Geoengineering will not save the poles from climate change

With carbon dioxide emissions still increasing, can geoengineering stop the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice caps and prevent massive sea level from rising? No, according to a review of the five main ideas for polar geoengineering suggests so far.

Promoting geoengineering ideas that can’t work distract the attention of the central question, says Martin Siegert at the University of Exeter in Britain. “It will be something that works against what we need to do, which is to cut off carbonize.”

Siegert and his colleagues evaluated each polar geoengineering idea based on six criteria: If it wants it to work, it may be on the scale required in a reasonable time, is it affordable, will land it and be able to keep this agrement for many decades, what are the environmental risks and travel false hope?

In Antarctica, some ice sheet rests on the seabed and melted from below by heating seawater. A suggested idea to save them is to build huge “curtains” to prevent hot current from reaching these ice sheets and the liquid ice shelves that help protect them.

It is not clear if this would help, says team member Steven Chown at Monash University in Australia.

“Hot water may well have been redirected from an ice shelf, but the question is, where is it going? It might just go to the ice shelf next door and create another problem,” he says.

Such curtains had to anchor to the seabed in depths of up to 1 kilomas, stretching upwards for hundreds of metrets and strtch for tens of thousands of kilometers at least – and to have to incorporate an extremely chopping envillent, says Chown.

Half of research cruises for Antarctica are redirected from their planned courses due to the dangers of icebergs and sea ice. “It’s just too dangerous,” he says.

Only a ship has been managed to reach the area where a seagardin had to be built to protect Thwaites “Doomsday” glacier, Chown adds.

With glaciers sitting ashore instead of the seabed, the concern is heating temperatures result in more liquid water under the ice that acts as a lubricant that speeds up ice flow. More ice that reaches the sea means more rise in sea level.

So a suggestion is to drill holes down through the Thought ice cream to pump out all the water beneath them.

“This would require a large amnt hole through extremely deep – possibly kilometer thick – areas of this sheep beyond any scientific drilling project ever happened,” says Sammie Buzzard at Northumbria University in the UK.

We even donate by where the water is and where to drill. “But even if we are understood where to drill better, we still have the scalabibility problem, the cost problem, the problem of running that bore,” says Buzzard. “Even if we understood science better, it’s still not a feasible idea.”

Another idea is to cover the surface of the Arctic Sea with small, hollow glass beads to reflect more of the sun’s heat back in the room and cool the region. “” “[But] It may well have the opposite effect, ”says Chown.

Keeping this cover would require 360 ​​Megatonne’s glass beads to be produced each year, which corresponds to the total global production of plastic. A project aimed at trying the idea was shut down after the laboratory test showed that the beads were toxic.

Then there is stratospheric aerosola – rebellious substances, such as sulfur dioxide in the stratotosphere, to form aerosols that reflect sunlight. This is much more problemmatic about the poles than elsewhere. Aerosols do not remain in the polar stratosphere as long as over the tropics say, and they make slightly different dark polar winters or over reflective ice or snow.

So very large amounts of aerosols would be required. This could deplete the ozone layer and disrupt the climate other, says Valérie Masson-Delmotte at Paris-Saclay University in France. Countries affected may require compensation.

Some have suggested the idea of ​​thickening sea ice in the Arctic by pumping seawater upstairs. “This would require millions of units that have been deployed across driving, bridal ice cream,” says Heïdi Sevestre at the Arctic surveillance and assessment program in Norway. “This is technological, logistical and financially unannounced.”

The final idea that the researchers evaluated fertilize the southern ocean to increase phytoplankton growth that removes carbon if more organic matter is locked away in sediments on the seabed. But across 12 small experiments, more carbon on the seabed reached only one. And this approaches can speed up oxygen loss in the world seas, potentially increasing the release of potent greenhouse gases such as methane and nitric oxide, Masson-Delmotte says.

“I have been very concerned about discussions to some advocates of these approaches were over-enthusiastic and had a very simplified [view] of the challenges, “says Masson-Delmotte.” I think this is working with such holes. “

Siegert believes that further research into these ideas is a waste of resources. “The impossibility of scale is something you can’t investigate,” he says.

Not all scientists are convinced. “I don’t think there’s not known enough about any of these approaches for them to be taken off the table,” says Shaun Fitzgerald at the Center for Climate Repair in Cambridge, UK.