AC A, Regarding your posting of the Bulgarian protests, their major demand seemed to be to re-nationalize the electric grid. That might be a good thing for renewable energy. I read an article about Hawaiian power a few months ago, and one of my take-aways was that the private power companies on Maui, Oahu and Hawaii were saying that 30% renewables couldn't be handled while the cooperative in Kawaii was planning to boost its renewable portion to 50%.

Crandles, Bob was assuming 4 turbines per acre. The windfarm you were referencing had only 1% that turbine density. The good news is that even if we had to increase by a factor of 640 from Bob's estimate, that would still "only" be 36,000 square miles, that would still only be around 1.2% of the US lower 48 land area. And the land used need not be otherwise unusable land, agricultural and pastoral land could easily be used as long as tall trees weren't involved. Even so, I'm not optimistic. I feel like I did over 35 years ago when I was told that the economic and engineering problems of storing nuclear waste were solved and all that remained were the politcal problems. My thought then, as now, was 'I'd rather the political problems were solved, and we needed to work on the engineering'

@ Chloe Yes, me. My guesstimate is that about 2 trillion tons of ice is the net melting each year. (Almost 1 trillion of Artic Sea Ice, then Greenland, the rest divided between Antarctica & glaciers.) I see a big feedback starting soon. Not the first year that we have a near ice-free arctic, but a few years later when the albedo change causes the artic ocean to heat up enough to really slow winter re-freeze. Once that happens, one of two things can happen. Either the 16-20 thousand cubic km of ice that currently melts in the artic ocean will move to Greenland Ice Sheet melt, or that energy will heat the atmosphere, ocean, or a combination. Either way, it's not good.

For maximum GIS loss, I did a back of envelope calculation that suggested that 1 watt/m2 over the entire earth,used solely to melt land ice would increase sea level by about 1 meter in 8 years. So if Greenland is about 7.2 meters, at 1 watt/m2 forcing, the maximum melt would be at 2% a year, and that's if the entire watt/m2 were all concentrated on Greenland. So there are limits, just not very comforting ones.

Talking about wierd,temperature north of 80 degrees is about 10 degree celsius above 1958-2002 average. See: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php Any ideas what's causing it, or speculation on when it will return to normal? When it touched the average about a month ago, I thought 'that's it' then it started going warmer than average again. My totally unsophisticated estimate is that right now the ice pack is thickening at less than 1/2 the normal rate. Have I totally missed something with this? What's this going to mean when melting begins May-June 2013?