Monday, July 12, 2010

Here's an idea: Why not spend $45 billion on an insane, fossil-fueled scheme to make the Arctic colder?

Refreezing the Arctic | UpHere.ca
It’s widely feared climate change could melt the Arctic, causing global chaos. Enter Peter Flynn, Poole Chair in Management for Engineers at the University of Alberta, with a scheme to save the world.

Up Here: What’s your plan to thicken the Arctic ice?
Peter Flynn: It would involve 8,100 barges that head into the Arctic Ocean in the fall, then use wind turbines to pump seawater from under the ice onto the surface, where it freezes.

UH: And the barges are unmanned?
PF: That's right. They would position themselves automatically, but we'd have a control centre on land to oversee them. The plan also budgets for 32 helicopters to fly in and do maintenance on pumps and wind-power systems. We’d have to build a harbour and an airbase, of course.
...it comes to $45 billion – we were shocked ourselves. But when you think about it, around 100 million people in Europe are in serious threat. So that’s down to $500 a head, which suddenly sounds reasonable.
2008: Home of the blizzard | UpHere.ca
Nunavut has seen lots of snowstorms, but no one was ready for what struck the Kivalliq region last winter. Between 2 a.m. on January 16 and 10 a.m. on January 23 – a record-breaking seven days and five hours – Rankin Inlet looked like it was drowning in skim milk. Winds gusted above 90 kilometres per hour and never dropped below 74. Temperatures sank as low as minus-58 with the wind-chill.
...
According to Environment Canada, it was by far the nation’s longest blizzard – defined as a snowstorm with winds above 40 kilometres per hour, visibility under one kilometre and wind-chills of at least minus-25. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the runner-up whiteouts had also been in Nunavut: 89-hour blizzards in Baker Lake in 1987 and Resolute in 1977, and an 87-hour storm in Iqaluit in 1979.

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