Running the numbers on an insane scheme to save Antarctic ice

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/running-the-numbers-on-an-insane-scheme-to-save-antarctic-ice/

by jseliger • 7 years ago

103 32 7 years ago

jseliger• 7 years ago

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.

Ixiaus3• 7 years ago

I agree, I think geoengineering is unavoidable. As far as geoengineering projects go, this one looks like the most feasible and safe so far:

https://projectvesta.org/

avip• 7 years ago

Could you elaborate? Enhanced Weathering is questionable on many levels. Have you compared it to other approaches?

endymi0n• 7 years ago

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.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing this, I wonder why more projects like this aren't under way already?

Sounds like the time to seriously start to consider these kinds of projects is now.

f4rker• 7 years ago

Climate change catastrophe has been exaggerated for over 30 yr now

UN predicted catastrophe in 1989

https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

adrianN• 7 years ago

The IPCC predictions tend to be too conservative:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43e8yp/the-uns-devastatin...

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.

tsimionescu• 7 years ago

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.

Scarblac• 7 years ago

As long as our CO2 emissions still grow every year, it's much more cost effective to work on that rather than remove some tiny part of it afterwards.

ximeng• 7 years ago

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw4132 - original article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup - unit of flow for ocean currents

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"

learnfromstory• 7 years ago

Does 12000 windmills sound like a lot? Consider that we have 1.7 million oil wells in the USA alone.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

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?

singularity2001• 7 years ago

Iron fertilization seems like a much more reasonable approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

Each kilogram of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

How much of that is permanently fixed, and how much of it goes right back when those organisms die?

namibj• 7 years ago

Bury it deep? A large part of the carbon should remain and turn into coal.

azernik• 7 years ago

From linked article:

"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.)"

curtis2• 7 years ago

A few years ago I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding sulfur dioxide injection into the stratosphere: http://curtisb.posthaven.com/someday-soon-chemtrails-may-be-....

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.

millstone• 7 years ago

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."

mikedilger• 7 years ago

You do know that sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere causes acid rain, right?

curtis2• 7 years ago

This paper considers that very question: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2009...

From the "Conclusions" section:

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.

networkimprov• 7 years ago

The 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo caused 0.5C degree of cooling the following year (i.e. instantaneously).

We need short-term remediation, starting immediately. This is the only cost-effective method.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/

Tade0• 7 years ago

How about using planks of cooling wood[0] to cover parts of the sea instead?

It should float and perhaps can create a cooling effect large enough to make ice out of already freezing seawater?

[0] https://www.coolingpost.com/features/cool-wood-could-take-th...

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

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.

Retric3• 7 years ago

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.

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

"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).

Running the numbers on an insane scheme to save Antarctic ice

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