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The “Insane” Plan to Save the Arctic’s Sea Ice

by Sallust
17 March 2024 9:00 AM

Anyone who watched the movie Snowpiercer, set in 2031, or the follow-up TV series will recall its premise: an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.

Perhaps that’s what’s inspired Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair. It has a team in the high Arctic busily experimenting with spraying seawater over a hole they’ve cut in the ice. The BBC’s Mark Poynting has the story:

The ultimate goal of the Arctic experiment is to thicken enough sea ice to slow or even reverse the melting already seen, says Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, whose team at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Climate Repair is behind the project.

Will it work or is it, as one scientist put it, “quite insane”?

“We don’t actually know enough to determine whether this is a good idea or bad idea,” admits Dr. Fitzgerald. They are drilling a hole in the sea ice that naturally forms in winter and pumping around 1,000 litres of seawater per minute across the surface.

Exposed to the cold winter air, this seawater quickly freezes, helping to thicken the ice on top. The water also compacts the snow. As fresh snow acts as a good insulating layer, now ice can also form more easily on the underside in contact with the ocean.

Like most self-respecting climate change panic projects, cranking this up to scale will have vast energy needs, to say nothing of manufacturing the pumps, quite apart from the possibility that the whole scheme might be insane:

“The vast majority of polar scientists think this is never going to work out,” cautions Martin Siegert, an experienced glaciologist at the University of Exeter, who is not involved in the project.

One issue is that the saltier ice may melt more quickly in the summer.

And then there’s the huge logistical challenge of scaling the project up to a meaningful level – one estimate suggests that you could need about 10 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across just a tenth of the Arctic. 

A number of scientists – including the UN’s climate and weather bodies – have warned that these approaches could pose grave risks, including disrupting global weather patterns. Many researchers want to see them banned altogether.

“Geoengineering technologies come with enormous uncertainties and create novel risks for ecosystems and people,” explains Lili Fuhr, director of the Fossil Economy Programme at the Centre for International Environmental Law.

But if that scepticism sounds reassuring, don’t be fooled. Some of the critics remain dedicated to total decarbonisation. However, perhaps what we’re seeing here is the climate change industry beginning to fragment into feuding factions?

Still, surely all we need to do is ‘follow the science’. What could possibly go wrong?

The Arctic researchers are acutely aware of these concerns. They stress that they are simply testing the technology, and wouldn’t unleash it more widely until the risks are better known.

Where have we heard that before?

Worth reading in full.

Tags: ArcticArctic iceClimate AlarmismCollateral DamageScienceSea iceThe Science

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24 Comments
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Dinger64
Dinger64
1 year ago

Nature will do what is needed, Leave it alone, stop meddling !

115
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  Dinger64

Yes I know, Dinger, but the fact is that you’re in Ireland and haven’t once mentioned St Patrick’s Day. 😮 This is funny. Just do a Roy Walker and ”say what you see”. 🙂

https://twitter.com/janelvis77/status/1769281387268313411

10
-1
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

😀😀😀

6
0
JXB
JXB
1 year ago

Arctic Sea ice extent is influenced by currents and wind – compacting or expanding it, moving ice into warmer waters where it melts, upwelling warmer waters from volcanic activity deep down and the season, Winter v Summer.

We really need to stop taxpayer funded ‘scientific research’.

88
0
For a fist full of roubles
For a fist full of roubles
1 year ago

Why? I thought loss of sea ice during summer months was a good thing for shipping and commerce.

30
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

“Climate Repair” ——Are you having a laugh? ——Actually no they are not having a laugh, they will be deadly serious like all the others in the climate change funding feeding frenzy. If someone offers me big chunks of money to look for purple horses I probably will have a good go at it, and report back that “my studies are not inconsistent with the existence of purple horses” or some other non scientific squirming. If people think this doesn’t go on they are kidding themselves. —-It is RIFE. Scientists and modellers and the rest of the climate change gang all have families to feed and mortgages to pay, and it is hard to get man to scrutinise objectively when his salary depends on not scrutinising objectively. —–It really is as crude as that.

98
0
sskinner
sskinner
1 year ago

Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair
What monumental hubris. These are the ‘brightest and best’? According to who and by what measure?

“…an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.”
This is just making sure all bases are covered much like the move “The Day After Tomorrow”.
The facts are we are still in an ice age and there is nothing to indicate it has ended or that the next glacial expansion won’t happen – it will, somewhere in the next 500 years or so. In which case these self deluded charlatans will create a fictitious scenario in a movie with actors and this will be presented as some kind of evidence! In this case the inference is the tinkering will do something and make the world cold when it already was and is going in that direction.

38
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago
Reply to  sskinner

But when we come out of this current Interglacial and full Ice Age conditions start to return then it will be the same solutions. ——–More and more government interference in every aspect of our lives. More Ice or less ice, it does not matter, big government are there to save us all, except saving the planet only normally means one thing —ruling it

43
0
Marque1
Marque1
1 year ago
Reply to  sskinner

This, possibly from the DS.

Dysrationalia

Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.

21
0
sskinner
sskinner
1 year ago

“One issue is that the saltier ice may melt more quickly in the summer.”
Is that so? Who did the research to make sure this film was factually correct? Just a quick Google along with some enquiring intelligence is all that was needed – 5 minutes tops.
This is what the NSIDC has to say.
“As the ocean water begins to freeze, small needle-like ice crystals called frazil form. These crystals are typically 3 to 4 millimeters (0.12 to 0.16 inches) in diameter. Because salt doesn’t freeze, the crystals expel salt into the water, and frazil crystals consist of nearly pure fresh water.“

Last edited 1 year ago by sskinner
21
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sskinner
sskinner
1 year ago
Reply to  sskinner

Every year 10,000,000 sq km of Arctic sea ice freezes and every year 10,000,000 sq km of sea ice melts. In the 1980s it was 8,000,000 sq km that would freeze and melt every year. What has happened is that minimum ice has reduced by more than maximum ice so that now more ice freezes during the Autumn, Winter and Spring months. The NSIDC produce various graphics and there is one that shows Arctic, Antarctic and global ice extent. It is a composite and for two of the graphs the zero line is not shown.
comment image?ssl=1
Below are the same graphs but with the reference to zero restored. It doesn’t look that scary now, not that it was beforehand.

NSIDC-Global-Sea-Ice
Last edited 1 year ago by sskinner
23
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

It is quite bizarre how there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, no increase in the rate of sea level rise, no empirical evidence that there are dangerous changes to climate afoot and yet 90% of the public think all of that is happening. ——-Remember Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”——–With climate change it is “As long as we fool most of the people all of the time, it won’t matter about the people we cannot fool none time”

50
0
psychedelia smith
psychedelia smith
1 year ago

Great. All we need now is for Gates and Branson to perfect their ‘CO2 scrubbing’ machines, get CO2 down from a lowly 425ppm to below 200ppm and they’ve ended all life on Earth.

45
0
sskinner
sskinner
1 year ago
Reply to  psychedelia smith

The ‘opportunities’ are boundless.

20
0
RichardTechnik
RichardTechnik
1 year ago
Reply to  sskinner

Yes – the ‘opportunities’ to receive large sums of taxpayer money to play with ‘scientific’ non-solutions to non problems and build academic empires and ‘fame’ and salaries are boundless

25
0
7941MHKB
7941MHKB
1 year ago
Reply to  sskinner

My spies tell me that Cambridge has another team, beavering away at their project to mend the holes in Polos. Should be brilliant!

Wouldn’t it be nice if these ocean pumping freaks could clearly show, before they started, that the sea ice extent in 1979 was “correct”, rather than just being a bit higher than usual?

Cost benefit analysis? Pump manufacturers will be happy chappies.

2
0
soundofreason
soundofreason
1 year ago

Effectively they’re transferring heat from the ocean into the atmosphere (heat pump technology). What could possibly go wrong?

…one estimate suggests that you could need about 10 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across just a tenth of the Arctic.

This shows a lack of ambition: They would need 100 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across just a tenth of the Arctic.

But it’ll be worth it if it saves just one polar bear. /s

These 10 or 100 million wind-powered pumps would be built of what? How much steel and other resources? If we (mankind) build 100 million wind-powered pumps for this what will we not build as a result? What could we have used the resources for instead?

20
0
RichardTechnik
RichardTechnik
1 year ago
Reply to  soundofreason

Effectively they’re transferring heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. Correct. The process may be simply spraying ‘warm’ seawater into ‘colder air’ but spraying is going to warm up the air rather a lot even without heat pumps to enable this process. Water releases 330 kJ/kg when it freezes or approx 100 kWh/tonne. And theres about 150 trillion tonnes of sea ice in the Arctic assuming average thickness of 2.5m. The suggestion that this academicexercise has ANY value is absurd. Less than 10 years ago, I met a group of academics who had excitedly proposed a chemical mitigation to marine diesel engine CO2 emissions – these people had not done the basic ‘fag packet’ sanity check which showed their idea was absurd. But they would have happily accepted several hundred thousand bucks to make a playground demonstrator.

This lot sound as though they are from the same school.

15
0
john1T
john1T
1 year ago

Back in the 1970s there was a plan to cover the ice with soot to prevent the coming ice age. Some people do not have a clue, but they still get funded by other people who do not have a clue.

31
0
Roy Everett
Roy Everett
1 year ago
Reply to  john1T

Yes. In the 1970s the Mencken Hobgoblin was the “The Ice Age Is Coming” (as the BBC called it) and was popularised by Nigel Calder (BBC/author) and  Stephen Schneider. Schneider ingeniously changed horse in mid-stream and moved to “Global Warming Is Coming” when it became apparent that The Ice Age Was Not Coming. https://notrickszone.com/2021/08/02/in-the-1970s-climate-modification-proposals-included-purposely-melting-arctic-sea-ice-with-black-soot/

20
0
NeilParkin
NeilParkin
1 year ago

Can we work on something more useful to society, like finding the Yeti or the Easter Bunny,,,

33
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

Dear Climate Alarmists, what is the correct amount of sea ice the world should have?

18
0
Peter W
Peter W
1 year ago
Reply to  varmint

And while you’re about it what is the correct temperature and CO2 level? Oh, so you don’t know? Then shut up and leave us all alone.

0
0
Whomakesthisstuffup
Whomakesthisstuffup
1 year ago

Sounds like another entry for an Ignobel award. Unfortunately for them there seems to be plenty of competition!

0
0

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