I’m not making this up. Here is the paper and its abstract:

Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 2012 ; e-Viewdoi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1

CO2 Snow Deposition in Antarctica to Curtail Anthropogenic Global Warming

Ernest Agee,1 Andrea Orton and John Rogers

Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

　Abstract

A scientific plan is presented that proposes the construction of CO2 deposition plants in the Antarctic for removing CO2 gas from the Earth’s atmosphere. The Antarctic continent offers the best environment on Earth for CO2 deposition at 1 bar of pressure, and temperatures closest to that required for terrestrial air CO2 snow deposition, 133°K. This plan consists of several components, including: (a) air chemistry and CO2 snow deposition, (b) the deposition plant and a closed-loop liquid nitrogen refrigeration cycle, (c) the mass storage landfill, (d) power plant requirements, (e) prevention of dry ice sublimation and (f) disposal (or use) of thermal waste. Calculations demonstrate that this project is worthy of consideration, whereby 446 deposition plants supported by 16 1200-MW wind farms can remove 1 B tons (1012 kg) of CO2 annually (a reduction of 0.5 ppmv), which can be stored in an equivalent “landfill” volume of 2 km x 2 km x 160 m (insulated to prevent dry ice sublimation).

The individual deposition plant, with a 100m x 100m x 100m refrigeration chamber, would produce approximately 0.4m of CO2 snow per day. The solid CO2 would be excavated into a 380m x 380m x 10m insulated landfill, that would allow one year of storage amounting to 0.00224B tons of carbon. Demonstrated success of a prototype system in the Antarctic would be followed by a complete installation of all 446 plants for CO2 snow deposition and storage (amounting to 1B tons annually), with wind farms positioned in favorable coastal regions with katabatic wind currents.

Like all wind, Katabatic winds are intermittent, but they can blow at hurricane force. Now what could go wrong with that?

Sounds like a few new green jobs.

This scheme, like all geoengineering schemes, is one of academia’s answers to a phantom problem. Because carbon dioxide is plant food and necessary for all life, we should not waste time and resources trying to get the atmospheric concentration down to some imagined correct magic number, see “A Modest Proposal: Triple Your Carbon Footprint.”  The geologic history of Earth shows that the normal concentration of carbon dioxide is at least three times what it is now.  Most plants and animals evolved under this higher concentration.

Although the authors of this paper are just trying to fill a perceived need (and maybe acquire politically correct grant money), all geoengineering schemes are foolish and unnecessary. Too bad they don’t direct their expertise toward something useful.

For another view, read an article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.”

See also:

Geoengineering Wacky Schemes to Control Climate

British Balloon to spew sulfur, another wacky geoengineering scheme

Girthic Warming

In order to forestall dread global warming, many, usually wacky, schemes have been proposed. The latest is from a group of British academics who want to simulate the cooling emissions of volcanoes by tethering a balloon about 1 kilometer into the sky and pumping up and dispersing a chemical mixture of sulfates to reflect sunlight. Of course, the EPA has for years been trying to reduce sulfur emissions from coal plants and automobile exhausts.

The academics have garnered a £1.6m ($2.5 million) British government grant to build a scale model of their device.

“The whole weight of this thing is going to be a few hundred tonnes. That’s the weight of several double-decker buses. So imagine how big a helium balloon do you need to hold several double-decker buses – a big balloon. We’re looking at a balloon which is possibly 100-200m in diameter. It’s about the same size as Wembley stadium,” said the Oxford engineering lecturer Hugh Hunt in an interview earlier this year. This hose would be just like a garden hose, 20km long and we pump stuff up the pipe.”

Read the whole story from the British newspaper, the Guardian.

For more wacky geoengineering schemes, see my post:

Geoengineering Wacky Schemes to Control Climate 

The premise: Man has messed with Nature to produce unusual global warming. The proposed solution: Mess with Nature even more. That’s the idea behind geoengineering and its wacky schemes to control climate.

Here is a review of some of the geoengineering schemes proposed. Many schemes have been proposed by serious scientists as a fix for a perceived problem. Some might be technologically feasible, but totally impractical; most are incredibly expensive; none are necessary or even desirable. The popular press has noticed that such schemes are being considered and promoted. An article in the March issue of Reader’s Digest says, “that radically altering our environment may be our last best hope for avoiding disaster.” Uh-huh. Dr. Strangelove lives. Apparently RD authors have not been reading the news lately about climategate.

The Cooling Schemes:

Cooling schemes come in two general varieties: block the sun, or suck up carbon dioxide.

1) Add aerosol sulfur to the atmosphere to create a haze and reduce sunlight reaching the surface. Never mind that for the last few decades we have been trying to reduce sulfur emissions from coal-fired electric generation plants and smelters. And there is that thing about acid rain.

By the way, according to the EPA U.S. emissions of air pollutants have decreased significantly since 1980: carbon monoxide has decreased 79% ; ground-level ozone has decreased 25%; lead emissions have decreased 92%; nitrogen dioxide has decreased 46%; sulfur dioxide decreased 71%; and particulate matter has decreased 19%. Was all that Clean Air Act stuff a mistake?

2. Create large-scale reflective screens to block sunlight and reduce glacier melt. Who’s going to keep the snow off the screens? Ah… green jobs.

3. Spread iron filings on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The iron would nurture phytoplankton, which, in turn, would absorb more CO₂.

4. Add lime to the ocean to make it more alkaline and thereby presumably increase the ocean’s ability to absorb CO₂. Shell Oil is actually funding such research. Maybe it would offset the acid rain produce in scheme #1.

5. Use a fleet of ships set up to spray water into the atmosphere in the hope of making whiter clouds that would reflect sunlight.

6. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University suggests building 60,000 shiny space ships and putting them into orbit. They would reflect away some sunshine and cool the earth. Cost, only $100 billion a year. A similar proposal involves shooting millions of tiny reflective frisbees into space to reflect sunlight. This latter plan, proposed by a University of Arizona researcher, would cost somewhere between $800 billion and $400 trillion according to an estimate in Popular Mechanics ( http://tinyurl.com/yg5qxl4 ). That wide range of estimated costs seems to be typical of many schemes. Still other schemes would orbit giant mirrors to reflect sunlight away.

7. CO₂ Scrubbers, hundreds of thousands of them, would suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere and then store it underground. This suffers from the same problem as capturing CO₂ from fossil fuel plants (see: http://tinyurl.com/l6zoeo )

The Warming Schemes:

Back in the 1970s, when climate scientists were absolutely sure that the planet was entering another glacial epoch, geoengineering schemes were designed to warm the planet.

1. Melt the Arctic Ice cap by covering it with coal dust to increase heat absorption. The darker, ice-free water would then absorb more sunlight and warm up.

2. Dam the Bering Strait to keep cold Arctic water out of the Pacific Ocean.

3. Deflect the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Two kinds of proposals were 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. Other schemes would deflect the Kuroshio Current in the Sea of Japan.

4. Create African oceans: If the Congo River, which carries some 1,200 cubic kilometers of water per year, were dammed at Stanley Canyon (about 1 mile wide), it would impound an enormous lake (the Congo Sea). The Ubangi, a tributary of the Congo, could then flow to the northwest, joining the Chari and flowing into Lake Chad, which would grow to enormous size (over 1 million square kilometers).

5. Create Siberian Seas: Dams on the Ob, Yenisei and Angara rivers could create a lake east of the Urals that would be almost as large as the Caspian Sea. This lake could be drained southward to the Aral and Caspian Seas, irrigating a region about twice the area of the Caspian Sea. The theory behind these dam schemes is that the presence of a large lake transforms the heat exchange between the surface and atmosphere.

The problem with all these schemes, besides being unnecessary and costly, is that they would have unpredictable consequences for individual countries, regions, and the planet. They could result in political manipulation as countries and companies promote vested interests. They could, perhaps, even cause climate wars, especially if a scheme perpetrated by one country adversely affected another.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (MAY/JUNE 2008) gives 20 reasons why geoengineering is a bad idea. See: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/20Reasons.pdf

But the schemes have their advocates (or is it patsies?). Science Insider reports that Bill Gates has spent $4.5 million of his own money supporting a wide array of research on geoengineering since 2007. It seems that this perceived problem is ripe to suck up grant money. Hey Bill, there’s this bridge in Brooklyn….

John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, says the White House is seriously considering geoengineering options. (AP April 8, 2009). It would be better if they seriously considered the fraud and data manipulation of the Climategate revelations.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

–H.L. Mencken