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A Controversial Plan To Refreeze the Arctic is Seeing Promising Results (cnn.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Deep in the Canadian Arctic, scientists and entrepreneurs brave sub-zero temperatures, whipping winds and snowstorms to drill holes through the sea ice to pump out the seawater below and freeze it on the surface. The group from the UK start-up Real Ice is in Cambridge Bay, a tiny coastal village in Nunavut, to try to prove they can grow and restore Arctic sea ice.

Their ultimate plan is to thicken ice over more than 386,000 square miles of the Arctic -- an area more than twice the size of California -- with the aim of slowing down or even reversing summer ice loss and, in doing so, help to tackle the human-caused climate crisis. It's a bold plan, and one of many controversial geo-engineering proposals to save the planet's vulnerable polar regions that range from installing a giant underwater "curtain" to protect ice sheets, to sprinkling tiny glass beads to reflect away sunlight.

Some Arctic scientists and experts have criticized Real Ice's methods as unproven at scale, ecologically risky and a distraction from tackling the root cause of climate change: fossil fuels. But the company says its project is inspired by natural processes and offers a last chance to protect a disappearing ecosystem as the world fails to act swiftly on climate change.
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A Controversial Plan To Refreeze the Arctic is Seeing Promising Results More

A Controversial Plan To Refreeze the Arctic is Seeing Promising Results

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  • The age old argument (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Turkinolith ( 7180598 ) on Thursday December 12, 2024 @05:10PM (#65008961)
    Re: "a distraction from tackling the root cause of climate change: fossil fuels."

    Looks like the old argument: Do something now to try to help the situation somehow or wait to come up with the best solution.

    I think given the way things are going in the world we're going to need a bit of both.

    • This. You can only do what you can do. If you can't get other people to stop polluting, but you have a way to reduce the effects, that's worth doing! Whether it will work is a different question (I hope it does!), but the slow inevitability of doom isn't a good reason to stop trying to push it back.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

      It's really a short sighted perspective a lot of people have with that old argument 'Fossil fuels'.
      No, the problem isn't fossil fuels, they're a symptom of the problem.

      The problem is not having a replacement that's sustainable and economical yet to replace oil based products which we require for a lot of industry, consumer, and electronics used by society. The other problem is how to recycle everything built from fossil fuels, as it produces c02.

      Well, the answer to most things seems to be recycling. So recy

    • We're not going to do anything about emissions; they're only going to increase (see: gaming theory):

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      The only thing that even slowed it down was Covid.

      Look at these impossible scenarios to even prevent even the least damage:

      https://media.springernature.c... [springernature.com]

      Sea ice? Just another distraction.
  • Is that there are entrepreneurs involved in this. Entrepreneurship [wikipedia.org] is the creation or extraction of economic value. I wonder what economic value they gain from this.

    • Is that there are entrepreneurs involved in this. Entrepreneurship [wikipedia.org] is the creation or extraction of economic value. I wonder what economic value they gain from this.

      Somebody's gotta provide the drills and pumps, and the power/fuel used to drive them.

      • so? where is the creation or extraction of economic value in this action?

        • so? where is the creation or extraction of economic value in this action?

          I would guess somebody's getting some money out of transporting and running all that gear. No way that's happening "for free." Not to mention, there's probably a hefty price tag on whatever power requirements they have due to being in such cold conditions. There has to be somebody footing that bill. Is there some government body shoveling cash at the project? That would be my first suspicion..

        • I imagine the group that wants to do this would likely try to receive government funding (any government funding) and the private market would supply the drills and pumps in exchange for that money. So all of us would be paying for this endeavor via taxation and those selling tools would profit.

          Is this the best use of those resources? I've no idea but I'm sure someone who has the time and access to enough data could help make that choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Their involvement may not be entrepreneurial, though. An entrepreneur is someone who engages in entrepreneurship, not the entrepreneurship itself. People do many things.

      Warren Buffet is an investor who gave half is net worth to a charity. That gift was not an investment.

  • Their stated plan is to do research for the next 3 years and THEN "scale" to 100 sq km in year four ... that is 38 square miles ... less than 0.01% of the problem. So the 100 sq km must be a pretty tenuous objective if they need 3 more years of research to figure this out.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Vegan Cyclist ( 1650427 )

      Here's the irony - pretty much all power generation in the Arctic is diesel generators.

      Including this.

      TFA says 'green hydrogen' is the ultimate goal, but in the meantime they're only adding to the problem in their experiment.

      It's literally like pouring gas on a fire to try and put it out.

      • I think they're trying to find out whether this has even a prayer of working, not to come up with an ideal long-term solution right away. As one researcher I used to work with liked to put it, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." If you're trying to expand our knowledge of something, it often seems a bit like scrabbling around in the dark until you can find that interesting nugget you were looking for.

        • It's a ludicrous plan, period. There's scrambling around in the dark, and then there's poking out your own eyes.

          • I don’t think it’s ludicrous, though it’s by no means guaranteed to produce the results they’re hoping for. You have no clue how science works.

    • During those 3 years, they could see what the local impact on wild life would be by doing this. With enough observational data, they can then determine if it's worth scaling up.

  • Ministry For The Future & Kitchen Sink (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PseudoThink ( 576121 ) on Thursday December 12, 2024 @05:37PM (#65009053)

    I enjoyed reading Kim Stanley Robinson's rendition of this idea in Ministry for the Future. Like the plot of that book, I think the haphazard and piecemeal approaches to geoengineering our way out of climate change may not be optimal, but are probably necessary and more realistic than hoping for our deeply flawed global organizations and national governments to initiate a more effective approach.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      I had the exact same thought! Also enjoyed that book. And thought of it with the killing of that healthcare insurance CEO too

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      That's basically the plot of Neal Stephenson's recent book, "Termination Shock". The people who have money to lose via climate change will start acting to reverse it, as the investment required is well within the means of many large organizations.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 12, 2024 @07:10PM (#65009237)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • You must be, and speak like, a true Vancouverite, who owes their entire quality of life to their neighbor province. Emissions from the oil sand have been steadily dropping, and both emissions and wages are now far better than the sources you will replace it with in the Middle East if you kill your backyard business. As the old adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good (and in your case I’ll add stupid) intentions.

  • Correct me if I am wrong, I thought one of the rules of thermal dynamics is that if you cool one area you heat another, will the net effect to zero, all they would achieve is to transfer the heat from one place to another.

    Maybe they're just after the participation award, so they can all get a ribbon.

    • Re:Correct me if I am wrong (Score:5, Informative)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Thursday December 12, 2024 @07:33PM (#65009321)

      By increasing ice coverage, they increase planetary albedo and reflect solar energy back into space before it is absorbed and re-emitted as heat.

      They're not dropping the temperature, they're adding a parasol so it doesn't get hot in the first place.

      • And, since the ice cover already exists, they are really just slowing the rate that the parasol melts away -extending the time that we can benefit from its reflectivity.

        • Yes, in the worst case. But if they can manage to keep enough of the sea ice around, there would be some hope of cooling the Arctic and expanding the ice over time. (Over geologic time the sea ice has both increased and decreased, so it *is* possible to increase it, although it's difficult). Admittedly this would be a little like the mythological Sisyphus who was doomed to roll a huge boulder uphill for eternity, but if it can buy us some time to get our act together, so much the better.

    • Only in a closed system, consider yourself corrected

  • This is what angers with with opponents of efforts to reverse the effects of climate change. They seem to think that doing so will allow people to just keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That is there ONLY goal and it's naive as fuck. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today, there is an enormous amount of damage already baked in so we need to find ways to adapt and possibly reverse that.

  • Where have I seen this before? (Score:3)

    by Randseed ( 132501 ) on Thursday December 12, 2024 @08:11PM (#65009409)
    Sounds almost like the 1989 plot of Midwinter [wikipedia.org].
  • I thought natural ice was pure water. Pumping up seawater would introduce salt. It would lower the melting point of the ice, but what other effects would it have? Would lowering the melting point of the natural ice cause it to melt faster during a warm period?
    • Yes, it would melt faster if the temperature warmed up. Most of the natural ice in the Arctic is from snowfalls, which are essentially pure water. The idea is to create enough of it such that it stays around longer than the ice that's there "naturally", and thereby increasing the albedo of the Arctic ocean, causing more sunlight to be reflected back out into space. Obviously there are a lot of interactions involved here, and the point of the study is to see whether it might be possible to force the system i
  • I wonder what the stability of this ice will be in the summer when it currently is melting faster due to warming.I assume if it freezes "down' into the sea water the salt segregates into the wafer leaving pure ice. If the sea water is dumped on top of the ice to freeze where does all that salt go?

  • Some Arctic scientists and experts have criticized Real Ice's methods as unproven at scale, ecologically risky and a distraction from tackling the root cause of climate change: fossil fuels.

    Since the first UN resolution on global warming, ANNUAL emissions have grown by two thirds. Not only have we not done anything to slow emissions, we have put our foot on the gas to create even more.

    I'm cynical enough to think the real "distraction" is competition for funding. Since the current "scientists and experts" don't seem to be actually accomplishing anything beyond talk, I am not sure competition for their funding is a problem. It doesn't matter if fossil fuels are the root cause if you can't or ar

  • This is too funny it's got to be an april fools.

    When they freeze the ice.

    Um...

    Where are they dumping the heat?

    #watchhumanspanicwhentheycantunderstandwhatsinfrontofthem

  • I leave the fridge door open.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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