Meanwhile, American scientists as part of Project Plowshare[1] were proposing to use nukes to blast a harbor in Alaska, "in the shape of a polar bear, if desired".[2]
They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]
Several bombs were used to attempt to extract natural gas under Project Plowshare. Lots of gas was made extractable but due to contamination it was unsuitable for cooking or heating buildings. You can hike or drive to the detonation sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rulison
In those times i.e. nuclear age, scientists probably dreamed of every solution in terms of nuclear energy or explosions to solve things quickly, much as we think of ML today.
All these technologies have their limitations and it took some careful failures to realize and move to alternatives or tested traditional methods.
Shape of a polar bear, if desired. You think that's a smoking gun?
Hey you gotta brag your wares. It ain't bragging if it's true.
And it's a really great way to dig, it's not blasting, it's boiling the rock, so the oxygen goes into the atmosphere, you crack it for a huge radius, it's a really good application of nuclear explosives. Explosives always had a dual use, war and mining, clearing rock.
Also, The North American Water and Power Alliance top bring water to California from Alaska by building nuclear powered pumps and atomic blasting out new channels. After failing to be adopted the plan in later years has been picked up and promoted by the Lyndon LaRouche Movement
Not sure if it's in the same league but in South Africa we have considered towing icebergs to Cape Town as a possible water supply as recently as 2019.
From the article I see that in the past that's something they considered for San Diego as well.
> "So in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union found itself trying to pit its land and resource advantage against the continental United States' more temperate climate. With space and the atom having been harnessed, why not the world's oceans? Why not the weather itself?"
Soviets always wanted a warm water port and to warm the Arctic for trade routes and making Russia more able to have an advantage on their land which is 63% frozen.
> It's important to note that Borisov wasn't a mad scientist or anything of that sort, and his work was of interest to the Soviet government, which was already funding a wide range of research looking to warm the Arctic. It was all aimed at solving a simple problem: Russia is too damn cold.
> You might laugh, but while Soviet Russia was blessed with the largest land mass of any nation on Earth, much of it resource rich, putting that land to use was stunningly difficult. Currently about 63 percent of Russia is buried under permafrost, and as the CIA World Factbook notes, even today it is a significant barrier to development of Siberia.
It wouldn't have been good for climate for everyone else, even Russia long term.
It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well. [1]
That is an interesting idea considering the oil/gas export leads to that and all that permafrost which would cause massive carbon releases.
Their population never boomed like it did in the US post WW2, possibly because of the massive loss of lives in the war. I feel like all that development would be pretty useless if there were no people to actually do anything.
> It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well.
That is curious idea. I wonder how the risks of thawing permafrost play into the equation. The thaw leads to newly available biomass, digested by microbes to release carbon dioxide and methane, and leaving a considerably altered environment including depressions filled with water [2]. Would those risks be outweighed by overall gains of a warmer Siberia?
Slightly worrying notion but, if Russia believes that global warming benefits them, they might keep on extracting and burning fossil fuels long after everyone else has transitioned to renewables.
Then why not doing more things where coldness becomes an asset instead going against nature?
Geo-engineering should be made illegal. Their "bugs" would scorch the Earth. No geo-engineer knows what's he/she is doing. Any implementation there is a guarantee of having massive unintended consequences that are irreversible.
I come from a country where you can't walk a single kilometre without running into another damned river or canal. It's difficult to remember that water is a precious resource for most of the world population.
Large swathes of human population do experience issues with water availability.
However, richest parts of the world are where water was traditionally in abundance, and human settlements have been created around large bodies of (drinking) water. Confluences of rivers into (non-frozen) seas is the sweetspot: pottable water and cheap trade routes.
So you come from a rich part of the world because it's got a great balance of natural resources, but humans are there because of it: it is no accident!
Btw, canals (as in human built rivers) might have been part of the problem. They might also be part of the solution going forward.
> In current US dollars, that amounts to nearly $138 billion. But Borisov dreamed of enlisting the US, Canada, Japan, and Northern Europe in the plan, as all would theoretically benefit from a warmer climate. Surprisingly, the US was intrigued by the idea. In fact, in a response to a series of questions sent in 1960 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy noted, as part of a larger point about the value of innovation in fostering cooperation, that the Siberia-Alaska dam was "certainly worth exploring."
However, it turns out that it is much easier politically to just use advertising to convince Americans to buy and drive big, gas-guzzling SUV/Pickups and let the CO2 do the warming.
> However, it turns out that it is much easier politically to just use advertising to convince Americans to buy and drive big, gas-guzzling SUV/Pickups and let the CO2 do the warming.
Are you genuinely suggesting this or are you wasting people time?
Is your thesis American knew about CO2 and gauged how bad it would be and decided the positive effects from warming meant it was better to encourage greater CO2 output?
I remember the conspiracy theory that HAARP was a secret weather control weapon. Some argued that the US had used weather weapons during the Vietnam War to create rain and bog down the North Vietnamese.
The Americans were interested in the project too, according to the article. They just didn't want to fund it.
Remember that in the 50s-60s when Borisov was promoting this scheme, the consensus of scientists was that the big threat from climate change was global cooling and that the world was endangered by a new ice age. Climatologists were writing to the US President, telling him to prepare agriculture and industry for permanently colder conditions. Back then climatology did not have the same mindshare as today, but nobody would have objected to it on climatological grounds and if anything they would have supported it.
The most compelling climate engineering mega-project has to be the Qattara Depression project, which would create a super-saline inland sea, generate a few GW of electricity and dramatically increase water fall over large parts of the Sahara desert:
The immediate concern for them is melting of the permafrost in northern Siberia, which is already happening. This could cause collapses of entire cities, industrial/mining complexes, pipelines etc. This process will take decades, so can be potentially planned for, but Russian rulers aren't known for being long-term thinkers.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|3 years ago|reply
They also wanted to use nukes to blast a canal through Central America, as an alternative to the Panama Canal.[2]
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-...
[2] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
[+] [-] makerofspoons|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srvmshr|3 years ago|reply
All these technologies have their limitations and it took some careful failures to realize and move to alternatives or tested traditional methods.
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
Hey you gotta brag your wares. It ain't bragging if it's true.
And it's a really great way to dig, it's not blasting, it's boiling the rock, so the oxygen goes into the atmosphere, you crack it for a huge radius, it's a really good application of nuclear explosives. Explosives always had a dual use, war and mining, clearing rock.
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treeman79|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Manhattan_expansion
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
[+] [-] snthpy|3 years ago|reply
From the article I see that in the past that's something they considered for San Diego as well.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-06/towing-an...
[+] [-] arethuza|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_European_Enclosure_Da...
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|3 years ago|reply
Soviets always wanted a warm water port and to warm the Arctic for trade routes and making Russia more able to have an advantage on their land which is 63% frozen.
> It's important to note that Borisov wasn't a mad scientist or anything of that sort, and his work was of interest to the Soviet government, which was already funding a wide range of research looking to warm the Arctic. It was all aimed at solving a simple problem: Russia is too damn cold.
> You might laugh, but while Soviet Russia was blessed with the largest land mass of any nation on Earth, much of it resource rich, putting that land to use was stunningly difficult. Currently about 63 percent of Russia is buried under permafrost, and as the CIA World Factbook notes, even today it is a significant barrier to development of Siberia.
It wouldn't have been good for climate for everyone else, even Russia long term.
It also seems climate change and global warming Russia thinks benefits them at least then, maybe now as well. [1]
That is an interesting idea considering the oil/gas export leads to that and all that permafrost which would cause massive carbon releases.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-...
[+] [-] pm90|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|3 years ago|reply
That is curious idea. I wonder how the risks of thawing permafrost play into the equation. The thaw leads to newly available biomass, digested by microbes to release carbon dioxide and methane, and leaving a considerably altered environment including depressions filled with water [2]. Would those risks be outweighed by overall gains of a warmer Siberia?
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-sibe...
[+] [-] snek_case|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebastianconcpt|3 years ago|reply
Geo-engineering should be made illegal. Their "bugs" would scorch the Earth. No geo-engineer knows what's he/she is doing. Any implementation there is a guarantee of having massive unintended consequences that are irreversible.
[+] [-] MomoXenosaga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|3 years ago|reply
Large swathes of human population do experience issues with water availability.
However, richest parts of the world are where water was traditionally in abundance, and human settlements have been created around large bodies of (drinking) water. Confluences of rivers into (non-frozen) seas is the sweetspot: pottable water and cheap trade routes.
So you come from a rich part of the world because it's got a great balance of natural resources, but humans are there because of it: it is no accident!
Btw, canals (as in human built rivers) might have been part of the problem. They might also be part of the solution going forward.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
However, it turns out that it is much easier politically to just use advertising to convince Americans to buy and drive big, gas-guzzling SUV/Pickups and let the CO2 do the warming.
[+] [-] aaron695|3 years ago|reply
Are you genuinely suggesting this or are you wasting people time?
Is your thesis American knew about CO2 and gauged how bad it would be and decided the positive effects from warming meant it was better to encourage greater CO2 output?
[+] [-] mjreacher|3 years ago|reply
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf
(see page 8 of the pdf)
[+] [-] Victerius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagels|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] origin_path|3 years ago|reply
Remember that in the 50s-60s when Borisov was promoting this scheme, the consensus of scientists was that the big threat from climate change was global cooling and that the world was endangered by a new ice age. Climatologists were writing to the US President, telling him to prepare agriculture and industry for permanently colder conditions. Back then climatology did not have the same mindshare as today, but nobody would have objected to it on climatological grounds and if anything they would have supported it.
[+] [-] manholio|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classified|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlatu|3 years ago|reply
well. what if the plan to warm the arctic was never binned?
there is data that shows a correlation between modern wars and CO2 emissions.
What if russias big game is actually to change the climate enough to make siberia hospitable?
[+] [-] badpun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sharmin123|3 years ago|reply
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