NBC News promoted a new idea to mitigate “rising seas:” build more icebergs with a fleet of ice-making submarines.
NBCNews.com reported the “audacious plan” on Aug. 6, writing “Designers in Indonesia have offered up what may be the most audacious plan yet: they propose building ice-making submarines that would ply polar waters and pop out icebergs to replace melting floes.”
It called rising seas “one of the most worrisome consequences of climate change” and traced that threat to the “problem” of melting icebergs.
“A fleet of the ice-making subs, operating continuously, could create enough of the 25-meter-wide ‘ice babies’ to make a larger ice sheet, according to the designers,” NBC reported.
The only criticism in the story was from climate alarmists concerned about the “feasibility” of the iceberg-making sub idea. University of Colorado’s director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center Mark Sereze asked,“What are you going to do, put out a flotilla of 10,000 submarines?” He also asked who would build them, how much energy they would cost and what forms of energy would they run on.
He called it a “Band-Aid,” rather than a solution.
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NBC conveniently neglected research that cast doubt on the idea that melting icebergs have anything to do with rising sea levels.
President of the International Sea Level Institute John Englander wrote “Why Melting Icebergs Don’t Affect Sea Level” in 2018.
“As icebergs melt and the water warms back into the “normal” ocean temperature range above 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) the density increases, reducing the volume. As a result, the actual melting of ice does not add to the level of the water – regardless whether the liquid is your glass of iced tea, or the ocean – though it does defy intuition and seems perplexing. It is truly one of nature’s phenomena,” Englander wrote.
Under Common Misconceptions About Glaciers the AntarcticGlaciers.org site also wrote in 2018 that “Sea ice floats, and when it melts, it does not contribute to sea level rise.”
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