2000 Forecast: Snowfall to disappear from the UK « JoNova

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Could a massive dam between Alaska and Russia save the Arctic?

Two years ago a science writer from the Netherlands proposed a radical solution to combat melting in the Arctic. In his "North Pole Rescue Plan," Rolf Schuttenhelm suggests blocking the flow of water from the Bering Sea into the Arctic Ocean. He argues that this idea -- crazy as it sounds -- is worth exploring.
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Yet Schuttenhelm is not the first to think damming the Bering merits further study. Decades ago, a Soviet engineer cobbled together a similar, if more elaborate, proposal aimed not at saving the Arctic's trademark chill, but eliminating it.

"We must thaw the ice in the Arctic Ocean," Petr Michailovich Borisov said in 1960 in an interview published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, a Russian language literary newspaper. (The article was reprinted in English in "The Bering Strait Project: Symposium.")

Borisov believed a thawed Arctic could solve any number of society's cold-driven ailments. Frozen soil and Arctic chill had made the Sakhalin oil fields hard to drill and construction of the Saratov-Moscow gas pipeline more challenging. When warm weather did show up, it sucked moisture from already dry climates, causing severe droughts in Russia and abroad. The frigid Arctic Ocean interfered with rice crops in Northern Japan and grape vines in the North of France, while sea ice clogged and blocked shorter routes for international shipping. And every facet of life was more expensive in the heart of the north's freezer box.

"Cold is a beast of prey that devours tremendous sums of money," noted the Literaturnaya Gazeta article's author, Boris Lyubimov, who was sympathetic to the cause.