10 ms·

A Soviet scientist dreamed of melting the Arctic with a 55 mile dam (2013)

115 points by Hooke 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> 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.
- aaron695 4y ago
  > 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?
  - mlatu 4y ago
    YES, the americans did know about CO2 at least as early as 1941. I didnt try to look that up but instead stumbled upon it while reading something else, and remembered your comment, so here you go: > Ford’s 1941 bioplastic Model T was made of hemp, flax, wheat, and spruce pulp, which made the car lighter than fiberglass and ten times tougher than steel, wrote the New York Times on February 2, 1941. The car ran on ethanol made from hemp or other agricultural waste. Ford’s experimental model was deemed a step toward the realization of his dream to “grow automobiles from soil,” wrote Popular Mechanics in their December 1941 issue and reduce greenhouse gases—already known to occur by then. https://themeaningofwater.com/2020/10/03/henry-fords-hemp-cars/ https://themeaningofwater.com/2020/10/03/henry-fords-hemp-ca...
    - thombat 4y ago
      Unfortunately that "Popular Mechanics" reference appears to be false: the December 1941 issue [1] did feature an article "Pitch Hitters for Defense" which included Ford's car experiments, but the entire focus was on supplanting the use of metals to free capacity for the military use. Carbon dioxide, greenhouse effect, or any environmental discussion is quite absent. (The advertising in the issue is interesting since even just before Pearl Harbor there's a lot of military references. My (very limited) understanding was that isolationism was strong but apparently far from pacifism) [1] https://archive.org/download/PopularMechanics1941/Popular_Mechanics_12_1941_text.pdf https://archive.org/download/PopularMechanics1941/Popular_Me...
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    I think Russia is absolutely trying to warm Siberia via CO2 production.
    - necovek 4y ago
      Wouldn't that be easier done by burning all of those fossil fuel locally instead of exporting it? (Though CO2 as side product is not overly localised, it certainly is to an extent)
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > 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? While I assume it was a joke, global warming was certainly known of at the time. It wasn't super-well understood (they couldn't make detailed predictions in the way they can today), but they would have known that adding CO2 would raise the temperature.
drawkbox 4y ago
> "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. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-russias-interest-in-a-warming-arctic https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-...
- pm90 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    That + killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population + creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family + creating a political climate favoring emigration?
woodruffw 4y ago
See also: the 1920s proposal to dam the Mediterranean[1] and various plans to expand lower Manhattan[2], some of which were executed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Manhattan_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Manhattan_expansion
- labrador 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
  - wahern 4y ago
    That Wikipedia article quotes critics describing > "the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West" and > "the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years". Yet the Chinese South-North Water Transfer Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...) currently underway is (or at least was at inception) intended to move nearly half as much water--44.8 billion cubic meters vs 93 billion cubic meters. While still under construction, it's already moving 7 billion cubic meters per https://window-to-china.de/2022/02/20/china-reports-progress-in-the-south-to-north-water-diversion-project/ https://window-to-china.de/2022/02/20/china-reports-progress... That's only about 1/5 of their planned volume, but IIUC the final, western diversion would provide more water to be diverted for the first two completed (?) routes. On the face those criticisms might still stand, but the context seemed to be an explanation for why NAWPA was an utter failure from inception, in which case they may soon seem merely short-sighted or at least myopic.
    - labrador 4y ago
      There is a documentary on it somewhere that I watched many years ago. The main sticking point was the use of nuclear blasts to carve out water channels. For a brief time after WW2 this seemed like a good idea, but upon further reflection fell out of favor.
sharmin123 4y ago
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
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.
- necovek 4y ago
  You've got it a bit backwards. 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.
mjreacher 4y ago
Similar sentiments of controlling the weather/climate were expressed in the USA too, although they never went anywhere: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf (see page 8 of the pdf)
- Victerius 4y ago
  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.
bagels 4y ago
Sounds like a veiled doomsday weapon to flood the western coastal cities.
- origin_path 4y ago
  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.
mlatu 4y ago
:| 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 4y ago
  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.
  - mlatu 4y ago
    "Russian rulers" why the plural? it has been this one singular dude for quite some time XD and that contradicts (i mean, not contradict, but like... who are you talking about?) your "not known for being long-term thinkers". i dont think we know what putin is scheming i admit that my what-if-s are not helpful, but it doesnt look to me like he is concerned of global warming at all. and this article here makes me think that might be no coincidence.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  Russia absolutely is intentionally trying to warm Siberia.
pmoriarty 4y ago
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] [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-... [2] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace/ https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
- koheripbal 4y ago
  This was obviously before they understood that radioactive fallout was an issue with nukes.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    No, they already knew about the dangers of fallout. "the AEC established Project Plowshare amid growing public and political opposition to nuclear programs. Nuclear tests routinely produced unacceptably high levels of fallout, and the subsequent appearance in drinking water, milk, meat, and produce of strontium-90, cesium-137, and other cancer-causing radioactive elements had generated a movement demanding a worldwide ban on airborne nuclear tests." But "the AEC believed the region [in Alaska where the harbor would be created with nukes] to be an uninhabited Arctic wasteland." "Environmental scientists, as well as many Alaskan locals, were not sold. They doubted AEC estimates that a bomb crater harbor would be handling $176 million in annual exports within 25 years. Cape Thompson adjoined large deposits of coal and oil, but it also was iced in nine months out of every 12." "And the cape was only 30 miles south of Point Hope, an Inuit village whose residents subsisted on the region’s abundant wildlife. Irked by critics, Teller vented to economist George Rogers, "We are not interested in preserving the Eskimo as a hunter. We are interested in giving him the opportunity of becoming a coal miner.""[1] [1] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace/ https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
manholio 4y ago
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Great idea, climate change as a service. Who said the soviets weren't enterprising.. /s
classified 4y ago
I guess we can be thankful that not all dreams become true.

115 points by Hooke 4y ago

> 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.

aaron695 4y ago
> 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?
- mlatu 4y ago
  YES, the americans did know about CO2 at least as early as 1941. I didnt try to look that up but instead stumbled upon it while reading something else, and remembered your comment, so here you go: > Ford’s 1941 bioplastic Model T was made of hemp, flax, wheat, and spruce pulp, which made the car lighter than fiberglass and ten times tougher than steel, wrote the New York Times on February 2, 1941. The car ran on ethanol made from hemp or other agricultural waste. Ford’s experimental model was deemed a step toward the realization of his dream to “grow automobiles from soil,” wrote Popular Mechanics in their December 1941 issue and reduce greenhouse gases—already known to occur by then. https://themeaningofwater.com/2020/10/03/henry-fords-hemp-cars/ https://themeaningofwater.com/2020/10/03/henry-fords-hemp-ca...
  - thombat 4y ago
    Unfortunately that "Popular Mechanics" reference appears to be false: the December 1941 issue [1] did feature an article "Pitch Hitters for Defense" which included Ford's car experiments, but the entire focus was on supplanting the use of metals to free capacity for the military use. Carbon dioxide, greenhouse effect, or any environmental discussion is quite absent. (The advertising in the issue is interesting since even just before Pearl Harbor there's a lot of military references. My (very limited) understanding was that isolationism was strong but apparently far from pacifism) [1] https://archive.org/download/PopularMechanics1941/Popular_Mechanics_12_1941_text.pdf https://archive.org/download/PopularMechanics1941/Popular_Me...
- koheripbal 4y ago
  I think Russia is absolutely trying to warm Siberia via CO2 production.
  - necovek 4y ago
    Wouldn't that be easier done by burning all of those fossil fuel locally instead of exporting it? (Though CO2 as side product is not overly localised, it certainly is to an extent)
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > 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? While I assume it was a joke, global warming was certainly known of at the time. It wasn't super-well understood (they couldn't make detailed predictions in the way they can today), but they would have known that adding CO2 would raise the temperature.

drawkbox 4y ago

> "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. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-russias-interest-in-a-warming-arctic https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/28/what-is-behind-...

pm90 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vlovich123 4y ago
  That + killing/imprisoning a lot of your own population + creating an economic climate where it was hard to sustain your family + creating a political climate favoring emigration?

woodruffw 4y ago

See also: the 1920s proposal to dam the Mediterranean[1] and various plans to expand lower Manhattan[2], some of which were executed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Manhattan_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Manhattan_expansion

labrador 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
- wahern 4y ago
  That Wikipedia article quotes critics describing > "the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West" and > "the most outlandish water development scheme to emerge in the past 50 years". Yet the Chinese South-North Water Transfer Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...) currently underway is (or at least was at inception) intended to move nearly half as much water--44.8 billion cubic meters vs 93 billion cubic meters. While still under construction, it's already moving 7 billion cubic meters per https://window-to-china.de/2022/02/20/china-reports-progress-in-the-south-to-north-water-diversion-project/ https://window-to-china.de/2022/02/20/china-reports-progress... That's only about 1/5 of their planned volume, but IIUC the final, western diversion would provide more water to be diverted for the first two completed (?) routes. On the face those criticisms might still stand, but the context seemed to be an explanation for why NAWPA was an utter failure from inception, in which case they may soon seem merely short-sighted or at least myopic.
  - labrador 4y ago
    There is a documentary on it somewhere that I watched many years ago. The main sticking point was the use of nuclear blasts to carve out water channels. For a brief time after WW2 this seemed like a good idea, but upon further reflection fell out of favor.

sharmin123 4y ago

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

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.

necovek 4y ago
You've got it a bit backwards. 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.

mjreacher 4y ago

Similar sentiments of controlling the weather/climate were expressed in the USA too, although they never went anywhere: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf (see page 8 of the pdf)

Victerius 4y ago
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.

bagels 4y ago

Sounds like a veiled doomsday weapon to flood the western coastal cities.

origin_path 4y ago
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.

mlatu 4y ago

:| 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 4y ago
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.
- mlatu 4y ago
  "Russian rulers" why the plural? it has been this one singular dude for quite some time XD and that contradicts (i mean, not contradict, but like... who are you talking about?) your "not known for being long-term thinkers". i dont think we know what putin is scheming i admit that my what-if-s are not helpful, but it doesnt look to me like he is concerned of global warming at all. and this article here makes me think that might be no coincidence.
koheripbal 4y ago
Russia absolutely is intentionally trying to warm Siberia.

pmoriarty 4y ago

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] [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#cite_note-... [2] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace/ https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...

koheripbal 4y ago
This was obviously before they understood that radioactive fallout was an issue with nukes.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  No, they already knew about the dangers of fallout. "the AEC established Project Plowshare amid growing public and political opposition to nuclear programs. Nuclear tests routinely produced unacceptably high levels of fallout, and the subsequent appearance in drinking water, milk, meat, and produce of strontium-90, cesium-137, and other cancer-causing radioactive elements had generated a movement demanding a worldwide ban on airborne nuclear tests." But "the AEC believed the region [in Alaska where the harbor would be created with nukes] to be an uninhabited Arctic wasteland." "Environmental scientists, as well as many Alaskan locals, were not sold. They doubted AEC estimates that a bomb crater harbor would be handling $176 million in annual exports within 25 years. Cape Thompson adjoined large deposits of coal and oil, but it also was iced in nine months out of every 12." "And the cape was only 30 miles south of Point Hope, an Inuit village whose residents subsisted on the region’s abundant wildlife. Irked by critics, Teller vented to economist George Rogers, "We are not interested in preserving the Eskimo as a hunter. We are interested in giving him the opportunity of becoming a coal miner.""[1] [1] - https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-for-peace/ https://www.historynet.com/an-explosive-plan-to-use-atoms-fo...
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago

manholio 4y ago

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GekkePrutser 4y ago

Great idea, climate change as a service. Who said the soviets weren't enterprising.. /s

classified 4y ago

I guess we can be thankful that not all dreams become true.