<Saturday open threadThe Oil DrumBrian Schweitzer on 60 Minutes last night>

178 comments on Sunday evening open thread

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xuewen on February 26, 2006 - 9:36pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
We ought to be able to enlist Santa Claus' help too... after all it's his home that's at stake!

Perhaps he can deliver us a deliver us a giant solar-powered refrigerator to help make all the ice we need...

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Movie Guy on February 26, 2006 - 9:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I appreciate your humor, but for someone who is trained in chemical engineering, I would have hoped for a better response.  

Santa Claus?  He's gonna be all wet.  As will everyone who lives along a coastline in North America.

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xuewen on February 27, 2006 - 4:49am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
OK - here's the chemical engineer's response:

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.

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Movie Guy on February 27, 2006 - 6:55am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
xuewen,

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.  

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SHiFTY on February 27, 2006 - 7:54am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
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.

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.

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Gets IT on February 27, 2006 - 8:54am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
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.
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xuewen on February 27, 2006 - 8:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
OK, lets follow this through.

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. "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.

  4. 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.

  5. Compare the scale of the "large scale hydrology projects" you mention with the scales involved in the calculations above.
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wimbi on February 27, 2006 - 8:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
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.
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Twilight on February 27, 2006 - 5:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
How much ice would that sea water melt before it got cold enough to freeze?  Would it be a net gain or loss of ice?

Personally, I think we should all just leave our refrigerator doors open!

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Movie Guy on February 27, 2006 - 10:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
xuewen,  

I appreciate your time and effort.  My remarks below correspond to your number ordering.      

  1. 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.    

  2. 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.    

  3. 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.    

  4. 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.    

  5. 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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xuewen on February 28, 2006 - 7:49am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hello Movie Guy,

I have some further responses for you, retaining the numbering sequence we appear have adopted.

  1. 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).

  2. <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.

  3. <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).

  4. 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.

  5. <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... ]
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