By Paul Homewood
Feeding time for the fruitloops who read the Guardian!
Physicist Steven Desch has come up with a novel solution to the problems that now beset the Arctic. He and a team of colleagues from Arizona State University want to replenish the region’s shrinking sea ice – by building 10 million wind-powered pumps over the Arctic ice cap. In winter, these would be used to pump water to the surface of the ice where it would freeze, thickening the cap.
The pumps could add an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic’s current layer, Desch argues. The current cap rarely exceeds 2-3 metres in thickness and is being eroded constantly as the planet succumbs to climate change.
“Thicker ice would mean longer-lasting ice. In turn, that would mean the danger of all sea ice disappearing from the Arctic in summer would be reduced significantly,” Desch told the Observer.
Desch and his team have put forward the scheme in a paper that has just been published in Earth’s Future, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, and have worked out a price tag for the project: $500bn (£400bn).
It is an astonishing sum. However, it is the kind of outlay that may become necessary if we want to halt the calamity that faces the Arctic, says Desch, who, like many other scientists, has become alarmed at temperature change in the region. They say that it is now warming twice as fast as their climate models predicted only a few years ago and argue that the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming will be insufficient to prevent the region’s sea ice disappearing completely in summer, possibly by 2030.
“Our only strategy at present seems to be to tell people to stop burning fossil fuels,” says Desch. “It’s a good idea but it is going to need a lot more than that to stop the Arctic’s sea ice from disappearing.”
All of the usual myths are there:
1) Temperatures are now so high at the north pole that scientists are contemplating radical schemes to avoid catastrophe
No they’re not. Temperatures across the Arctic were just as high in the 1930s and 40s:
2) This paucity of sea ice bodes ill for the Arctic’s summer months when cover traditionally drops to its lower annual level, and could plunge to a record minimum this year. Most scientists expect that, at current emission rates, the Arctic will be reliably free of sea ice in summer by 2030
Summer sea ice extent has been stable now since 2006. There is no evidence at all that it will all disappear by 2030.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
3) Last November, when sea ice should have begun thickening and spreading over the Arctic as winter set in, the region warmed up. Temperatures should have plummeted to -25C but reached several degrees above freezing instead. “It’s been about 20C warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean. This is unprecedented,” research professor Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University told the Guardian in November. “These temperatures are literally off the charts for where they should be at this time of year. It is pretty shocking.
There was nothing “unprecedented” about last November’s spike in temperatures, which were in any event still well below freezing, contrary to Francis’ fake claim.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
For instance, there were also large warm anomalies during the winter of 1972, when Arctic ice was expanding rapidly:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
4) With less ice to reflect solar radiation back into space, the dark ocean waters of the high latitudes will warm and the Arctic will heat up even further.
While this may be true for a short spell during summer months, for most of the year the opposite is the case. Ice free oceans will lose heat to the atmosphere, and thus into space.
This whole potty scheme is a classic case of what happens when you hand out billions of pounds in grants to research anything to do with climate. But Steven Desch ought to be more careful what he wishes for.
Messing around with natural climate forces might have cataclysmic effects, by creating too much ice. After all, why does he assume that the amount of ice we had in 1979 is “normal” or “desirable”. Countries like Iceland certainly did not think so, as it nearly wrecked their economy.
Before he wastes any more taxpayers’ money, maybe he ought to study Arctic climate history and the role of cycles. I suggest he reads HH Lamb, who had this to say in 1995:
In other words, Arctic climate revolves around an interdecadal cycle, and we are currently in the warm phase, just as we were in earlier decades.
One of the major drivers is that when the Arctic is warmer, it is also wetter. Rivers running south to north in Canada and Siberia drain this extra fresh water into the Arctic Ocean. Fresh water of course freezes more easily, thus eventually leading to increasing sea ice, and reversing the warm part of the cycle.
It has happened many times in the past, and will happen again in the next few years. If mad scientists like Desch get their way, we may end up with more ice than we know what to do with.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 20, 2018 at 08:42AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 