Arctic ice continues to thin

Are you serious?

such a proposal should be imposible due to the scale of thousands of miles and the implementation. Plus it isn't harming anyone for the artic to have thin ice.

Besides winter 2008 was a record breaking comeback for artic sea ice.

I think cloud seeding may be a better way of creating some extra reflective material.

As i read the postings, it occurs to me that many who are concerned about this global changing, tend to focus on the problem area, when in actual fact there are larger forces working here. The melting ice cap is not the problem but rather a symptom of a much larger problem.

To stop the ice melting, one would have to understand why it's melting and control the cause. I suggest this article (long URL - click here) may shedl ight on the fact that we tend to view changes in our life-time as disastrous when it may be a sad fact that "mother nature" sees this as a mere blink of an eye happening. I have no answers, just more questions and attempting to help the polar ice cap freeze is probably an effort in futility. It's human nature to say "but we have to do something!" just because it is who we are ... Survivors. Trouble is, perhaps we need to start looking at ways to re-invent the human experience as our environment dictates how we survive, not the other way around.

I think your idea is better than doing nothing with proper engineering it could work... That said it has become obvious to me that most humans aren't ready to be this proactive, lots of easy examples, our current presidential race is a great one. ("Lets just drill for more oil") another example would be these islands Dubai built that you mentioned don't factor in the inevitable sea rise coming so all that work is going to be submerged in less than 30 years. No forethought at all. I would laugh but its not even funny anymore. To quote my hero Carl Sagan "Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking." In order to get a project like yours going the mentality of our species would need to change. Not one of our politicians has the thought process that could make it happen. Another hurdle is the public, they simply do not have the tool of scientific thought necessary to make the changes we need. Reality of it is there is no chance of getting them to back you up.

To me, this is all sad, as I would love to have hope for our current society. I don't know what will happen in the years to come as our weather careens away from what humanity is used to. I do have hope that humans will survive and progress beyond what we have managed so far. Sorry if this seems pessimistic but I have been waiting for humans to start getting it for too long. :)

What do people really think happens when a planet is comming OUT of an ice age?

I despair at people willingness to believe anything they are told. WMD's included.

Any attempt to modify the climate without actually understanding it would be STUPID at best. You don't actually KNOW what the problem is, do you.

The only idea here that had been GOOD is the idea that we should adjust to live with what Nature throws at us.

Because whatever your views are as to the cause the result is going to be the same and within the next 20 years or so. So prepare, be ready and live. Or moan and complain/blame and don't survive. Your choice.

Not gonna work. The scale of the area is way too big, if it was possible, we could as well build huge space-shade for earth and terraform venus as well. It's just way too big project, and way too expensive. And even if we could afford it, expanding and contracting ice, weather (waves, wind), strong sea streams, floating ice blocks would destroy entire project in a year.

If you have ever seen spring and melting ice on lakes, how ice crushes everything in it's path, you would realise that there's nothing which can stand those forces.

I'm not too sure how the whales, dolphins, sea birds etc. Etc. Will feel about the surface of their ocean being swathed in sheets of plastic (Or something.), it would be a bit hard to breathe through.

The only "fix" that MIGHT conceivably work with the LEAST amount of environmental damage is to throw an intermittant shadow on the polar regions. (Anything scheme implemented at ground level is hideously wrongheaded, and would as surely wreck the polar environment as the thaw will). That can only be accomplished by employing a fleet of huge "parasols" in orbits that would cast shadows of sufficient area over sufficient periods of time onto the polar regions. Alternatively tens of thousands of giant silvered blimps floating in the upper atmosphere could possibly accomplish the same thing at even greater cost.

But none of those sexy and hugely expensive enterprises would serve as an incentive to wean people and their governments and their corporate band-leaders from their CO2-producing ways. NO technological FIX will or CAN do that. We have to REDUCE our CO2. That's not just technology. The real problem lurks in politics and social economics.

And in education. NOT the sinister practice of "Propaganda". I mean EDUCATION.

If, in ADDITION to adopting REASONABLE measures to reduce pollution and wrecking of our world wherever possible (economically speaking), we humans could manage the courage and fortitude to REDUCE our global population by a mere 0.01% annually over the next several centuries, we (and our fellow travelers on Earth) MIGHT have a chance at immortality without necessarily suffering upheavals greater than our planet would experience during the critical period over the coming century, starting right now.

By the way, that 'immortality' I speak of is the real kind - none of that selfish nonsense dispensed by many religions, some sects of which actively forecast and even celebrate impending global doom.

But if we can sustain a decent technological civilization over the next several centuries without descending into the darkness of religious superstition, we might just be able to transplant whatever is left of our planet's treasure of life to the stars. If that isn't a suitable long-term goal consistent with immortality, nothing is.

Beth,

At this point in time ANY suggestions to prevent the artic from going ice free are Good. This problem is far more serious than big white bears migrating south, eating our children and raiding our refridgerators. A large surface area changed from a reflector to an absorber of solar energy will put Climate Change on the fast track with an adverse result to civilization as a whole.

Previously, We used volcanoes to cool things down. Significant amounts of Volcanic ash ejected into the upper atmoshere will block and reflect sunlight and buy us time to change our habits. Does anyone know how much ash is needed? This isn't an exact science but We have volcanoes working at northern latitudes in Alaska and Russia right now and We will will have many more online soon. If it were me, I would ask God for volcanic ash. The question remains, how much ash do you ask for? Did farmers in the midwest ask for rain this year? Perhaps they should have been specific on the quantity.

Once again, Beth, the are no stupid ideas for this problem. From the German research, this is happening very fast. Cover it with a tent, put up beach umbrelas, whatever works!

A grand idea, but there are flaws. Algae would adore the floating surfaces, and they'd end up dark green in no time.

Whilst an intriguing idea, I think that the side effects of such interferance would be more impacting for the local flora and fauna than the loss of Ice cover. Global warming may be to blame, but lets be careful here, the planet goes through numerous cycles, some last thousands of years, and our record of ice thickness measurments goes back barely half a century.

It is dangerous to draw any firm conclusions from the findings and we should be careful before we go taking drastic action when we know little about whats going on and understand the effects of our actions even less.

Hey, I certainly don't think that your idea is crazy. I actually had a similar idea about two years ago, which is a bit less controllable but of a wider scope. I was visualizing the production of billions of highly reflective, baseball-size spheres, which we could first experiment with by releasing them into a relatively land-locked body of water, like Lake Michigan. We could then monitor for changes in the water temperature, and perhaps the water level too, since the rate of evaporation might be affected. If the spheres could be made cheaply and durably, and yet be biodegradable when ruptured, then perhaps releasing massive numbers of them into the oceans would help to reduce the solar energy that the oceans are absorbing.

I second you on this. While I don't believe necessarily in any of the plans mentioned I do believe that action of whatever sort, needs to be taken now, even if it is to examine and prepare for the possibility that we may have to manipulate our environment to secure the survival of the planet. 10,000 years ago, without any human intervention we were in the middle of an Ice Age......if we had been 10,000 years earlier and living then how would we fair. It has to be far more reaching than manipulating our environment, we have to manipulate ourselves into learning to embrace balance in all that we do. Whether it is learning to eat local produce, use technology to reduce business flying and yet still leave enough balance to permit pleasure travel, by controlling the growth factors of our population so that life is balanced with resource. Idealistic absolutely, but if not that then what, continue along the path of basic barbaric behaviour we have succeeded in writing into our history, alongside the brilliance and adaptability, our love of social understanding, science, art, we must turn our attention to our environment and understand it as thoroughly as we understand our chemistry, and our biology. We have DNA and genetics, not in fullness but certainly enough to keep us all excited about what is coming next with regard to manipulating disease and genetics, not that I think it doesn't have the potential for adverse effects, but they too have to be balanced and we must understand before leaping.....

Learning now and focusing on it rather than allowing our governments to spend on defence and armies...not that I don't think there doesn't need to be a policing effort for the world but seriously, 3 trillion dollars on a war, who are we kidding - can you imagine what that kind of resource could do if it was properly focused. From what I have read so far everyone has expressed a sound opinion and each of us have been subjective expressing the multitudes of opinions around the western world. An article recently asked if China might actually lead the green revolulution (long URL - click here)

The green revolution doesn't mean we can't continue to strive for material things, or that profit isn't going to drive our economy, the economy can gulp hard enough to fund this type of concerted effort to understand our environment. Any academic knows, we don't understand it unless we can model it, and we're not very close at the moment.

Beth, in answering your three questions,

a. Is it possible - I feel more informed and interactive with the front line than most and I wholeheartedly believe so.

B. No, not enough, it is still only living as concepts in think tanks and blogs. The objectors are the ones with their eyes open and unfortunately the ones with their eyes open are also the ones who feel that they are small in a large world. I am just that, where do I go? I would love to understand how to expand ideas and run a multinational task force to examine it, or at least manage sufficient funding to rank our determination to understand our environment alongside the figures for advertising, R&D into pharmaceuticals, military spending, the amounts we spend anually on scotch for pete's sake. That's about as serious as mankind is on understanding our planet.

How do we begin to flock together as a louder and progressively louder voice - of professionals, of legislators, of politicians who also believe this is the course, of entrepreneurs who believe the economy can be driven through green technology and the green technology revolution. Branson offers $25million

for anyone who can remove greenhouse gases

(long URL - click here)

and he is one person with a bit of dough, where are all the other champions who should be taking the financial constraints out of making affordable solar power - we're close.

I'll join that movement, hell, I would be willing to take a role in it, but it will take both people of gravitude as well as Joe Public - anyone out there want to support it?

"The Great Wall of China was built in the 5th century B.C. It's over 4000 miles long and it's still standing"

You can take the artic ocean as being roughly 1000 miles in radius, so the surface area is going to be roughly 3 million square miles.

A box of syran wrap weighs about 30 grams and covers an area of about 25 square feet.

This means that in order to cover the ocean

you would have to make and deploy about 100 million tonnes of syran wrap.

Syran wrap is about as thick as a good layer of spray paint, so you would have to dump 100 million tonnes of paint onto the arctic ocean as well.

What material can you think of that can be deposited in such quantities into the ocean that would simulate ice, would not degrade substantially over time, and which does not have an even more disasterous effect on the local ecosystem.

If it's floating like expanded polystyrene then how are you goint go prevent 100 million tonnes of the stuff from emptying into the rest of the oceans? Blowing onto the land, being eaten by fish, birds, sucked into the blowholes of whales, etc.?

Now as to cost. A roll of 2 mil poly intended for packaging wrap costs about $24 for a roll that covers about 5,000 ft**2, so purchasing the platic wrap at wholesale prices would cost about 400 billion dollars.

Application would cost as much if not more than the plastic itself, so add another 400 billion and you have a total cost of 800 billion dollars.

Lets round that up to a single application of reflective Munge to the arctic ocean of about 1 trillion dollars per year - forever.

Hi Hank, the DOI is correct but the paper isn't properly published yet on the journal's website. An "in press" version is here, as a PDF: http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2008GL034457-pip.pdf