Another possibility for reducing melting of marine ice shelves (e.g. the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) would be to move sediment/rocks so that they are in a pile at the edge of the ice shelf that is out at sea.

This pile or wall would reduce the amount of water that can flow beneath the ice shelf (see the orange and blue arrows):

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1996/nstc96rp/images/waisbimg.jpg

Again, it would probably be another multi-billion-dollar proposition, but it involves no extraordinary new technology. If the world was seriously worried about disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and associated sea level rise, it would be worth conducting a detailed engineering/scientific analysis of the possibility of slowing ice melting by reducing the flow of water underneath the ice sheet.

I can think of several measures to mitigate sea level rise that could be done in this century. They would of course cost many billions of dollars, but so would significant sea level rise:

1) Inject air, or put in essentially tens of thousands of square miles of air mattresses, under the ice sheets that extend out from the land in Antarctica and Greenland. This would significantly reduce the melting rate, because air is an excellent heat insulator, whereas water is an excellent heat conductor.

2) Essentially stuff airbags into the moulins in Greenland and Antarctica. (Moulins are holes in the ice that carry meltwater from the surface of a glacier down to the base of the glacier, thus lubricating the base of the glacier, and speeding its travel.) Instead divert the meltwater in channels across the surface of the glaciers.

3) Trap meltwater running over the surface of glaciers in reservoirs, so that the water will not go into the sea. Then pump the water up upwards in the winter, making snow/ice.

4) Cover large portions of glaciers with tarps in the summer, which can be removed during the winter.

Again, all these ideas would be multi-billion-dollar efforts. But there is no extraordinary new technology or technical advance required to employ them.

http://www.john-daly.com/dietze/cmodcalc.htm
Compare effect on the a1b emission scenario
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/co2a1bfick.gif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&feature=channel

I’ll mostly withhold comment until I can get my hands on the mythical study & see what the means and methods were, but a few things in the press release did stand out:

“ ‘It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,’ Solomon said.” Really. Wasn’t it only 3-5 years ago that C02 stayed aloft for mere hundreds of years? And before the 1980s, wasn’t it scores of years? Solomon does include the sneaky qualifier, “some”, which renders the statement effectively meaningless (yeah, and with every breath I take, I inhale some DaVinci molecules); still, readers new to the Climate Debate may be interested in a Geologist’s take.

” ‘ . . . carbon dioxide [is] unique among the major climate gases,’ said Solomon.” Again, we’ll see, when the study actually appears; in the meantime, looks like standard AGW fixation on a trace, beneficial gas. Regarding the alleged correlation between tropospheric CO2 levels and heat content, another Geologist has other thoughts (the link is to part 1 of 5; you’ll need to watch at least parts 1 & 2).

Roger is no doubt aware of the above references, so on the face of it, his statement “If Solomon et al. are correct about the irreversibility of climate change, and I have no reason to doubt them . . .” is astonishing; however, since the study has yet to appear he would indeed have no cause for doubt. But maybe he’s simply performing the now-standard ritual obeisance to AGW dogma in the hopes that some of its less rigid devotees are amenable to reason – “Yes, it’s real and a real problem, but it’s not the end of the world as we know it; we need to prioritize, and to consider mitigation and other strategies.”

Futile, I think. Near the end of his life, the arch socialist & atheist Steven J. Gould finally capitulated to the bible-thumpers with his NOMA olive branch, probably figuring that that old time religion wasn’t going anywhere, and he and his fellow evolutionists had better try for detente’ instead. But the W.J. Bryan crowd wasn’t having any. Not for them some impersonal Prime Mover; they want an interested, caring God. And the AGW Greens don’t want high-tech, big engineering mitigation & adaptation solutions; they want humanity trodding soft energy paths to some imagined Ecotopian future.

Yes, here are some recent trends in the cost of desalination:

http://www.desalination.ucla.edu/background_files/image004.jpg

More recently than these trends, scientists have discovered that carbon nanotubes can separate salt from water with much more energy efficiency than current reverse osmosis membranes:

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-05-06.html

stan:
Hubris is exactly the right word.

I am thinking many things about this debate are, in fact, speculative including estimates of how bad things will get and how long it will last. Perhaps we need to weigh various knowledge claims in the climate change world based on a defined “index of speculativity” composed of the kinds and forms of speculation, assumption, and projections involved in the claim.

Or we could have a panel of experts who would hold up (virtual) cards after a knowledge claim with a subjective speculativity rating.