The plan is to actively solicit Congressional support from both houses for creating a new Manhattan Project which will focus national funding, resources, and potential solutions directly on the restoration of the northern polar cap.
A successful sponsoring bill will require 150-250 sponsors (Congressional Members who sign on), so the undertaking is not a mild exercise. It may require reintroduction in a number of successive Congresses to reach passage. One can expect a 1-5 year window prior to successful passage, depending on the level of citizenry and corporate ramp up that pushes for the legislation.
There is a high probability that the Bush Administration would support such legislation once the merits were addressed.
If the United States of America can fund a war campaign of the financial magnitude that we're now committed to, then we have the capacity and means to set up a Northern Polar Cap Manhattan Project (NPCMP) devoted to avoiding a global disaster as will be created once the northern polar cap vanishes.
It's my judgment that the project should undertake a multitude of critical actions, one of which would be to establish a multiple location hydro mechanical watering operation, the responsibility of which would be to repair ice sheet damage, generate new water flow to build additional ice sheets, and undertake additional actions which would help slow the meltdown of the ice cap. The goal is to repair the northern polar cap while it still exists, as the absence of a working platform compounds the problem. Similarly, such NPCMP operations need to be undertaken in Greenland, and other deep cold locations.
There will plenty of detractors, but that is to be expected. The people who will dismiss this idea are not the leaders who got us to the Moon, built the largest dams and bridges in the world, or dug the Panama Canal.
This project takes real leadership. The call to go forward with the Congress is the first major political step. Thereafter, seasoned professional from a number of fields (mechanical engineering, hydrology, climatology, Corps of Engineers, et al) will take the helm at the direction of the Congress and whatever Administration is serving at the time the Northern Polar Cap Manhattan Project (NPCMP) is authorized as a federally funded project.
The amount of energy you would need to throw around to do this would easily be several orders of magnitude (hundreds or thousands of times) or more greater than mankind's total energy production capabilities.
It's a question of scale. A quick look at the amount of energy sloshing around in natural systems compared with the amount of energy humans can command will tell you this.
Engaging in this type of activity is about as effective as trying to stop a freight train with a pea-shooter.
Or as Ben Elton once put it, a bit like pissing into a hurricane.
Well, it's a better answer than your first effort, but I respectfully don't necessarily agree with you.
Sure, the scale is large. There are many ways, though, to increase the rate of ice growth at the northern polar cap. Collectively, it is possible that the situation could be improved substantially over doing nothing.
What you appear to be overlooking is the theory behind refrigeration and the potential for making ready use of Earth's natural power to assist in growing the ice sheets. The polar cap is still a refrigerator. It just needs a little help with materials to freeze. Scaler electromagnetics could be employed along with a number of other approaches. Same for wind applications plus clouding seeding as well as hydro mechanical means.
There is no question that we could use large scale pumping systems, whether powered by nature or nuclear power, to repair some of the ice sheet breaks. Anyone familiar with large scale hydrology projects would not readily dismiss the idea.
Another idea that may have merit is a global pipeline fund to flood the deserts of the world with seawater.
There are many areas of the world that are inland deserts well below sea level, for instance the Caspian Basin, the areas surrounding the Dead Sea, areas of the Australian desert and many others. Pipelines and canals could be built from the ocean, funded by a every nation on earth as everyone would benefit from the lowering of sea levels. The pipelines could be siphon driven with nuclear powered pumping stations perhaps.
The benefits would be large- as well as mitigating the effects of rising sea level (enough to counteract melting ice) you would also create inland marine ecosystems, increase evaporation and precipitation and possibly create new forested areas in the desert, which would remove large amounts of carbon from the air over time.
It would be a huge engineering project over hundreds of years, but it looks like similar things are already happening: The news story below talks about a pipeline being planned to refill the Dead Sea.
You can draw some power until the water levels equalize. I don't think the Baku, Azerbaijani folks are going to be real happy to hear about this plan though. They're kinda' in a mess already.
I am not overlooking refrigeration theory - the North Polar cap is not a refrigerator, and there is no "natural power" running it. The north pole is cold because it doesn't absorb as much heat from the sun as the rest of the planet - partly because of the low (average) angle of the sunlight (less power input per unit of surface area) and partly because it is white (reflects a larger fraction of the incident light back out to space). Heat comes in from the sun and heat is lost though radiation to space - the surface temperature is a (complex) balance between these two things.
Suppose you want to use refrigeration to supplement the ice generation rate at the north polar cap. The first thing we need to estimate is how much extra ice we want. Lets take a number which (I'm guessing) is smaller than the number that you would propose, say, 1% extra ice cover. Taking data from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_cap) as accurate, we have about 10 million km^2 of ice. If we take a conservative assumption of ice thickness 1m thick (this will result in an underestimate of the energy requirement), the volume of ice we need to make is 1% x 10 million km^2 x 1m. There are a million square meters in a square kilometer, so the volume we're talking about is 0.01 x 10 million million square meters x 1 meter = 100 billion cubic meters of ice. Given the density of ice at about 1 tonne per cubic meter, that's about 100 billion tonnes of ice, more or less. How much energy will this take? The latent heat of fusion of water is about 330kJ / kg, meaning that it takes about 330kJ of energy to convert 1kg of water at 0C to 1kg of ice at 0C. So to add an extra 1% coverage of sea ice 1m thick, we need 100 trillion kg x 330 kJ/kg = about 3.3 times 10 to the power of 16 kJ, or 33 million billion kJ of energy. How much is that? Well, if you wanted to do this in a year, the power requirement would be about a TeraWatt, meaning that you would need about a thousand average sized power stations (nuclear or otherwise) running just for that purpose. If you wanted 10% ice coverage, it would be 10,000 power stations be they nuclear, coal, wind, whatever. Now, the thing about refrigeration is that it generates more waste heat than the cooling created (check refrigeration "coefficient of performance") - the first law of thermodynamics says that it is at least equal to the amount of cooling done, and the second law says that it is a lot more. This is why a refrigerator dumps heat to the room through a heat exchanger, and why an air conditioner dumps hot air to the environment outside. If you refrigerate the north pole with 1,000 purpose built power stations (2,000 with a realistic coefficient of performance for the refrigerator), where would you send the waste heat? Note that what I've written so far doesn't make any assumptions about technology, it's only considering thermodynamics (ie, physics).
"Scaler electromagnetics" are technology, not energy. Regardless of what technology you might want to use, ALL OF IT requires more useful energy going in than you get useful energy or work coming out. Unless you want to advocate using perpetual motion machines. This means that if something is energetically impossible, it is also technologically impossible. If if it is technologically impossible, it is politically, economically and socially impossible.
Fundamentally it's a problem of energy balance. There is no way to "grow the ice" without either a) decreasing the energy that is coming into the system, or b) increasing the energy that is going out of the system. Because whether ice grows or shrinks depends on the temperature and the temperature as I mentioned depends on the balance between energy coming in and going out. Increasing the energy leaving the system is not possible because you cannot decrease the temperature of the sky (this is what controls radiative heat loss). That leaves decreasing the energy coming in by filling the sea with ping pong balls, polystyrene, floating metallised foil etc., all of which would have unintended consequences and all of which are questionable in terms of practicality given the area that would need to be covered.
Compare the scale of the "large scale hydrology projects" you mention with the scales involved in the calculations above.
Very Good. Now do the numbers for a scheme putting windmills on the ice cap that pump seawater straight up and out on the ice to freeze in the winter cold. Nothing else used.
I appreciate your time and effort. My remarks below correspond to your number ordering.
You stated some basic information that we all know, but in my judgment you miss the point on how the planet Earth works. It's a heat pump. There are three principle thermostat locations. Two ice coolers (cold box refrigerators) - northern polar cap and southern polar cap, and an interrupter - the Isthmus of Panama. Those are the critical components that influence the heat pump function of the planet. If those thermostat locations do not perform their current functions, the planet's climate shifts radically. It's not much more complicated than that, other than sun radiation patterns and the heat sink capacity of the oceans and certain land masses. Yes, everything is influencing the heat pump, but its primary components are as stated.
That's not a bad answer overall. But you glossed over hydrology and pump GPM considerations. That's another factor. Yes, there will be heat exchange at the polar wherever the hydro mechanical is being accomplished. That effort could very well lead to additional snowfalls, so (if true) that needs to be factored in. If the hydro mechanical stimulated more snowfall, that would be a positive benefit. Of course, there are other ways to help induce greater snowfall. You also excluded the consideration of natural flow force potential for moving fluids through a pipeline. There may be a way to tap currents to drive some of the flow. It would help to have a few pipeline specialists address some of the finer points of pipeline operations such as the pumping station at Delta Junction, Alaska. Have you ever watched a snow generation system work? I'm surprised that no one mentioned that technology. Of course, wet bulb is the issue there.
I disagree with your position on this one. I have followed some of the Russian work on this technology applications since the early 1970s. They were not just wasting their time. Climatic influence is apparently well within reach. I have seen some papers that discuss matters that I will not go into (divulge), but I am not convinced that this approach is a wasted consideration. That's all I will say. There are a few ongoing projects that appear to support the general theory and available technologies in practical applications.
I agree with many of the basic comments you shared. I do not agree with your notion that we "cannot decrease the temperature of the sky (this is what controls radiative heat loss)". That's not correct technically nor with regard to Earth's recent history to the best of my knowledge. You also didn't mention the heat sink capacity of the oceans and seas, and how events create temperature variations in those pools of water. I suggest that the oceans are of primary consideration, not the atmosphere in the sky. The ability of sea salt water to hold heat is significantly larger than that of the sky. There is no comparison, actually. This all goes back to basic knowledge of heat pumps and heat sinks. There are, moreover, a number of ways to transfer heat back, deep, into the Earth. Of course, we haven't explored that potential.
Scale is not an obstacle for my strategic thinking. It's a secondary consideration. As to cost, how much are the cities and infrastructure along the East Coast worth? This is a question raised by Stormy that no one to my knowledge bothered to answer.
I do appreciate your fine effort. Thanks, xuewen.
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I have some further responses for you, retaining the numbering sequence we appear have adopted.
The earth is NOT a heat pump! A heat pump takes energy and uses it to move heat from a cold temperature to a higher temperature, expelling it along with the energy that was consumed. I believe you may have a fundamental misunderstanding about why the poles are cold. Unlike your domestic freezer, they are not cold because of the action of a heat pump. Like your house on a cold day, they are cold because heat naturally flows to something that is even colder. In the case of the North Pole, what is this thing that's even colder? The sky (NOT the atmosphere). The night sky has a temperature of about 3-4 Kelvins, as close to absolute zero as makes no difference. Heat is continually lost from the planet to the sky by thermal radiation - to prove this is as simple as drawing a system boundary around the earth. Energy comes in from the sun, and because the earth's state is more or less at equilibrium, more or less exactly the same amount of energy is radiated to space. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it all goes somewhere. The reason why the poles are so much colder than the rest of the planet is simply that they receive a whole lot less solar energy per square meter than the rest of the planet (but their heat loss rate is [more of less] comparable).
<regarding hydrology and pumping> I didn't "gloss over" it. It's irrelevant to the calculation because I'm talking about energy balance considerations - thermodynamics. If you want to consider the necessity of pumping, it won't be as large as the heat of fusion considerations, but will only increase the calculated energy requirements and render the proposal even more impossible (is that like something being larger than infinity?). Snowfall? Snow falling on the ice doesn't help because it doesn't increase the surface area of the polar cap. Snow falling on the ocean also doesn't help because it melts immediately. The polar caps grow when the temperature gets low enough to freeze the top of the sea. Making artificial snow does not remove any heat from the system (it actually adds a small amount because of the pumping energy used) and so does not help the situation.
<re: "scaler magnetics" and technology vs energy> I'm sorry, but you're flat wrong. Electromagnetics of any kind ARE NOT energy sources, they simply convert energy from one form to another. They are a technology. Technology is not the same kind of thing as energy. To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming to have a perpetual motion machine. If you want to make such a claim you would not only need to provide some sort of logical argument, evidence or at least references, but they would have to be very, VERY good arguments, evidence, AND references. This confusion between technology and energy seems to be the source of a great deal of (potentially fatal) muddled thinking in our society, particularly from the economics side (sorry LouGrinzo).
I said sky, not atmosphere. They are not the same thing. The night sky has a temperature of around 3-4 Kelvins. And no, its temperature has not changed over any time scale that is of geological interest to humans. The beauty of the first law of thermodynamics, as I'm sure you are aware, is that it applies to all systems regardless of whatever the hell it is that goes on inside the system. So the complexities of atmosphere, oceans etc don't make a lick of difference to my argument. Pumping heat into the earth would take at least as much energy as the heat you are trying to pump, and it wouldn't stay where it's put.
<re: scale being a secondary consideration> I'm surprised you aren't dead. For me, considerations of mass and velocity scales are what stop me from stepping out into moving traffic or jumping from heights much more than a meter or two. As to cost, well I haven't considered it yet. It's hardly worthwhile costing something that we know is not physically possible. Physics trumps engineering and economics. ie if something is not physically (eg, thermodynamically) possible, it can't be engineered no matter how hard you try, and no matter how much money you throw at it. [BTW, what's really interesting I think is that it appears that mathematics trumps physics... ]
Restoration of the northern polar ice cover and the melting of the Greenland ice sheets? What drugs are you on?
This is Mother Nature we're screwing with. Man is not the measure of all things as the Greek put it. The sooner you understand this, the fewer posts of this kind you will make. This, in turn, will restore some clear thinking as to what we're going to do about it. Hint: we've got to cut GHG gas emissions right now and going forward because a significant volume of those emissions end up in the atmosphere. This warming melts ice, warms the oceans and generally causes longterm surface warming of the planet as it attempts to come into radiative heat balance.
Just because we can make ipods and cellphones doesn't mean we can 1) increase world-wide oil production without limit and 2) stop climate warming. Technology has its limitations as humankind is about to learn (and is learning) in a very disruptive way.
Time to powerdown and take the problems associated with exponential growth (of people and energy consumption) seriously. The arrogance of people to think that they can do anything they want. The Fossil Fuels Age is a 300 year window in the whole of human history. Time to think about what we're going to do as it winds down in a realistic way right now and not spend our time thinking we can engineer the climate and geophysics of planetary processes.
Take a deep breath and, as in The Matrix, take one of these pills.
Take the red pill and deal with reality. Or take the blue pill and decide we can engineer the climate (technology will save us) or have blind faith in Adam Smith's invisible hand (the markets). It's your choice.
I fear peak oil means it will be a lot harder to lauch "Manhattan projects." Indeed, the last one we launched was the Apollo program, forty years ago. Before we hit the U.S. oil peak, perhaps not coincidentally.
We have been forced to lower our sites, and peak oil will mean lowering them even more.
You don't have your facts straight. You can condemn and quibble, but you haven't grasped the bottom line of our situation.
Your emotional outburst is an understandable response, but it's clear in my judgment that you understand little about refrigeration theory and the operation of heat pumps, or the principle of delayed effect.
Taking global emissions to ZERO tomorrow morning will not save the northern ice cap. Call NASA and any experienced climatologist and ask them that question. The answer is no.
Similarly, the cleaning up of the air in the atmosphere has further complicated the problem with temperature increase.
The question is simple. The ice cap is melting rapidly. What will the nations of the planet Earth do about it? The cap still serves as a refrigeration center or thermostat, and it's still functioning. If we were to experience massive increased snowfall on the northern cap for the next few decades, it's rate of meltdown would decrease. Absent that potential, we can add artificial snow or simply freeze more water on the existing remaining ice fields, whether on ocean or land. That initiative, in turn, will help stabilize the cap until emissions reductions kick in over the longer term.
We have no choice in attempting to supplement the ice fields of the northern polar cap. A large undertaking, yes, but not insurmountable.
There is an effective alternate to snowing and icing the northern polar cap by the means I have recommended. While effective, there are a number of negatives associated with this climate strategy.
We could initiate a few Plinian eruptions, but then we would have the problem of ash clean up. But the planet climate would change rapidly.
It wouldn't be overly difficult to light off a few volcanoes, but that's hardly the first course of action that I would recommend. And if you believe that they won't try that later on, probably after we're dead, I would think again. They will get desperate after we also lose the southern polar cap.
Dave and Everyone Else,
Do you agree with Movieguy's following assertion:
"Taking global emissions to ZERO tomorrow morning will not save the northern ice cap."
If you are unsure, then point to where the science is unclear.
If you disagree, then argue the case. Only in this instance do you have a plausible response.
If you disagree, then you have one of two options:
Be fatalistic and accept the loss of much of the coastline and some countries.
Explore how we can arrest or slow ice cap melt.
Movieguy's assertion is at the heart of his case for at least thinking about delaying the melt.
How much is NYC worth?
I think we will have no choice but to pick #1. There seems to be a growing consensus that it's already too late to arrest or reverse climate change. And with peak oil looming, we'll have more than enough on our plates already.
I am not a scientist by any means, but would a gazillion white ping-pong balls lower the Albedo Effect enough to create more ice? They certainly would be easy to suck up if they started drifting too far south. Or would this be too dangerous for the Arctic wildlife?
Square mm in the polar ice cap ~10e6 km^2 x 1e12 mm^2 / km^2
= ~1e19 mm^2
Number of balls required = 1e19 / 1600 = ~6e15 balls
Mass required = 1.7e16 grams
... or about 17 billion tonnes of ping pong balls!
Please think about the scales involved.
Where would we make them?
How would we ship them?
Where would the energy for this exercise come from?
How long would it take to do?
How long do we have?
How would we keep all these ping-pong balls from being blown into the Berants Sea or Antartic Ocean, drifting around for years, not being eaten by dolphins and finally clogging up the pipelines we're going to build to the Dead and Caspian Seas? And if they don't clog up the pipelines, what will the folks living near the Dead Sea and the Caspian Sea do with all of them?
Your fundamental premise in this post and the others is just wrong. We can not engineer natural processes to suit us just as we are influencing them in the wrong direction. What, do you think Homo sapiens is, God?
There is a book called The Arrogance of Humanism by David Ehrenfeld which is "an inquiry into the origins, dissemination, and consequences of the modern belief that humans can solve any problem and overcome any difficulty, given time and resources enough."
We've got a fairly good handle on what anthropocentrism has and is doing to the Earth so far--exponential growth is a powerful thing--do you think we could possibly know enough to reverse the processes we have set in motion? Or have the psychological wherewithal and will power to do so?
You know, the global warming deniers make a lot of mileage out of false dichotomy and framing probability questions as if they were binary. They want proof ("0" or "1") and then binary action ("do nothing, or cripple the economy").
I'd hate to see mitigation treated the same way.
It's not a binary. There are more choices than "do nothing, or launch large, costly, and risky mega-engineering projects."
Some things are so natural it's hard to fault them (planting trees). Others have been suggested which, while costly, seem harmless enough (paint all roofs white). At the furthest extreme there are things like dumping iron in the oceans which, while possibly effective would strike me as quite risky.
Obviously there is a scale to these things (in both cost and risks).
Some issues are logically binary. But I did give a third alternative: You are not sure that we have reached a tipping point. In short, we have time to pursue conservation and technological change.
If a logical sequence seems false, demonstrate it. Simply saying that some issues cannot be framed this way is not enough. Is this one of those issues?
Psychologically, I know that considering world-scale projects is very, very uncomfortable. People will think that you have gone off the deep end. It will be one more reason they will not heed the danger. You will be a true Cassandra, looking very, very silly, more like a Chicken-little clown than anything else.
I would suggest that emotionally we have yet to grapple with this issue. Our intellect says "Danger," yet we look around and everything seems fine. Daily experience challenges what we intellectually know.
I for one experience this bifurcation every day. Consequently, I wait. In the last analysis, I am not sure. I cling to daily experience, hoping it will stay the same. So, too, do the deniers. We are not so different from them, I think.
I happened to just say this in another forum, but it applies here I think:
Last year, or the year before, I was struck by two parallel trends. On the one hand this binary view of global warming was strong, and on the other hand poker was becoming a very popular game.
I've always thought that this would be a good teaching opportunity for global warming. Maybe someone who is a better writer than I could take a crack at it ... but basically, sometimes it's a good idea to fold after just seeing a few cards. You have not "proved" who will win, but you a good idea of the odds.
Abusing the analogy, the stereotypical global warming denier wants us to play out the game, prove who wins ... and then bet.
Unfortunately it's too late then, the game is over.
The Global Warming deniers I run into fall into one of 10 categories:
either they believe in binary counting or not.
OK. Kidding aside, a large majority of the deniers can be broken out into 2 extreme camps: those who know no science and think it's just quirks of the "weather" as always and those who know too many scientific attacks on the details and are waiting for the unassailable ultimate proof. Like you said, that proof will come when it is too late and a Category 6 hurricane is blowing humanity off the face of the Earth (yes, I know there is no 6. It's a figure of extremist speech.)
We were pushing category six last year. With continued global warming contributing to hotter Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico waters, combined with this year's El Nino, we may get one, or more.
What's risky about dumping iron in the ocean to fertilise the algae to suck up all the CO2? The only risky thing about it is that it probably won't work. What's the worst thing that could happen if we tried it again, in different places, at different times, to see which places and times worked best?
How do you know it won't artifcially inflate some species populations, while depressing others? How would the "new" ratios of plantonic creatures shake out through the higher food-chain?
That will probably happen because that's what happens in the real world. The plankton will be eaten by zooplankton, which will be eaten by small fish, which will be eaten by big fish.
But which big fish?
When the cod disappeared recently, the lobster catch boomed. Was it connected? Causal? No idea, but lots of theories.
So maybe the former cod fishery gets replaced by a herring fishery?
Overnutrient dead zone happen in rivers and rivering environments with limited oxygen, like under a freshwater fan in a delta. Those deadzones are caused by fertiliser runnoff.
Since we are adding the feritiliser, we have an economic incentive not to overfertilise.
And remember, the alternative is global warming, malaria in your town, and storm surges wiping out the coastline.
You asked what could go wrong. Oxygen depletion is one thing that can go wrong. The law of unintended consequences applies.
We may not know we have overfertilized until it's too late. The problem often happens when the fertilizing stops. A dieoff occurs with the sudden drop in nutrients, which does bad things to the water quality.
Northern Polar Cap Manhattan Project (NPCMP)
TJ and others,
The plan is to actively solicit Congressional support from both houses for creating a new Manhattan Project which will focus national funding, resources, and potential solutions directly on the restoration of the northern polar cap.
A successful sponsoring bill will require 150-250 sponsors (Congressional Members who sign on), so the undertaking is not a mild exercise. It may require reintroduction in a number of successive Congresses to reach passage. One can expect a 1-5 year window prior to successful passage, depending on the level of citizenry and corporate ramp up that pushes for the legislation.
There is a high probability that the Bush Administration would support such legislation once the merits were addressed.
If the United States of America can fund a war campaign of the financial magnitude that we're now committed to, then we have the capacity and means to set up a Northern Polar Cap Manhattan Project (NPCMP) devoted to avoiding a global disaster as will be created once the northern polar cap vanishes.
It's my judgment that the project should undertake a multitude of critical actions, one of which would be to establish a multiple location hydro mechanical watering operation, the responsibility of which would be to repair ice sheet damage, generate new water flow to build additional ice sheets, and undertake additional actions which would help slow the meltdown of the ice cap. The goal is to repair the northern polar cap while it still exists, as the absence of a working platform compounds the problem. Similarly, such NPCMP operations need to be undertaken in Greenland, and other deep cold locations.
There will plenty of detractors, but that is to be expected. The people who will dismiss this idea are not the leaders who got us to the Moon, built the largest dams and bridges in the world, or dug the Panama Canal.
This project takes real leadership. The call to go forward with the Congress is the first major political step. Thereafter, seasoned professional from a number of fields (mechanical engineering, hydrology, climatology, Corps of Engineers, et al) will take the helm at the direction of the Congress and whatever Administration is serving at the time the Northern Polar Cap Manhattan Project (NPCMP) is authorized as a federally funded project.
I roughed out the basic concept here:
MG
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/3/0394/97545#111
MG
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/3/0394/97545#162
Stormy's post
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/3/0394/97545#169
MG
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/3/0394/97545#172
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Perhaps he can deliver us a deliver us a giant solar-powered refrigerator to help make all the ice we need...
Santa Claus? He's gonna be all wet. As will everyone who lives along a coastline in North America.
This is not even remotely possible.
The amount of energy you would need to throw around to do this would easily be several orders of magnitude (hundreds or thousands of times) or more greater than mankind's total energy production capabilities.
It's a question of scale. A quick look at the amount of energy sloshing around in natural systems compared with the amount of energy humans can command will tell you this.
Engaging in this type of activity is about as effective as trying to stop a freight train with a pea-shooter.
Or as Ben Elton once put it, a bit like pissing into a hurricane.
Well, it's a better answer than your first effort, but I respectfully don't necessarily agree with you.
Sure, the scale is large. There are many ways, though, to increase the rate of ice growth at the northern polar cap. Collectively, it is possible that the situation could be improved substantially over doing nothing.
What you appear to be overlooking is the theory behind refrigeration and the potential for making ready use of Earth's natural power to assist in growing the ice sheets. The polar cap is still a refrigerator. It just needs a little help with materials to freeze. Scaler electromagnetics could be employed along with a number of other approaches. Same for wind applications plus clouding seeding as well as hydro mechanical means.
There is no question that we could use large scale pumping systems, whether powered by nature or nuclear power, to repair some of the ice sheet breaks. Anyone familiar with large scale hydrology projects would not readily dismiss the idea.
--
There are many areas of the world that are inland deserts well below sea level, for instance the Caspian Basin, the areas surrounding the Dead Sea, areas of the Australian desert and many others. Pipelines and canals could be built from the ocean, funded by a every nation on earth as everyone would benefit from the lowering of sea levels. The pipelines could be siphon driven with nuclear powered pumping stations perhaps.
The benefits would be large- as well as mitigating the effects of rising sea level (enough to counteract melting ice) you would also create inland marine ecosystems, increase evaporation and precipitation and possibly create new forested areas in the desert, which would remove large amounts of carbon from the air over time.
It would be a huge engineering project over hundreds of years, but it looks like similar things are already happening: The news story below talks about a pipeline being planned to refill the Dead Sea.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1479583,00.html
This might be easier engineering-wise, although it does nothing to reduce the source of the problem- CO2 emissions.
Personally, I think we should all just leave our refrigerator doors open!
I appreciate your time and effort. My remarks below correspond to your number ordering.
- You stated some basic information that we all know, but in my judgment you miss the point on how the planet Earth works. It's a heat pump. There are three principle thermostat locations. Two ice coolers (cold box refrigerators) - northern polar cap and southern polar cap, and an interrupter - the Isthmus of Panama. Those are the critical components that influence the heat pump function of the planet. If those thermostat locations do not perform their current functions, the planet's climate shifts radically. It's not much more complicated than that, other than sun radiation patterns and the heat sink capacity of the oceans and certain land masses. Yes, everything is influencing the heat pump, but its primary components are as stated.
- That's not a bad answer overall. But you glossed over hydrology and pump GPM considerations. That's another factor. Yes, there will be heat exchange at the polar wherever the hydro mechanical is being accomplished. That effort could very well lead to additional snowfalls, so (if true) that needs to be factored in. If the hydro mechanical stimulated more snowfall, that would be a positive benefit. Of course, there are other ways to help induce greater snowfall. You also excluded the consideration of natural flow force potential for moving fluids through a pipeline. There may be a way to tap currents to drive some of the flow. It would help to have a few pipeline specialists address some of the finer points of pipeline operations such as the pumping station at Delta Junction, Alaska. Have you ever watched a snow generation system work? I'm surprised that no one mentioned that technology. Of course, wet bulb is the issue there.
- I disagree with your position on this one. I have followed some of the Russian work on this technology applications since the early 1970s. They were not just wasting their time. Climatic influence is apparently well within reach. I have seen some papers that discuss matters that I will not go into (divulge), but I am not convinced that this approach is a wasted consideration. That's all I will say. There are a few ongoing projects that appear to support the general theory and available technologies in practical applications.
- I agree with many of the basic comments you shared. I do not agree with your notion that we "cannot decrease the temperature of the sky (this is what controls radiative heat loss)". That's not correct technically nor with regard to Earth's recent history to the best of my knowledge. You also didn't mention the heat sink capacity of the oceans and seas, and how events create temperature variations in those pools of water. I suggest that the oceans are of primary consideration, not the atmosphere in the sky. The ability of sea salt water to hold heat is significantly larger than that of the sky. There is no comparison, actually. This all goes back to basic knowledge of heat pumps and heat sinks. There are, moreover, a number of ways to transfer heat back, deep, into the Earth. Of course, we haven't explored that potential.
- Scale is not an obstacle for my strategic thinking. It's a secondary consideration. As to cost, how much are the cities and infrastructure along the East Coast worth? This is a question raised by Stormy that no one to my knowledge bothered to answer.
I do appreciate your fine effort. Thanks, xuewen.--
I have some further responses for you, retaining the numbering sequence we appear have adopted.
This is Mother Nature we're screwing with. Man is not the measure of all things as the Greek put it. The sooner you understand this, the fewer posts of this kind you will make. This, in turn, will restore some clear thinking as to what we're going to do about it. Hint: we've got to cut GHG gas emissions right now and going forward because a significant volume of those emissions end up in the atmosphere. This warming melts ice, warms the oceans and generally causes longterm surface warming of the planet as it attempts to come into radiative heat balance.
Just because we can make ipods and cellphones doesn't mean we can 1) increase world-wide oil production without limit and 2) stop climate warming. Technology has its limitations as humankind is about to learn (and is learning) in a very disruptive way.
Time to powerdown and take the problems associated with exponential growth (of people and energy consumption) seriously. The arrogance of people to think that they can do anything they want. The Fossil Fuels Age is a 300 year window in the whole of human history. Time to think about what we're going to do as it winds down in a realistic way right now and not spend our time thinking we can engineer the climate and geophysics of planetary processes.
Take a deep breath and, as in The Matrix, take one of these pills.
We have been forced to lower our sites, and peak oil will mean lowering them even more.
You don't have your facts straight. You can condemn and quibble, but you haven't grasped the bottom line of our situation.
Your emotional outburst is an understandable response, but it's clear in my judgment that you understand little about refrigeration theory and the operation of heat pumps, or the principle of delayed effect.
Taking global emissions to ZERO tomorrow morning will not save the northern ice cap. Call NASA and any experienced climatologist and ask them that question. The answer is no.
Similarly, the cleaning up of the air in the atmosphere has further complicated the problem with temperature increase.
The question is simple. The ice cap is melting rapidly. What will the nations of the planet Earth do about it? The cap still serves as a refrigeration center or thermostat, and it's still functioning. If we were to experience massive increased snowfall on the northern cap for the next few decades, it's rate of meltdown would decrease. Absent that potential, we can add artificial snow or simply freeze more water on the existing remaining ice fields, whether on ocean or land. That initiative, in turn, will help stabilize the cap until emissions reductions kick in over the longer term.
We have no choice in attempting to supplement the ice fields of the northern polar cap. A large undertaking, yes, but not insurmountable.
We could initiate a few Plinian eruptions, but then we would have the problem of ash clean up. But the planet climate would change rapidly.
It wouldn't be overly difficult to light off a few volcanoes, but that's hardly the first course of action that I would recommend. And if you believe that they won't try that later on, probably after we're dead, I would think again. They will get desperate after we also lose the southern polar cap.
Anyway, here's a brief overview:
DYNAMICS OF A PLINIAN ERUPTION
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/
ASH PROPERTIES & DISPERSAL BY WIND
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/properties.html
- Be fatalistic and accept the loss of much of the coastline and some countries.
- Explore how we can arrest or slow ice cap melt.
Movieguy's assertion is at the heart of his case for at least thinking about delaying the melt. How much is NYC worth?Global Volcano List
http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/sorted_by_country.html
.
I am not a scientist by any means, but would a gazillion white ping-pong balls lower the Albedo Effect enough to create more ice? They certainly would be easy to suck up if they started drifting too far south. Or would this be too dangerous for the Arctic wildlife?
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Assume that the area we need is comparable to the size of the arctic ice sheet or ~10 million km^2 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_cap)
A ping pong ball has weight 2.7g and diameter of 40mm. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_tennis#Equipment)
If we assume that the balls are square packed, the amount of area covered by a single ball as 40x40 = 1600 mm^2.
1 km^2 = (1000 mm/m x 1000 m/km)^2 mm^2 = 1e12 mm^2
Square mm in the polar ice cap ~10e6 km^2 x 1e12 mm^2 / km^2
= ~1e19 mm^2
Number of balls required = 1e19 / 1600 = ~6e15 balls
Mass required = 1.7e16 grams
... or about 17 billion tonnes of ping pong balls!
Please think about the scales involved.
Where would we make them?
How would we ship them?
Where would the energy for this exercise come from?
How long would it take to do?
How long do we have?
There is a book called The Arrogance of Humanism by David Ehrenfeld which is "an inquiry into the origins, dissemination, and consequences of the modern belief that humans can solve any problem and overcome any difficulty, given time and resources enough."
We've got a fairly good handle on what anthropocentrism has and is doing to the Earth so far--exponential growth is a powerful thing--do you think we could possibly know enough to reverse the processes we have set in motion? Or have the psychological wherewithal and will power to do so?
Have you ever seen the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still?
I'd hate to see mitigation treated the same way.
It's not a binary. There are more choices than "do nothing, or launch large, costly, and risky mega-engineering projects."
Some things are so natural it's hard to fault them (planting trees). Others have been suggested which, while costly, seem harmless enough (paint all roofs white). At the furthest extreme there are things like dumping iron in the oceans which, while possibly effective would strike me as quite risky.
Obviously there is a scale to these things (in both cost and risks).
If a logical sequence seems false, demonstrate it. Simply saying that some issues cannot be framed this way is not enough. Is this one of those issues?
Psychologically, I know that considering world-scale projects is very, very uncomfortable. People will think that you have gone off the deep end. It will be one more reason they will not heed the danger. You will be a true Cassandra, looking very, very silly, more like a Chicken-little clown than anything else.
I would suggest that emotionally we have yet to grapple with this issue. Our intellect says "Danger," yet we look around and everything seems fine. Daily experience challenges what we intellectually know.
I for one experience this bifurcation every day. Consequently, I wait. In the last analysis, I am not sure. I cling to daily experience, hoping it will stay the same. So, too, do the deniers. We are not so different from them, I think.
Last year, or the year before, I was struck by two parallel trends. On the one hand this binary view of global warming was strong, and on the other hand poker was becoming a very popular game.
I've always thought that this would be a good teaching opportunity for global warming. Maybe someone who is a better writer than I could take a crack at it ... but basically, sometimes it's a good idea to fold after just seeing a few cards. You have not "proved" who will win, but you a good idea of the odds.
Abusing the analogy, the stereotypical global warming denier wants us to play out the game, prove who wins ... and then bet.
Unfortunately it's too late then, the game is over.
either they believe in binary counting or not.
OK. Kidding aside, a large majority of the deniers can be broken out into 2 extreme camps: those who know no science and think it's just quirks of the "weather" as always and those who know too many scientific attacks on the details and are waiting for the unassailable ultimate proof. Like you said, that proof will come when it is too late and a Category 6 hurricane is blowing humanity off the face of the Earth (yes, I know there is no 6. It's a figure of extremist speech.)
But which big fish?
When the cod disappeared recently, the lobster catch boomed. Was it connected? Causal? No idea, but lots of theories.
So maybe the former cod fishery gets replaced by a herring fishery?
http://tracer.env.uea.ac.uk/soiree/
From what I recall it was not a huge success (for reasons of scale, once more)
Since we are adding the feritiliser, we have an economic incentive not to overfertilise.
And remember, the alternative is global warming, malaria in your town, and storm surges wiping out the coastline.
We may not know we have overfertilized until it's too late. The problem often happens when the fertilizing stops. A dieoff occurs with the sudden drop in nutrients, which does bad things to the water quality.