Whitening the Arctic Ocean: May restore sea ice, but not climate

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://carnegiescience.edu/news/whitening-arctic-ocean-may-restore-sea-ice-not-climate

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Whitening the Arctic Ocean: May restore sea ice, but not climate[/font]

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

[font size=3]Washington, D.C.— Some scientists have suggested that global warming could melt frozen ground in the Arctic, releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, greatly amplifying global warming. It has been proposed that such disastrous climate effects could be offset by technological approaches, broadly called geoengineering. One geoengineering proposal is to artificially whiten the surface of the Arctic Ocean in order to increase the reflection of the Sun’s energy into space and restore sea ice in the area.

New research from Carnegie’s Ivana Cvijanovic (now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Ken Caldeira, as well as Douglas MacMartin of Caltech, shows that while an incredibly large effort could, in principle, restore vast amounts of sea ice by this method, it would not result in substantial cooling. As a result, it would not be effective in keeping the ground frozen in the Arctic. Their findings are published by Environmental Research Letters.

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Using specially developed model configurations, the team studies how Arctic whitening would be expected to play out in a world with four times the preindustrial amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide , and an Arctic that is about 10 degrees Celsius hotter (18 degrees Fahrenheit).

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“Simply put, our results indicate that whitening the surface of the Arctic Ocean would not be an effective tool for offsetting the effects of climate change caused by atmospheric greenhouse gas,” Caldeira said. “Furthermore, it is not clear to me that there is a technologically feasible way of actually doing this, and even if you could do it, the direct negative consequences of reducing the amount of sunlight available to marine ecosystems could be huge.”

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[Warpy]

1. The huge one day spike in methane over the Arctic has them panicking

as well they should, since it's not even getting that warm up there yet. Release of methane locked in and under permafrost in northern Canada and Siberia is the likeliest culprit.

[Nihil]

2. Or a shallow clathrate deposit hit critical point ...

... and went with one massive belch before dispersing ...