The proposal for saving Antarctic ice in the submitted article may be just too big for humans to do. Sulfur dioxide injection, however, is dirt cheap, and we could definitely do that. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but we can do it.
It's so cheap that a nation threatened by climate change likely will do it "rogue", without international consensus. It's less a matter of "if" but "when."
> Analysis of our results and comparison to the results of Kuylenstierna et al.[2001] and Skeffington[2006] lead to the conclusion that the additional sulfate deposition that would result from geoengineering will not be sufficient to negatively impact most ecosystems, even under the assumption that all deposited sulfate will be in the form of sulfuric acid. However, although these model results are feasible, should geoengineering with sulfate aerosols actually be conducted, local results due to weather variability may differ from the results presented here. With the exception of terrestrial waterways, every region has a critical loading value a full order of magnitude above the largest potential total amount of acid deposition that would occur under the geoengineering scenarios presented in this paper. Furthermore, our results show that additional sulfate deposition tends to preferentially occur over oceans, meaning the chance of such a sensitive ecosystem receiving enough additional sulfate deposition to suffer negative consequences is very small.
Also note that I did not say that sulfur dioxide injection was a good idea, only that we could afford to do it.
"Of the carbon-rich biomass generated by plankton blooms, half (or more) is generally consumed by grazing organisms (zooplankton, krill, small fish, etc.) but 20 to 30% sinks below 200 meters (660 ft) into the colder water strata below the thermocline. Much of this fixed carbon continues into the abyss, but a substantial percentage is redissolved and remineralized. At this depth, however, this carbon is now suspended in deep currents and effectively isolated from the atmosphere for centuries. (The surface to benthic cycling time for the ocean is approximately 4,000 years.)"
Sounds insurmountable. That said, in the context of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, this feels like there are far more knowns than unknowns.
Think of it this way. JFK laid out a challenge that in retrospect amounted to "Here's a iPhone. Go put us on the moon. Soon!"
THAT was madness. Redistribution of some water* - even at this scale - is more Mercury than Apollo. It seems it might be us who now knows too much to be crazy enough to try. That's a shame.
* On a daily basis we redistribute a massive amount of oil. So there is a reference point in terms of volume / scale.
The are talking about moving over 100x times as much water per year as we move oil. Further, it’s only going to freeze during winter adding even more time constraints.
Just desalination of this much water would cost ~5 trillion dollars in the US. Doing this in the Antarctic winter would probably double that if not more.
"The are talking about moving over 100x times as much water per year as we move oil."
> Fair enough. But 100x still isn't a moon shot.
"Just desalination of this much water would cost ~5 trillion dollars in the US."
> Perhaps. But what is the cost of NOT doing it? 2x? 3x? 5x? 10x?
Long to short. if it were easy we would have done it already. Therefore, I have to believe the next steps are going to be hard, harder, and perhaps hardest (i.e., greater than going to the moon on the back of an iPhone).
The only impact of not doing this is less sea level rise. The ocean is still going to rise significantly, thus the savings is likely less than the 10++ trillion this would cost.
Remember, this is also not a long term solution, it would need to be repeated over time.
How do you figure that not doing this would cause less sea level rise? The article states that proceeding with this plan might slow sea level rise to nearly one-third of its current rate:
> To put that into context, removing that much seawater from the ocean would lower global sea level by about 2 millimeters per year. Current total sea level rise is a little over 3 millimeters per year, so it would be like nearly halting sea level rise… by bailing water out of the ocean. We can call that a bonus positive.
On what grounds do you dispute this? I'm not saying you're wrong (I'm too uneducated in the relevant fields to know that), I'd just like to know your rationale?
I mean you are not going actually fix global temperate, weather patterns, ocean acidification etc. It’s benefits are simply going to be limited to stuff very near the ocean, and when you start talking trillions of dollars that builds a lot of structures.
145GW of power needed to raise water up 640m. Desalination not included, may be necessary. Would require 12k high-end wind turbines given local wind conditions. This is around 25% of current global wind capacity.
https://wwindea.org/information-2/information/ - "UPDATED: 4 June 2019 Wind Power Capacity Worldwide Reaches 597 GW, 50,1 GW added in 2018 China with more than 200 GW, USA close to 100 GW, Europe in decline Bonn, 25 February 2019 (WWEA) – The overall capacity of all wind turbines installed worldwide by the end of 2018 reached 597 Gigawatt"
When you consider that's 12,000 for the least energy intensive part, just pumping the water, yes. A hell of a lot.
How many extra windmills for desalination and freezing to produce snow? How many acres or square miles of desalination plant? How to dispose of the few(!) tonnes of salt? How much of the world's shipping, construction and engineering requires commandeering, WW2 style to ensure it's a ten year not fifty year project?
Many recent discussions around the unfolding global warming catastrophe have asked, "What can we do?" Besides the obvious, Climeworks now has a scheme to let average people pay to bury carbon: https://www.climeworks.com/. I've signed up but have no information beyond the articles I've read about the company: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-busin....
It seems we're past the point where reducing emissions will be enough, and to the point where we need to reverse atmospheric CO2, now.
I‘ve come to the conclusion that planting trees is probably the best strategy in the short term. While there‘s obviously limited space to continue that forever without advanced strategies such as BECCS, it’s a super safe and extremely scalable option (drones!) with lots of other benefits that would give us a massive head start for the next 10-20 years until we figure out how to scale CO2 capture.
I agree we should also plant trees and cultivate forests however that won't help fix our oceans.
The reason why I like the olivine weathering proposal is that it weathers co2 out of the ocean and uses the ocean as a carbon sink. This way you remove co2 from the both the atmosphere and ocean (if you weather enough of it).
Why is enhanced weathering questionable? I don't really know much about it, but I was under the impression that carbon absorption by weathered silicates will have a dramatic impact on the planet over the very long term[1]. Is enhanced weathering just too slow, or is there more to it than that?
I've only compared it to sulphur dioxide and the risks look fewer. The other benefit of enhanced weathering with olivine distributed in energetic waters is that it removes CO2 from the ocean (letting the ocean act as a carbon sink for the atmosphere).
I'm interested in learning more about research into enhanced weathering, could you provide some recommendations?
Given our disastrous track record with any sort of environmental engineering, I don't think this is a good pandora's box to open.
Also, any plausible form of geoengineering still requires carbon emissions to be reduced to 0 as soon as possible. Since that is known to be within our technical capacities, and known to be safe, it still seems like the first step that we must dedicate our energies to.
It's just that "catastrophic" changes meaning over time. Permafrost melting on a massive scale? Catastrophic prediction thirty years ago, just another item in the news today. Losing almost all coral reefs? Today it's just something we can't prevent anymore.
I don't believe that the data here is being misrepresented. But the conclusions are not valid.
The gist of the article is:
1. Arctic ice thickness and extent are cyclical and uncorrelated with atmospheric CO2 levels.
2. NOAA sea ice graphs start at a cyclical peak (1979), which incorrectly leads people to believe that Arctic sea ice thickness and extent are on a consistent downward trend, rather than the low end of a multi-decade cycle.
3. Therefore, global warming does not exist (????)
I'm not exaggerating the third point:
Eastern Arctic temperatures closely track the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and show no correlation with atmospheric CO2.
This wrecks global warming theory which is climate scientists’ bread and butter, so NASA simply erases the prior warmth
NOAA and NASA should rightly be taken to task for misrepresenting Arctic ice data.
However to dismiss the entire global warming premise on this basis is a maliciously illogical conclusion.
Spent some more time poking around through this website, and the best conclusion I could draw was: scientists like to make bold predictions on tenuous grounds, and the media likes to make hysterical reports based on those predictions. Therefore we shouldn't believe in global warming because there is a lot of both bold over-prediction and hysterical over-reporting associated with it.
Meanwhile the blog does plenty of disingenuous over-reporting of its own, flagging several historical weather events as evidence that the climate is not changing and that it is not warming.
Edit -
Here's a great example: https://realclimatescience.com/2017/04/global-warming-and-th... it sets up a strawman argument, "climate experts tell us global warming brings in early spring". The author then looks outside his window, sees snow, and concludes that there is no early spring.
Therefore climate change is a hoax, right? We are all being lied to? It's so obvious! Except for the fact that spring did indeed come early on the East Coast: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/08/climate/early... as for the connection to climate change, that was over-reporting. The connection was posed by one research team, who used a computer model to show that greenhouse gas emissions could (in their model) lead to earlier onset of spring.
It's interesting to see how the USGS talks about climate change. In their terms, early onset of spring indicates climate change because the climate is literally changing: spring comes earlier than it used to in the south and east. At no point do they make a connection between average global temperatures or greenhouse gas emissions.
Edit 3 -
Interestingly, the data in that blog post does suggest that there is no need to "save" the Arctic ice, at least not yet.
Monsoon rain in indian Subcontinent has also started happening later and more rain happens in shorter time period which is resulting in flooding and crop damage. I am in agriculture trade and major crop arrivals to the market usually were same time period for decades but seem to be changing in the last few years.
The proposal for saving Antarctic ice in the submitted article may be just too big for humans to do. Sulfur dioxide injection, however, is dirt cheap, and we could definitely do that. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but we can do it.