Total Pageviews

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Freezing the Arctic with Wind Turbines

I have just read the most abysmally stupid idea for combating climate change.  Some 'professor' proposes to put some 10 million wind pumps all over the arctic ocean at a cost of trillions of dollars to pump sea water onto the ice where it will freeze and thicken the ice.

Leaving aside the difficulty of building and maintaining anything which is floating amongst the ship crushing ice flows in the Arctic, how about putting all these wind turbines on land and off shore all over the world to generate electricity and replace fossil fuel use.  Use some of these trillions for energy storage systems as well and promote electric cars.  Attack the source of the problem, not the symptoms.

Besides, when surface sea water freezes naturally, it produces fresh water ice.  The salt is rejected, forms brine which sinks to the bottom of the ocean.  As heat conducts through the ice into the atmosphere, more fresh water ice is frozen to the bottom of the existing ice and more brine is produced.  This fresh water ice is strong and melts...well at the freezing point of ice.

If you pump sea water on to the ice where it freezes, it will be full of salt.  That slushy weak ice will melt out rapidly when spring comes and will likely melt out the underlying fresh water ice just like when you put salt on an icy sidewalk.

Add to that, even if this hair brained idea did work, what would the effect be when we are up to 500 or 600 ppm CO2 and the funds ran out at the next economic crisis (none of the fundamentals were changed by the Obama presidency) and the first item cut from the budget is maintaining all these wind pumps in one of the harshest environments in the world.

This whole idea reminds me of the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff type policy that we use with our refugees.  Instead of eliminating the source of the refugees, we spend huge amounts of money trying to care for them.  They don't want to be in our strange (to them) land.  They want to be in their homes amongst their friends.

To stop the creation of refugees, the next time someone decides to start a completely unjustified war in someone else's country,  the whole world should put full sanctions on them.  Yes America and the UK, I am talking about you.

Even worse, when you refuse to come to the party and reduce your carbon pollution, once again sanctions should be imposed until you wake up.  Here I am only addressing the US.  The UK is making a pretty reasonable fist of reducing their carbon emissions.

This ridiculous idea of trying to artificially create more ice is  philosophically, practically and scientifically fought.  Get real and address the cause.  Use these trillions to get us free from fossil fuels.

No comments: