What stage of climate collapse are we in when refreezing the Arctic Sea Ice is the only option left?
The Arctic is unraveling before our eyes. Many do not know that because the Media rarely covers the topic, except when Trump, as a distraction from his uncountable crimes and his cruelty, claimed he would seize the ice cap by unleashing the military against 65,000, the Inuit, descendants of the Thule people, have lived there since 1150 AD.
The world's ice fields can be compared to air conditioning units for our climate. When sea ice is intact and healthy, it reflects 90% of solar energy to space.
When sea ice melts, as it does now, solar energy is absorbed by dark, open ocean waters in the Arctic. This creates feedbacks that melt sea ice, land ice, and glaciers and warm the oceans, leading to atmospheric and oceanic complications. The consequences threaten all of us with a changing polar vortex, increasingly more deadly heat waves, unpredictable weather patterns, hail, flooding, and drought threatening every life form's ability to feed themselves.
We could and should stop burning fossil fuels and protect ecosystems, but we are not doing either.
At least to the degree of the enormity of our predicament.
Some geoengineering specialists who recognize our dire circumstances are proposing rebuilding the sea ice from above because much of it is melting on the surface. Equally challenging is that the Arctic Ocean has warmed by albedo loss (solar reflection to space) and the introduction of warmer ocean currents, which historically have not entered the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic and Pacific.
Scientific American's Alec Luhn wrote the story, and Mark Fischetti edited it.
The ice acts like a giant mirror, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sun’s radiation back toward space. Ocean water, in contrast, absorbs 90 percent of sunlight. The ice cap’s core of so-called multiyear ice, which persists year-round, has shrunk by about 40 percent in four decades, kicking off a vicious cycle: as more ice melts, more ocean water is exposed, and that water warms further, melting even more ice. If the ice starts disappearing entirely in summer, global temperatures could rise an extra 0.19 degree C by 2050.
Real Ice is trying to thicken seasonal ice so it lasts longer into the warm months, keeping the planet cool. Sherwin hopes pumping could someday refreeze a million square kilometers of both seasonal and multiyear ice—an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined and about a fifth of what’s now left in summer—to stop the ice cap’s death spiral. All it would take, Real Ice says, is half a million ice-making robots.
Polar geoengineering on such an enormous scale could help slow warming until the world finally weans itself off coal, oil and natural gas. Many scientists think it will never work. The researchers at Real Ice argue we no longer have any option but to try; studies suggest that even slashing fossil-fuel use may not save summertime sea ice. “It’s sad that it’s ended up that way, but we’ve got to do something about it,” Sherwin said to me out on the frozen plain. “Emissions reduction is just not enough anymore.”
Your 'moment of doom' for May 21, 2025 ~ Feedback loop alert!
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@climatecasino.net) 2025-05-21T13:24:39.930Z
"as the Arctic warms, clouds shift from containing mostly ice to more liquid, which increases their ability to trap heat, further warming the Arctic and creating a positive feedback loop."
phys.org/news/2025-05...
Consequences.
Climate change costs $$
— Paul Bierman (@paul-bierman.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T12:16:50.570Z
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www.forbes.com/video/79a1c0...
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