Climate Change Has Brought Forth Countless Proposals To Mitigate The Harm It Will Do

But at the tragic heart of the issue is the fact that it is NOT Climate Change that we have to worry about first and foremost.

The deadliest threat to life as we know it is the lethality of yesterday’s trillion tonne dose of CO2 we have forced upon GAIA herself (that includes us)

GAIA has some advice to those willing to consider this — follow the money and don’t waste any more time

Recently I have been corresponding/brainstorming with a journalist in Moscow who has been pursuing an interest in whether there is any hope for the world, for GAIA. This post is part of that correspondence that is directed toward one of the ideas he fancies that might help save the world from climate change. I hate to pop the bubbles of his bubble wrapped notion of refreezing the arctic but there is an important ‘case in point’ lesson within.

Dear A, This engineering notion of refreezing the arctic is demonstrable as being one of the roots of the dilemma of poor GAIA. Here’s my hypothesis that I have given some, not sufficient thought to. I am open to comments, ideas, and help with this. My apologies that it is somewhat of a rant.

It seems to me the climate change ‘refreeze the arctic’ engineers have chosen to misunderstand/misrepresent the nature of Arctic ice and mechanism of freezing in the arctic. Given the sums of money in doing anything along their line of thought one doesn’t have to go past the rule “follow the money” to perhaps understand motivations. The field of climate change is like that, there is so much money in the game most people are willing to adapt any idea to secure a place at the table. Such adaptation is always seen as an intentional over simplification of the complexities of climate and global temperature.

10 million proposed wind powered devices, at $50,000 per device, $500 billion in all are in the first draft ‘refreeze the arctic’ estimate. Such first estimates are always a fraction of what such grand schemes really take.

In this case the ice modellers start with the simple presumption that the arctic ice is merely frozen from the air down as if the arctic and its ice works like a simple refrigerator. Of course since their only experience in Nature is inside their refrigerators this explains such a simplified point of view. The freezing process on the Arctic Ocean and the nature of the ice that forms is not so simple as a refrigerator as it is a very large-scale dynamic ocean system. The simple model suggests that by allowing a half a trillion dollar bet to be made ‘on credit’ the game is on.

Sustainable Ice Is Needed

As the ice forms on the surface of the sea and grows, at the bottom of the skim of ice, it sheds its salinity at the water interface and the ice becomes less and less salty. It is a very delicate ‘balance of nature’ chemistry trick. Since fresh water freezes more readily than salt water this provides the leverage that historically freezes/makes large amounts of durable/sustainable multi-year arctic ice.

It is rather analogous to making ice cream by salting ice, therein lies the same chemical/salty energy advantage over simply the temperature. To get at the cold available and needed for ice cream first you must start with fresh water ice, to make it cold enough to make your ice cream. Pumping salt water onto the surface of what ice cap remains to freeze as proposed will make saltier ice not fresher ice. Bzzzt… the arctic cold available isn’t cold enough to make this sustainable ice.

The physical chemical thermodynamics simply don’t support the hypothesis. There is likely insufficient cold available to make the volume of sustainable salty ice required, to say nothing of the dramatic to changes physical ice characteristics that will be profoundly ecologically different that might result with a salty ice cap. When summer arrives short-term salty ice turns to slush fast.

Atlantic water reaches the Arctic Ocean via two main branches, which separate in the northern Norwegian Sea. There it flows under the ice where it has led to the Arctic losing its sustainable ice.

The question remains as to whether warmer water intrusions from the warmer ocean water to the south is substantially driving Arctic unfreezing. If that is so then there certainly is no hope to do the refreezing as the thermal mass balance with such a mass of water is far too great to overcome. Once again one first has to calculate the total energy change being seen and then calculate the amount of energy the human engineering, aka the pumps, might put into the equation.

Back of the envelope

Surely back of the envelope maths suggest that the energy we puny humans can put into the equations are orders of magnitude out of play. The engineers proposing this are selling their ideas that will see them receive large ego and financial returns… that’s just the same old same old testosterone ego prancing. If this is the level of scientific validity needed to define meaningful climate change mitigation then we might just as well go with the flat earthers as their ‘science’ allows any and all science fiction.

As for your concern for the threats of a shifting jet stream as the Artic unfreezes, well that may well be GAIA’s way of dealing with her poisoned malaise. We too surely will have to follow her lead, sorry for the inconvenience Miami and Bangladesh though no one there won’t be able to walk away from the rising tides. We’ll no real persons anyway, the corporate personhood banksters are going to need snorkels 😊 as their ‘asses (ets)’ don’t walk.

GIGO earth science by computer

This is all illustrative of the insanity of the shift seen in the world of natural history and climate of late where that science has been reduced by armchair mathematicians to a computer game of rival GIGO models (garbage in garbage out). The armchairs are filled with the countless puppy mill protégés who failing the constitution or earnest intention to engage in the challenges of field science write nonsense mathematical models/games. In thos games they have removed all the messy and imperfect bits, other wise known as nature’s variability, to make their models compute on the available hardware. The boldest of the modellers engage in banal arguments where they measure each others computer ‘iron,’ and the one with the ‘biggest iron’ wins.

All over the world insects are reported to be disappearing. They aren’t gone completely anywhere yet, but their numbers reveal far more than decimation, 75% of our insect shipmates are missing in Europe. Click to read more

Having thrown out Nature and her natural ways out of the simplified models makes them ‘work’ on paper, of course the proof is in the doing. Surely a test at 1/10th of 1% scale must be done before any of this can be considered. Since the total cost of refreezing the arctic is sure to be at least a trillion dollars we need an experiment costing at least $10 billion to get any sort of data to test the hypothesis. The design of that $10 billion experiment will mean it really needs to cost far more, prototypes always cost ten times the final version so we are talking about a $100 billion test. Good luck with that research proposal.

Taking care of GAIA means we need eco-restoration not geo-engineering

We have tickled Nature/GAIA and made her flinch. To suggest we can pour into Nature a massive amount of counter momentum to quiet that flinch is absurd. We are not going to offset that momentum in a short time frame, sorry there are consequences as to how dire those consequence are well have to wait and see. The important thing to the ecosystem that we call Gaia it is her biology/ecology that we must be concerned with, NOT her momentary climatic flinch. If we take care of her she will take care of us.

The trillion tonnes of yesterday’s CO2, emitted by our fossil fool age, is wreaking havoc on this planet, it is now clearly seen to be a lethal overdose of CO2 that is effectively our genocide against the smallest and most vulnerable of life, the insects of the land and the plankton of the seas. Click to read more

Her eco-restored healthy living systems will conform the climate to its (our) needs, Nature always does this and she does it fast enough, for life as we know it, given a chance. Nature also conforms herself to climate but that pathway always takes millennia. Our first fast lethal dose of yesterday’s CO2 is KILLING nature today and as those parts of her die, her capacity to adapt/conform dies with those parts. Evolving replacement parts for GAIA takes not millennia but rather eons.

Stop being distracted by climate change and focus on the immediate dying of life

I say save the parts of GAIA we have poisoned today, nothing else matters, and that takes becoming good shepherds not smart ass engineers or avaricious banksters in the climate industrial complex.

OK I will agree perhaps we should throw everything in the book at the problem as we have surely invented a plethora of crazy technologies to create Gaia’s ills.

The greatest threat to the environment is waiting for someone else to save it.