Paul Homewood beat me to it with this, but I just can’t resist writing a post on it also. Just too funny. The BBC reports that Cambridge scientists are to set up a centre looking at ways to ‘fix’ the climate. One of the ideas apparently is to “refreeze the poles”. The initiative is coordinated by the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Prof Sir David King.
Refreezing the poles
One of the most promising ideas for refreezing the poles is to “brighten” the clouds above them.
The idea is to pump seawater up to tall masts on uncrewed ships through very fine nozzles.
This produces tiny particles of salt which are injected into the clouds, which makes them more widespread and reflective, and so cool the areas below them.
Seriously. I mean, apart from the small inconvenient fact that the poles are already frozen – unless mile thick glaciers, icebergs and endless snowy wastes are a figment of climate deniers’ imaginations – isn’t this just the maddest, most screwy, megalomaniac idea you’ve heard from climate alarmists since the last maddest, screwiest, megalomanic idea?
You never know though, it might catch on and the Cambridge Climate Repair Centre may turn out to be a profitable franchise. Kind of like Kwikfit. They’ll eventually set up in every major University town. You’ll just wheel your broken down climate in and they’ll fix it there and then.
The Climate Repair Centre will form part of the Carbon Neutral Futures Initiative which has itself only just recently been set up and Emily Shuckburgh appointed as its first director. We’ve met Dr Emily Shuckburgh before on this blog. Geoff pointed out her role as adviser to Prince Charles whilst writing his Ladybird Book on Climate Change. Curiously, there’s a picture of her on that post, wearing a very warm looking parka, set against a backdrop of frozen [not frozen] Antarctic snowy wastes, taken presumably when she was working for the British Antarctic Survey. I imagine this was a couple of years ago and it’s all green and lush now and in urgent need of repair. I must say, the picture looks photo-shopped to me. The Union Jack is flying like mad in the background but her hair seems not to be moving at all. So maybe even then the Antarctic had melted and they had to superimpose her image onto an old stock photo.
Dr Shuckburgh also wrote a haughty letter to the Times criticising Matt Ridley’s article on ice ages, saying that he forgot to mention that the ice age cycle was ‘broken’ (another job for the Climate Repair Centre?) and therefore we wouldn’t be expecting another for at least 50,000 years. I wrote about this here.
These people are actually getting paid for this nonsense and sucking up public subsidies for their insane ‘initiatives’. That’s the part that’s not quite so funny.
Climate Scepticism 
Before firing up the polar climate center, it would be wise to remember what humans have already done to Antarctica. Thanks to the Onion we have the Timeline Of Human Activity In Antarctica, with some added images.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/timeline-of-human-activity-in-antarctica/
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I have to admit, when I read about refreezing the poles, I laughed so hard I did a little wee. But what really got me rolling in the isles was the idea that creating more clouds might actually cool the planet. Now, who saw that one coming?
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Howard, I thought Kate Marvel dashed our hopes that clouds might save us from Thermageddon. Something about warming more than they cool. Personally, I feel the only thing that will save us is if they spray artificial snow all over the Sahara and cover the Pacific with white polystyrene tiles.
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Forget geo-engineering. What we need to stop global warming is geo-politics: Declare a new cold war. That’s the ticket. Trump is already working on it; both China and Russia are getting the cold shoulder, not to mention Iran and the EU. Hell will freeze over, just you wait and see.
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This will come in pretty handy if you live in Cambridge. It’s mid May and I’m guessing, like here, it’s bloody cold and won’t stop raining. Residents can just take their broken climate round to the University and leave it with the experts to be fixed whilst they nip round to Sainsbury’s to do a bit of shopping. Then when they come back out, the sky will be blue, the sun will be shining, not too hot, not too cold, just like Goldilocks’ porridge. Sorted. Lucky buggers.
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This one is a bit tricky for the Green Blob, I’d expect some green-on-green action here. If it is deemed to be possible to “deal-with” CO2 then those motivated by “must-control-CO2” (which gets a mention on pretty much all climate science papers in the first few sentences) will be a bit miffed.
I’m starting to toy with the idea of supporting zero-carbon, as long as it only takes 5-10 years. That gives the delicious prospect that all those making a good living from endless promotion of zero-carbon will have to get themselves real jobs, and many such real jobs will be created, such as in the new horse-drawn transport and muck removal industry.
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Jaime. Your humour hides a major problem because by favourably altering proximal Cambridge climate you may adversely affect Norfolk’s climate. We are of course discussing weather not climate, but in the past, changing weather was seriously considered as an act of war. Deliberately changing a country’s climate could also be viewed as an aggressive act. Imagine Canada’s response to a refreezing of its Arctic territories and this reverses any improvements in the climate elsewhere in the country. In my view meddling with the climate is about the most stupid and dangerous things we could attempt. Putting irretrevable reflectors in space is plain stupidity.
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Won’t somebody please think of the polar bears? Making the Arctic colder and the sea ice thicker could have some unintended consequences:
https://polarbearscience.com/2013/02/21/where-were-the-appeals-to-feed-starving-polar-bears-in-1974/
“I want to live in a world where we still have polar bears” says the little girl in one of those smart meter ads on the radio. Maybe she and her friends could be persuaded to picket the Repair Centre on one of their “school strike” Fridays. 🙂
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Alan, I think perhaps altering the climate in Cambridge only may not have too much of an effect upon Norfolk as a whole. Norwich might experience worsening climatic conditions though and UEA might have to quickly set up their own Repair Centre to counter the negative knock-on effects of the Repair Centre in Cambridge.
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Thomas Wysmuller suggest a dam beween Svalbard and Nordkapp to refreeze the arctic sea, this blocks the warm water from entering the arctic.
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Hans,
Brilliant. I’m sure that won’t disrupt North Atlantic deep water formation as all the warm water collected further south during summer, unable to dissipate its heat content by progressing into the Arctic, raises the temperature of surface waters during winter, inhibiting sinking in the North Atlantic.
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Jaime. Lincolnshire won’t escape Cambridge repaired climatic change. Skeggers will tumble into the sea and the Butlins birthplace will be no more. The Wash will be washed a little more vigorously.
Seriously I do hope Dr Emily Shuckburgh hires an expert in foreign diplomacy and sets up a hotline to the UN Security Council.
Why does anybody pay King any attention whatsoever? Didn’t he suggest that global warming would only leave polar regions habitable? Now he’s associated with a repair shop to keep them frozen. Sheesh!!!
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Jaime I believe your 11 May 19 at 7:10 am post reveals some of the considerable damage that large scale geoengineering could produce. Such tinkering is just as likely to cause adverse changes we haven’t predicted. A combination of such hubris (we can repair climate damage) and the mania of groups like XR (we are causing irreparable climate chaos and must do something, anything, regardless of cost) might produce disaster. I used to meet numerous, ill-informed undergraduates who foolishly combined these two traits. If UEA was typical then God preserve us and our descendants.
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Alan, Skeggers is safe. They have all those lovely wind turbines just offshore, neutralising carbon emissions and therefore reducing sea level rise and decreasing the severity and frequency of damaging storm surges – not just in the Wash but in the Bay of Bengal too. At least, that’s what XR and the BBC tell us happens when Britain builds extra renewables capacity.
But yes, it is a serious matter if any of these megalomanic fanatics ever get to the point of actually being able to implement their hair-brained climate fixes.
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It is difficult to determine which aspect of this rent seeking academic hustle is more annoying.
The hubris?
The foolish naivity of those who accept its premise?
The anti-scientific claptrap the academics involved are producing?
The lack of self awareness of about how often those who claim to be saving something actually damage that something?
So many great choices it is difficult to choose the worst that this represents
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Spraying sea water into the air from a nuclear powered super strengthened vessel with a small crew would create a large ice island which could conceivably be tens of meters thick. This would allow building a large ice hotel with a runway to entertain rich folk during the Arctic summer.
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In the 60’s and 70’s they wanted to melt the ice in the Arctic to warm up the planet, in the period when there was no global cooling, (so we are told).
“Controlling the Planet’s Climate” J. 0. Fletcher (Rand corporation)
From the book “Omega – Murder of the Eco-system and the Suicide of Man , Paul K Anderson, 1971
(The language never changes!)
“For example, suppose that the warming of the Arctic, which by 1940 had greatly reduced the thickness of the pack ice, had continued? As the ice receded farther in summer and the thinner ice become more fractured in winter, evaporation would have increased, thus increasing the density of the surface waters both by increasing the salt concentration and by cooling; this would tend to decrease the vertical stability of the upper layers of the ocean.
Budyko (see Fletcher, 1966) has argued that, under present conditions of solar heating, the arctic pack ice would not reform if it were removed. Instead, a new and stable climatic regime would be established in which the Arctic Ocean would remain ice-free.
Many engineering proposals have been advanced for improving the climatic resources of particular regions. All of these schemes share the common defect that their influence on the global system cannot yet be reliably judged.
The largest scale enterprise that has been discussed is that of transforming the Arctic into an ice-free ocean. Three basic approaches have been proposed:
influencing the surface reflectivity of the ice to cause more absorption of solar heat;
large-scale modification of Arctic cloud conditions by seeding;
increasing the inflow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean.
The Soviet engineer, Borisov, has been the most active proponent of the much-publicized Bering Strait dam. The basic idea is to increase the inflow of warm Atlantic water by stopping or even reversing the present northward flow of colder Pacific water through the Bering Strait. The proposed dam would be 50 miles long and 150 feet high.
Deflecting the Gulf Stream
Two kinds of proposals have been discussed, a dam between Florida and Cuba, and weirs extending out from Newfoundland across the Grand Banks to deflect the Labrador current as well as the Gulf Stream.
The Pacific Ocean counterpart of the Gulf Stream is the warm Kuroshio Current, a small branch of which enters the Sea of Japan and exits to the Pacific between the Japanese islands.
It has been proposed that the narrow mouth of Tatarsk Strait, where a flood tide alternates with an ebb tide, be regulated by a giant one-way ‘water valve’ to increase the inflow of the warm Kuroshio Current to the Sea of Okhotsk and reduce the winter ice there.”
There is quite a bit more, Fortunately the climate got better all on its own.
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King blowing hot and cold….same info, same person, two different stories.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3737160.stm
Wednesday, October 13, 2004,
“Carbon ‘reaching danger levels”
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent
“The UK government’s leading scientist says levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already represent a danger. Professor Sir David King told a London audience, (Greenpeace), climate change was “the most serious issue facing us this century and beyond”, needing global solutions.
On present trends, Sir David said, the world was just 60 years from triggering an irreversible
climate disaster. He said measurements of atmospheric CO2 taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, and published earlier this year, were significant. ”
Twenty four hours later, having slept on it, King had a brief dalliance with “denial”. Oct 14, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/greenhouse-04h.html
“UK’s Chief Scientists Doubts CO2 Problem”
London (UPI)
“The U.K. government’s chief scientific adviser said the current rise of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere may be just an aberration, not the start of a trend.
Sir David King told BBC News Online the rise in CO2 – which, at 375 parts per million, is higher than at any time in recorded history, is likely to be an anomaly, which would not be unprecedented, and not the start of a trend, unless it is proved otherwise. [love it!]
Another British scientist, Peter Cox, who heads the carbon cycle group at the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, noted the CO2 increase was not uniform across the globe. He said the shift might have been caused by something unusual in the northern hemisphere.
For example, he said, Europe’s very hot summer in 2003 and unusually large number of forest fires could have killed off vegetation and increased carbon releases from the soil.”
It really is unequivocal.
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`What a delight to see a bit of uncertainty revealed.
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King and Wadhams should get themselves a copy of this book:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/fixing-the-sky/9780231144131 January 2012
“As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, some scientists argue. Instead, bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere. Launch mirrors into orbit around the Earth. Make clouds thicker and brighter to create a “planetary thermostat.”
These ideas might sound like science fiction, but in fact they are part of a very old story. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have tried to manipulate weather and climate, and like them, today’s climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible. Scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of managing the world’s climate, these individuals hatch schemes with potential consequences that far outweigh anything their predecessors might have faced.
Showing what can happen when fixing the sky becomes a dangerous experiment in pseudoscience, James Rodger Fleming traces the tragicomic history of the rainmakers, rain fakers, weather warriors, and climate engineers who have been both full of ideas and full of themselves.
Killer hurricanes, ozone depletion, and global warming fuel the fantasies of today.”
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“Climate Engineers”? I doubt the participation of any engineers in this sort of activity. Maybe the use of the term is to imply competence. Or perhaps, realism?
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“These people are actually getting paid for this nonsense and sucking up public subsidies for their insane ‘initiatives’. That’s the part that’s not quite so funny.”
I don’t think the UK taxpayer would be involved in funding the ‘Refreezing the Poles’ idea. The funding must be coming from somewhere else. I vaguely remember that amongst the things the Lib Dems did a few years ago when they were put in charge of climate and energy policy in the Coalition government was that they effectively banned the ‘solar radiation management’ (SRM) type of geo-engineering.
I’ve tracked the relevant document down, called “The UK Government’s View on Greenhouse Gas Removal Technologies and Solar Radiation Management (“Geoengineering”)”:
Click to access The_UK_Government.pdf
In the document it is stated that the UK government does not intend to commission further research or deploy SRM, and gives brightening of marine clouds and injecting aerosols into the stratosphere as examples of SRM. The refreezing of the poles idea is based on marine cloud brightening.
The UK taxpayer will however be funding the other type of geo-engineering, ‘greenhouse gas removal’ (GGR), which happens to be the type of geo-engineering that is favoured by the Green Blob. Examples of GGR given in the document include planting millions of trees, restoring peatland and using UK timber in the construction industry. Other examples of GGR would be ‘carbon capture and storage’ from power stations and those machines that suck CO2 out of the air that you sometimes read about.
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There is a long history of advocating geoengineering as an a;ternative to reducing CO2 emissions. One such is the 1965 “Report of the Environment Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee”. This was mostly on conventional pollution like pesticides, urban air pollution and impacts of animal wastes. On page 9 there was a short section on the impacts of CO2.
Rather than time running out for controlling CO2 emissions, the report is saying that dealing with it can be left for decades. But the reference to geoengineering is already here. The Cambridge Boffins are still speculating on how to control the climate.
The Subpanel Report Y4 beginning on page 111 (lead author Roger Revelle) goes into more detail. From the Y4 Summary and Conclusions
Note that geoengineering might be two decades behind schedule, but the hoped-for ability to predict the magnitude of global warming from CO2, and consequential impacts are now over 50 years behind schedule, despite orders of magnitude increases in computing power. Scientifically climatology has gone backwards, as predictions have been replaced with modelled scenarios, which are hardly ever checked against the data.
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They should start building a chimney off the ice cap, covered in solar panels painted black. If it extends into space, and is open at the bottom next to the North Pole Reindeer stables, the hot air from Santa’s carbon neutral haulage contractors will cause a zero energy updraught sucking methane rich hot air into outer space. It might be allowed to take much of Climate Science with it.
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Kill the Earth to save the climate…
It occurs to me that here in the USA auto repair centers have earned over many years a reputation for taking advantage of customers, especially naive easily scared car owners.
And here we have, after decades of scare tactic marketing, a handy climate repair centre opening up, all nice and shiney new, ready to help scared people with too much money.
An old Wall St. proverb comes to mind:
Wall St. takes their experience and investor’s money and makes it Wall St.’s money and the investor’s experience.
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There is something deeply rotten gnawing away at the core of British universities, and undermining the foundations of free speech, and academic excellence. It really comes to something when academics promoting ideas which go against the grain of the liberal progressive establishment have to hide behind anonymity in order to protect themselves from attack by rabid hordes of the ‘outraged and offended’, attacks which have cost many academics their jobs. In the Telegraph:
‘There is a climate of intimidation at British universities – we are afraid to speak about anything controversial’
There is. It’s very real and it’s getting worse by the day. Perhaps universities should be repairing this climate as opposed to making absurd, megalomaniacal proposals to repair the earth’s climate. Some types of research are triggers for lefty snowflakes:
Professor Jeff McMahan, who has set up the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a new, peer-reviewed publication dedicated to airing the kind of research that has recently seen academics no-platformed.
“There is a real climate of intimidation at universities that makes people fearful of speaking out on controversial issues,” he says. “Many people are deterred from publishing ideas or arguments for which they could provide good reasons and evidence because they are frightened of threats to their career or even their physical well-being.”
He also steered clear of Twitter, which has probably served him well over the past few months as he has been setting up the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a new, peer-reviewed publication dedicated to airing the kind of research on race and intelligence, genetics and gender identity that has recently seen academics no-platformed and drummed out of their jobs.
Last week, Noah Carl, a research fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, studying the link between genes and intelligence, was sacked after an investigation into his work triggered by an open letter from fellow academics, accusing him of “racist pseudoscience”. Carl says he was let go because his research threatened “certain sacred Left-wing values.”
Is it not absurd in the extreme and offensive to any person possessing even a rudimentary moral compass and a shred of rational intuitiveness that it’s OK to set up a centre proposing truly radical,dubiously beneficial or necessary, untested and potentially extremely damaging geoengineering projects aimed at ‘hacking the global climate’, but not OK to study the links between genetics and intelligence? What kind of insane “values” promote and enshrine this distinction in modern academia? The liberal Left has become a monster.
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They can save a fortune and find something else to do, according to the BBC…
Jakobshavn Isbrae: Mighty Greenland glacier slams on brakes
“We didn’t predict this change in behaviour”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48265217
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Oldbrew,
Mechanics in other repair centres tell many stories about check engine lights that turn off when the car is brought into the shop.
The ethical mechanics consider false positive signals, or at least dig more deeply.
Those lacking scruples simply sell more expensive procedures, calling them “repairs”.
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I don’t think I waste my time coming back to this site again.
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I decided to waste some time approving your comment and replying because we don’t generally censor opinion here, even if it is a waste of everybody’s time by someone who is avowedly ‘not interested’. Bye.
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