesh w/ IPCC’s & WMO’s 15 C or Trenberth/NOAA’s 16 C.
Point the Twoth
The moon is blazing hot on the lit side and bitter cold on the dark because it has not an insulating atmosphere like the earth.
Hmmmm.
The extremely obvious corollary is that without the atmosphere the earth would be much like the moon (Nikolov & Kramm) blistering hot on the lit side and bitter cold on the dark.
The insulating properties is how come the surface is warmer than the ToA just like a house.
The 30% reflective albedo created and sustained by the atmosphere cools the earth compared to no atmosphere.
And RGHE takes it right in the shorts!
https://www.diviner.ucla.edu/science
There are three key environmental factors that set the Moon apart from Earth: its lower gravity,
its virtual lack of an atmosphere, and the extreme temperature fluctuations experienced on its surface.
With the exception of Mercury, the Moon has the most extreme surface thermal environment of any planetary body in the solar system. At the lunar equator, mean surface temperatures reach almost 400K (260.6 ºF) at noon and then drop to below 100K (-279.4 ºF) during the night. For comparison, the mean surface temperature on Earth is a temperate 295K (71.6 ºF).
The Earth and Moon each receive the same flux of solar radiation; the important difference is that the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to insulate its surface. In addition to this the lunar day/night cycle lasts ~1 month (compared to 24 hours on Earth). Both of these factors are key in producing the extreme range of temperatures experienced on the Moon.
“Nick Schroeder July 28, 2019 at 4:01 pm
Elsewhere accused me of being stuck with 70’s science, out of date & touch.
Arrhenius proposed the RGHE in 1896.”
I have always been told, usually by alarmists, that he proved the RGHE via experimentation. I have never been able to find out what that experiment involved and how he setup a lab to do it. So, he just proposed that there might be a RGHE?
A submarine that makes giant hexagonal icebergs.
is there any problem that Minecraft can’t solve?
Oh the plus side, having all these giant hexagon shaped ice blocks pushed together will allow us to play some giant board games.
On the down side this sort of casual unicorn dream rubbish is why architects at BEST annoy the drokk out of engineering professionals. Remember, hard science is spelt STEM, not STEAM.
Am I missing something?
Can so many work on a project without understanding that their concept violates the law of thermodynamics?
My first thought was that if this works, I can keep my kitchen cool by leaving the refrigerator door open.
Of course you can cool your kitchen by leaving the refrigerator door open. Only if you first need to seal it into a hole cut in an outside wall.
We could cool permafrost using a pipe with a working fluid and a partial vacuum in it, like the thermosiphons along the Trans Alaska Pipeline. I think we could build a lot of those for the price of one nuclear submarine ice cube maker.
And yet no-one has addressed the cost of this scheme. But if we can just get the Eskimos to buy…..
[Bangs head against wall.] Seriously, anyone who completed high school science ought to know how insanely stupid this is. I mean, sinking and raising the whole boat just to get the water in and the ice out is dumber than a dead frog, but that’s just the poison ivy garnish on the BS sandwich,
Don’t designers have to understand something about air conditioning? How does a whole *team* of them miss a blunder of this magnitude? Or do they not care as long as they get paid?
How does someone who “contributes to some of the world’s leading architecture and design publications” miss a blunder of this magnitude? An art school graduate writing laudatory “journalism” about an idea that a bright 8 year old should have and a dumb 18 year old see through? Imagine my shock!
All these geoengineering people should be locked up in prisons for the MENTALLY INSANE as a danger to the human race.