RE: [geo] Arctic Wind Pump
Robert Tulip
Hi Kevin – in reply to your 12 August comment on Arctic wind pumps to thicken sea ice to increase albedo, I felt your description of this technology against the Rumsfeld epistemology was a bit flippant in view of its potential importance as a cost-effective contribution to planetary cooling. I don’t accept your assertion that Arctic sea ice is fatally doomed.
I see you have worked with Sev Clarke on his Ice Shield ideas (link), and am interested to know whether innovative methods can overcome the challenges you mention.
After reading your comment I returned to read Desch et al. (2017), Arctic Ice Management, (free link), which is the most prominent analysis of the Arctic wind pump sea ice concept. Steve Desch is a Professor of Astrophysics at Arizona State University.
This article presents suggestions that are quite different from your alleged “known knowns”, even accepting that you were responding to my slightly wild ‘bomb dispersal’ aircraft deployment idea. A key idea is to target locations along the fringe of the sea ice in early winter, rather than to deploy across the whole Arctic. There is no point deploying where ice will not melt away in summer, or where the ice melts early. The line of late melting ice can gradually be extended each year. I have added my interpretation of this to the attached file from Desch’s TEDx talk.
Desch suggests that small scale trials in northern Canada can test this concept, including in location where charismatic megafauna are under threat. It is amazing that this paper appears like so many geoengineering suggestions to have fallen dead-born from the press, when it appears to present a practical, safe, cheap and natural way to protect the Arctic ecology and the planetary climate. One commentary last year appears (typically) to exaggerate the risks and ignore the benefits.
I am not an engineer, so am just presenting ideas that could be readily refuted if they are wrong. With Arctic wind pumping, I would like to know if a mechanical pumping system could achieve better results than an electric turbine pump. I would also like to know if flexible materials rather than steel can work for a wind pump, so it would bend like a tree and would be lighter and cheaper to build.
Desch has a superb 2017 TEDx talk on this material - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD1QJrw6xjo I have included screen shots from his talk in the attached file to show the concept. I have added my understanding of the wind pump deployment line, in the diagram of ice thickness, along the boundary of 1.5 metre ice.
My interest in related topics started with investigation of tidal pumping a few years ago. It might be possible for tidal pumps to also contribute to Arctic ice thickening.
Regards
Robert
From: Kevin Lister <kevin.li...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 12 August 2021 10:02 PM
To: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>; geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [geo] RE: IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers
To answer Robert's comments on not seeing a downside to his proposal, and in the immortal intellectual framework of a previous Secretary of Defence:
There are known knowns, these are:
- If you are dropping wind turbines out of a plane, then best guess is that these would have a maximum power output of 2kW, or thereabouts. If they successfully land and penetrate the ice and start pumping, and the water forms a volcano shaped dome, with an inclination angle of 0.1 deg, then it will take a approximately 161 days to grow a cone that is 3 meters high at the pump, and it will have a radius of 1.7km. It would then take about 107,000 of these to cover the ice sheet. That's a lot and probably far more than all the planes of the US strategic deployment force can deliver at the beginning of winter. Even if this is successful, a significant number will be released from the edge of the ice in summer, say 10%, so approximately 10,000 will float around in the ocean.
Then there are known unknowns, these are:
- You do not know the angle that the water will settle on the ice,
- You do not know what shape the ice will form around the pump, it is likely to be a more complex and irregular doughnut shape. The mathematics behind this is extremely complicated, and after about a year's effort I managed only a partial solution before giving up.
- You do not know what effect the continual heat flow from the subsurface water being pumped onto the existing ice surface will have. In extremis, the pumps could cause the ice adjacent to them to melt so all they end up doing is pumping water into water.
- Even if there are solutions to all of these, there is the practical engineering matter of establishing the reliability of the pumps, especially when they are to operate in the Arctic winter which is both cold, dark and inaccessible.
Then there are the unknown unknowns, these are:
- With the heat flow into the Arctic from the lower latitudes, then getting reliable and consistent ice formation, even in the depths of winter, may no longer be possible.
- Ice formed on the surface of existing ice is of a totally different structure to ice naturally formed by freezing downwards from the existing ice. This new ice may have a structure more like glass and be of low albedo, so in the summer it could act as a miniature greenhouse on the existing ice, which is also being warmed from below, thus accelerating the loss of existing ice when it is needed the most. This would be the worst case scenario. We prevent heat release in the winter and minimise albedo in the summer.
- It is now as big an issue to release heat from the planet as it is to stop more heat coming in. Given that the Arctic sea ice is now fatally doomed, an alternative is to accept this and smash up the remaining ice in the winter with icebreakers to allow the most rapid release of heat to space, at an estimated rate ~500W/m^2
This is not to say that we should not increase planetary albedo and find ways to release heat. We clearly must do it. I maintain that the safe temperature rise is less than 0.5degC above baseline, which we passed through in 1980. But we should be under no illusions that this is going to be simple and absent of scientific and engineering risks.
Finally, and as you point out, carbon removal will be slow. The natural rate of removal is so slow as to not be measurable against CO2 emissions and the paleoclimate records that the AR6 is now taking more notice of indicates it will take about 250k years for CO2 to fall back to safe levels. So, as well as exploring all viable albedo and heat releasing mechanisms, we must immediately and simultaneously find ways to decarbonise.
Kevin
On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 12:16 PM 'Robert Tulip' via geoengineering <geoengi...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
I thought it was pretty bad that the IPCC report states as its headline B.1 finding that "Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades."
It should rather state "Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century even if deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades." (my bold)
As the NOAA AGGI report states, CO2 equivalents are now above 500 ppm. Emission reduction, technically defined, only reduces the future addition of GHGs to the system, and does nothing to remove the committed warming from past emissions. Leading scientists (eg Eelco Rohling) think past emissions already commit the planet to 2°C.
Even a major program of carbon conversion, transforming CO2 into useful commodities such as soil and fabric, would do nothing to stop the escalation of extreme weather this decade. Carbon removal is too small and slow, despite having orders of magnitude greater potential cooling impact than decarbonisation of the world economy.
My view is the only immediate solution is to brighten the planet. Albedo enhancement should start by pumping sea water onto the Arctic sea ice in winter to freeze and reduce the summer melt using wind energy (diagram attached). Marine cloud brightening is the next best option, followed by areas that need considerably more impact research such as stratospheric aerosol injection and iron salt aerosol.
It is a disgrace that the IPCC seems to have entirely written off this whole area of response, with no scientific reasoning as to why.
I understand that people find climate intervention for planetary restoration a rather mind-boggling idea and would prefer it were not needed. The problem is that extreme weather is steadily getting worse, and cutting emissions through the energy transition can do nothing to stop it. The overall issue is to define a scientific response to climate policy. That means relying on evidence to define the most safe and effective methods to support ongoing climate stability. Sadly AR6 squibbed that challenge.
Much of the public policy relies on other factors as well as science. Notably this is about public perceptions rather than empirical assessment. But that means the climate activist community will no longer be able to use the mantra "the science says" to oppose geoengineering, as Michael Mann and Bill McKibben and others now do.
I think the factors that could change public opinion quite quickly include the idea that immediate action to refreeze the Arctic is essential to maintain stability of main ocean currents. I was very perturbed to see the report last week on the slowing down of the AMOC Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and Gulf Stream collapse, with potential disasters for the world economy and ecology.
The linked press report suggested that decarbonising the economy is "the only thing to do" to prevent the AMOC from stopping. That is an absurdly unscientific opinion. It just fails to see that such natural processes require action at orders of magnitude bigger scale than the marginal effect of slowing down how much carbon we add to the air.
If steps were taken to fully refreeze the Arctic Ocean, perhaps with the quid pro quo of including transpolar shipping canals through the ice, the scale would be big enough to stop the dangerous looming tipping points of accelerating feedback warming. Alongside AMOC, big problems such as polar methane release, wandering of the jet stream and melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet are also well beyond what decarbonisation can prevent.
I really don't see any downside to such a freezing proposal, which should be an Apollo-type world peace project led by the G20. The climate activist community sees it as enabling a slower transition to renewables, but surely buying time in this way is entirely a good thing if it means we actually stabilise the climate?
Robert Tulip
From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Robert Cormia
Sent: Tuesday, 10 August 2021 4:32 AM
To: chris.vivian2 <Chris....@btinternet.com>
Cc: Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers
It took decades to get the public's attention about the clear and present danger of climate change, through extreme weather events, historic fires, and sea level rise. CDR is entering the dialog, slowly, it needs to accelerate. Newscasters could add a simple soundbite "net zero emissions and CO2 removal" as strategies, not just "clean energy and electric cars" How do we gain the public's awareness, much less attention, that putting a speed brake on emissions requires CDR, and restoring energy balance (addressing energy imbalance) is our best potential/feasible solution?
-rdc
On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 2:48 AM 'chris.vivian2' via Carbon Dioxide Removal <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
In the IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers published today, see sections D.1.4 to D.1.6 on page 40 where it mentions CDR - https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf.
Chris
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Kevin Lister
Sev Clarke
On 22 Aug 2021, at 6:53 am, Kevin Lister <kevin.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
Okay Robert,So in further answer to your comments, and I write these as an engineer and a mathematician:
Steve Desch's TED presentation and powerpoints are indeed very compelling. However, the final summary statement from Steve in his closing remarks is that we don't have much time and his presentation was made in 2017, and four years of time have now passed. The super exponential rate of change that has occured in the Arctic during this time, driven by interacting feedback mechanisms, has most likely rendered the concept unachievable. So, while it might have worked if we had started it in 1980 when Peter Wadhams first measured ice loss, I would suspect it would be unlikely to be effective now given the heat flow into the Arctic and the concentration of this heat in the upper surface of the ocean. Put simply, it is difficult to thicken ice in a hot bath tub. Thickening sea ice will remain possible whilst it forms in winter. This is likely to remain the case for some decades, though the window is narrowing. As we manage to thicken and ground more sea ice, thickening still more should become possible.The concept may have been to thicken ice only on the edges of the ice sheet, but the width of the edge to be thickened would necessarily have to be quite wide. It certainly would not be a narrow strip a couple of hundred meters wide, more likely that strip would need to be many tens of miles wide, perhaps hundreds of miles wide, and as the graphic shows that Steve presented, the edge of the sea ice is not a smooth line but a twisting and elongated line that is constantly changing, thus the circumference is long. Whilst sea ice might be thickened and grounded most easily in shallow water near to land (growing it outwards from the coast thereafter in subsequent years), it can also be thickened with floating (and probably mobile) ice shield arrays wherever sea ice forms in winter. This would be of most use in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Consequently, the area of thick and permanent ice that would not need thickening is likely to be small, and limited to the last bits of permanent ice immediately north of Greenland. It is also important to note that the summer ice that is left only has a reasonably large surface area because it breaks up into small pieces that are mobile and this is not evident on the satellite images of summer ice.In the graphic that you included, it shows a 10kW pump. That's not a lot of power to pump water. In the quick calculations I did previously a 10 kW pump operating for about 120 days, which is the most optimistic estimate for the available pumping time would be capable of thickening ice to 2.33 meters thick at the pumping unit and achieving a radius of 700 meters assuming that it formed a cone with a 1deg angle and the base ice was 1 meter thick. This assumes that the pump is so designed that the water flows immediately only to the ice and disperses on the surface, which was the basis of the engineering proposals that I looked at. On the grade scale of the Arctic Ocean, that's a negligible contribution and it ignores the plethora of other problems that I listed previously, such as the different ice structure that will form and the impact of the heat flow from the ocean onto the surface of the naturally formed ice. In my Ice Shield concept, I envisage 2.5MW wind turbines each powering many satellite pumping stations, each station thickening its encasing, lenticular ice shield by up to 80m/year nearest the pumping station. Each ice shield might eventually have a radius of perhaps 1.2km and would fuse onto the adjacent three shields in hexagonal close-packing, leaving polynyas between them, some of which would be inhabited by wind turbines. Arctic waters up to several hundred metres deep might eventually be covered in grounded ice shield arrays. The excess brine flowing off the perimeter of each ice shield would carry substantial amounts of dissolved CO2 and O2 to the seabed, where the CO2 would react with seabed carbonates to form benign, dissolved bicarbonate - thereby sequestering surface ocean and atmospheric CO2 safely for the long term.As I said before, the structure of the ice formation under this regime is extremely difficult to predict and it is unlikely to end up as a symmetric and well defined cone. Agreed The ultimate shape depends on complex heat flow calculations, mass dispersal, and requires a difficult application of Fourier analysis to solve. I managed to get a partial solution, but was not happy that I was moving in anything like a robust direction, and it seems to me that significant computer simulation is needed to establish the feasibility. Practical experimentation might be better, as an intermittent pumping regime together with directed flows could create many different shapes.In answer to your question about having mechanical pumps or electrical pumps, I would say that it does not matter. It is the generation of power in a hostile environment that is the problem. Steve's proposals are based on a huge number of inefficient power systems which creates difficult logistics problems, and Sev's proposals are based on megawatt scale wind turbines which would be almost impossible to engineer for reliable operation in an Arctic environment I disagree. Engineers can do amazing things, even in hostile environments and wind turbines are already working in polar and sub-polar environments. Moreover, the formation of the grounded ice arrays would itself obviate hostility from wave, current and translocation. The different solutions and approaches simply trade a different set of problems. If you were to have electrical power systems, you would need subsea (or on ice) cables to transmit the power, and if the ice started breaking up and moving around, then the power cables would break even if you were able to lay them at the beginning of the freezing season. If you had purely mechanical systems, such as a direct driven pumping system, you would need to have a method of ensuring that you do not have an ice build up in the event of cold and clear windless days. I looked at having a subsea pump (is good) and an insulation system, with accumulators to provide energy to keep the water flowing in periods of low wind (better to have the seawater in the pumping tube flow back to the warmer sea in periods of low wind, plus having electrical de-icing elements where needed), but the system quickly gets very complicated.
In answer to your question of flexible materials being of help, the answer is that this is unlikely to help. Wind turbine blades are already designed with resilience and flexibility built in, but that flexibility has to be carefully calibrated against the expected loads. If you design a slender structure like a turbine blade with too much flexibility, then you will get flutter in the blades and a catastrophic failure.
So yes, have small scale trials in Canada and see how the ice forms on preexisting sea ice and see how long it lasts over the summer. There's nothing wrong with doing research and we looked into this. But small scale trials will not solve the logistics and engineering problems associated with a large scale deployment, and before investing time on small scale experiments which are still likely to be very expensive, it is worth investigating the science and engineering of this when deployed at scale and checking some basic energy requirements. And even before you do small scale experiments, there is significant documentation on artificial ice formation from the oil industry's past history of building ice islands in the Arctic for drilling, and it's not too encouraging for climate restoration purposes and proposals being advocated. That is partly because gasoil drillers used flooding seawater rather than intermittent pumping to produce a low-angle, ice ‘volcanic’ cone off which flowed residual brine.As has been the thrust of this discussion thread, even under the absolute best case scenario of zero carbon by 2050 (not net-zero), it would take at least two hundred years for CO2 to fall to 300ppm, (maybe not if we use combinations of Ice Shields, Buoyant Flakes, Seatomiser and Fiztop technologies, plus strong mitigation. Deployed at scale we still should be able to cool the planet and go below 300ppm this century, depending somewhat on how far beyond and how many other tipping points are passed in the meanwhile) and that assumes a huge number of variables such as the ongoing sustainable strength of carbon sinks and even this wildly optimistic scenario is far longer than the expected life left in the Arctic ice cap, which once lost will lead to a significantly different ecosystem that will be unlikely to able to remove CO2, so it is imperative that we have SRM (Yes, and TRM and mitigation) and we need to be able to bring the climate back to its condition before interacting feedback mechanisms were first triggered, so that it is to a temperature less than 0.5degC of baseline. So while we should explore all options for SRM, we must equally be quick to dismiss proposals that are not feasible or cannot be deployed and sustained for ultra long time periods (or are over-risky and unacceptable by the community, as I judge is SAI and most space-based methods) and so it is as valid to know what won't work as it is to know what will Indeed.
Andrew Lockley
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Ronal Larson
"An iceboat (occasionally spelled ice boat or traditionally called an ice yacht) is a recreational or competition sailing craft supported on metal runners for traveling over ice."
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<Slides from Desch TEDx Arctic Wind Pump.pptx>
Peter Flynn
Some thoughts.
1. The work Songjian Zhou and I did envisioned unmanned barges equipped with high lift/spray and low lift pump capability, the former to help form new ice (as was done in making ice islands for drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea), the latter moving a far higher volume of water onto the ice surface. Both technologies are well proven.
2. We envisioned summer retrieval of barges for annual maintenance. This would involve cutting them out of ice. The alternative is servicing by helicopter. Some maintenance program will be required.
3. Heuristic arguments that the project is too big or the Arctic too cold frustrate me. Neither are true. I have found far too many unsupported “that won’t work” comments in the field of geoengineering. I have personal experience with work on a northern project (-40 in the winter) with a capital value in excess of $15 billion. As was already noted: this can be engineered.
4. Salt disposition (does it stay in the surface formed ice or migrate through microchannels, as brine, through the ice) remains an interesting question, but no reason not to do a physical experiment.
5. Ron, thanks for observing that our 2005 work seemed to fall off the map as far as references go. I’m retired and long past the annual faculty review process.
Best,
Peter
Peter Flynn, P. Eng., Ph. D.
Emeritus Professor and Poole Chair in Management for Engineers
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Gilles de Brouwer
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