Response to policy options for the new US Space Force and impact on saving Iceland and renewable electricity

This post tries to explain why Iceland might well turn into one big glacier in 5 to 20 years, with major freezing in other places like Britain, Ireland and Norway which depend on the Gulf Stream. But it starts with a quick evaluation of options for the new US Space Force which could be one part of how to prevent the disaster. At the end, I respond to questions from a few leading engineers about the Gulf stream problem and about access to space

COMMENTS ON SPACE FORCE OPTIONS

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The new US Space Force, done right, could substantially improve US military capabilities, but it could also turn the idea of space solar power (SSP) from political marketing hype to a real option for safe renewable electricity all over the world, and give us some hope for a new way to save Iceland (and many other parts of Western Europe like Noway, Britain and Ireland especially) into a glacier in 5-20 years.  BUT BASED ON HISTORIC EXPERIENCE, I WORRY WHETHER IT WILL BE DONE RIGHT.  

The level of spending from these choices is much less important than HOW the money is spent. The value of product of government spending varies by orders of magnitude as a function of how it is done.

In this case, I am aware of DARPA new starts, similar to what Mitchell Clapp and Jess Sponable tried to get going, which could be more important to the real hopes of human settlement of space than everything else on Earth combined, if they get more financial and policy support than before. Trump's policy logically calls for that support, but certain DC Lobby swamp types could easily get in the way, lowering technical standards for WHATEVER short term special interest. 

If the human settlement of space is what we really care about, we will give total priority to this core issue in our response. In jargon terms.. it is about precompetitive Rd&d, medium TRL, for reentry structure technology, drawing on advanced materials but not about materials in a narrow sense, making heavy use of WPAFB reality testing.

This was brief, but an earlier blog post gets into technical details, which I used when recommending the space guard idea a few short years ago:

https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2015/06/resurrecting-us-space-program-draft.html

RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY AND SAVING ICELAND

Renewable electricity

There are people out of touch with reality who imagine that a silver bullet technology exists for “sustainable” world electricity supply. Experts in electric power know that we need diverse sources, so that well-designed markets can choose where and how much the different sources and technologies are used. By “sustainable,” I do not mean politically correct, but simply what we can sustain -- what we could rely on  and survive not only now but in the long-term future. See www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf for an overview of the future needs, including citations to back up the claim that space solar power could realistically supply more than $200 billion per year of electricity if and when we solve the launch cost problem.

SAVING THE GULF STREAM

www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf also has a section on emerging problems with ocean currents and what could be done about them. Over the past few months, I have studied these problems in much more depth, with help from Al Trujillo (author of the best selling text on oceanography) and from my son Alex (who manages a software effort to process relevant satellite data). The biggest potential risk is still in the Antarctic, threatening Chile and Peru and California in a way which could affect all humans on earth (50-50 whether we all die after I am dead of old age), but our knowledge of exactly what to expect on what schedule demands new research. There is a piece by Purkey et al in Annual Reviews which gives an overview.

BUT THE GULF STREAM SIDE OF IT LOOKS MORE AND MORE DEFINITE. IT IS ON COURSE TO TERMINATE MUCH SOONER. ONLY THE DETAILS AND TIMEFRAME ARE HARD TO QUANTIFY.

I was in Iceland most of the past two weeks, and even people in the street told me without spontaneously “without the Gulf Stream, this whole island would be nothing but one big glacier”. No farms, almost no people.  And they would not be alone. When Trump talked about how to handle millions of refugees from Norway, I did not laugh.

Al recommended a paper giving a kind of technical overview of the problem:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0263-1?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201810&spMailingID=57464814&spUserID=NjI0MDk3MTMzMQS2&spJobID=1500065165&spReportId=MTUwMDA2NTE2NQS2

The big climate models do give us a warning, but does anyone believe those models? It reminds me of my first tenured job, at DOE’s Office of Energy Information Validation (OEIV), assigned to evaluate how far we can believe any of the big energy models, and what they really tell us.  To make it real, we need to understand a few key physical variables which drive the system, which could be put on a spreadsheet.

As I look for authoritative sources for what everyone already knows in this field, I ran across: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Not a bad start, but not the simple physics people need to understand.

See http://www.enviropedia.org.uk/Climate/Gulf_Stream.php for a clear statement of what the Gulf Stream really is, physically. For folks who do fluid flow modeling, it is the effect of the “mass balance” term in expanded Navier-Stokes equation, exactly balancing what they call “NADW”. In other words,  the amount of warming Gulf Stream current is mathematically the same as the amount of NADW. But what is NADW and why do I worry it will cut out in 5-20 years or so?

NADW is what is called a “thermohaline current” (THC) explained well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation, and in Al’s textbook.

It is a massive current, driven by water in the Arctic and North Atlantic pushed deep down into the ocean by an increase in density. If there is no increase in density somewhere, no water is pushed down and the THC stops.

The Wikipedia article has a simple colorful diagram showing what drives the density of seawater: temperature and saltiness (salinity).

It turns out that there are TWO drivers of THC, physically. If either one of the drivers continues, we get some THC. The amount of THC is basically just the sum of these two drivers. In the Arctic and North Atlantic, BOTH drivers are clearly on a path to sudden termination in the near future.

Driver number one is temperature. To understand that, look at the pink line in the Wikipedia article. When water on the surface is below that line, colder than the temperature of maximum density, then warming it up makes it more dense, and then it sinks. So picture a stretch of open ocean in the North, mixing gasses with the air at night, becoming rich with oxygen. Then when the sun comes out, it warms up, becomes more dense, and sinks. That’s driver number one, which is all I really knew about a year ago.

Driver number two is local increase in saltiness, which the paper in Nature put me onto (and which Purkey discusses at length in his recent review paper).  The search term “polynya” is pretty specific. This one happens when the surface suddenly gets so cold that it starts freezing. As it freezes, freezing concentrates fresh water into the new ice, making the water next to it absorb a whole lot more salt, making it more dense. The literature on THC from Antarctica shows that this happens mainly in just two places, the Weddell and Ross seas, where two little beaches provide most of the oxygen that keeps the whole ocean alive (the main thing standing between us and mass extinctions like what happened before 5-10 times). I imagine smiling penguins looking down on us all…

But it can happen in the Arctic too, when new ice is formed.

SO HERE IS THE CUTOFF, THE NEAR-TERM RISK TO ICELAND AND WESTERN EUROPE IN GENERAL: what happens when the surface water reaches the pink line in the Wikipedia article AND when the formation of new ice discontinues?

For water as salty as the North Atlantic, I would guess that the pink line kicks in at 0 degrees C, and we are already very close to that. Because the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the earth, the end of new ice formation is also in sight. It is curious how oil companies fund lobbyists who try to tell us that none of this could happen, even as they invest many billions on how to exploit the coming ice-free Arctic. (And no, they are not investing so much money for something 30 years in the future). And it is ever so sad that Trump has been supporting all that -- a commitment he has maintained even as he  surrenders or sells out on the ongoing war with what he calls “radical Islam” (a bad term for a very strong and persistent reality). But then again, the world today is very complex and hard for most people to understand; I know of no government on earth which does not have a mix of positive and destructive policies.

Even well before the zero NADW cutoff is reduced, the Gulf Stream will be reduced a whole lot as we get closer to the pink line and as the amount of new ice formation is reduced. If it were all just the salinity effect, we could even say that cutting the amount of new ice formation in winter in half would send Iceland and Western Europe down to temperatures halfway between what they are used to and what you see in Siberia at the same latitude. Roughly. Roughly in more ways than one.

Space technology is one hope for sustainable geoengineering, if we move fast enough. There is a time to stop debating options and instead to explore the “technology decision tree” with higher technology readiness levels, moving as fast as we can on more than one line of options to try to become ready to save Iceland and Norway and the British Isles before it is too late.

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Looking this over, Al Trujillo also mentions a new paper in Science:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1113

Kump's earlier work was cited by Peter Ward in his book, Under a Green Sky. That paper by Kump actually showed more awareness of what caused a massive release of H2S poison that Ward's own book (which calls for more research into THC by people who understand the physics more than he did). I once tried to get his group an NSF grant, but even the old NSF had its fetters.

In addition to the solutions proposed in www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, see https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2247441918619546

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One leading engineer (from the Republican/industry side) asked:

Paul—

This is interesting stuff.  It brings up more questions.

So, more melting of the Greenland ice sheet causes less salinity in the North Atlantic, which can shut down the Gulf Stream, which then makes Greenland colder again, stopping melting of more ice.  How much of the Greenland ice sheet would have to melt to make this happen?  If only 10%, then the multiple-meter sea level rise predicted to result from melting 100% of Greenland’s ice can’t happen.  Maybe that’s a self-regulating good thing?

My reply:

Yes, even though the core system here is just a few variables, a few variables forming a nonlinear dynamical system can show back and forth behavior which defies simple extrapolation.

IN THE PAST, the melting of ice from Greenland was the main cause of sputtering of the Gulf Stream. It was logical to assume that this would stop when all the ice on Greenland has melted. More precisely, if the RATE of fresh melt water coming off of Greenland stays constant, the DEGREE of reduction of the Gulf Stream would not grow. Things would not grow worse, if that were the only problem.

BUT IN THE FUTURE, there is a clear phase transition coming for the two core drivers of the thermohaline currents (THC) which drive the Gulf Stream even in the absence of problems from Greenland: the temperature effect and the effect on salinity of forming new ice in the ocean itself. The physics of the temperature effect is ever so clear and ever so certain (as in the diagram in the wikipedia article I cited), and so is the role of salinity in raising water density. Only the timing is in doubt. 

I suspect you would like those people in Iceland as much as my wife and I did.  Looking in their faces, and hearing them talk about the role of the Gulf Stream in their lives... I will do what I can to reduce my guilt about not really helping them in any way I can. 

Best regards,

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We had a lot more in-depth discussion of how to reduce launch costs, including engineers from NASA, AF, major aerospace companies and the space lobbies. Too much to post here. But in brief, the AF guys were so much further along in reality testing, without which nothing in space will be really real, whether for military or civilian or environmengal benefits.