Here we go again, more geo-engineering. From Physicsworld:
Artist’s impression of a Flettner spray vessel. The wind would be blowing from the right-hand side of the image, the rotor spin would be clockwise as seen from above, and the rotors would push the vessel to the left. (Courtesy: J. MacNeill).
Cloud-seeding ships could combat climate change
It should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air.
{The proposal] involves increasing the reflectivity, or “albedo”, of clouds lying about 1 km above the ocean’s surface. The idea relies on the “Twomey effect”, which says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud’s albedo. By spraying fine droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within each droplet act as new condensation nuclei when they reach the clouds above, leading to a greater concentration of water droplets within each cloud.
This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 free drifting ships.
According to the article, these ships ‘would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 meter high, 2.5 meter diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors.
The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US dollars cost of $2.65 to 5.3 billion for the ships only.
Here is what the original rotor ship looked like:
The Buckau, then renamed Baden-Baden crossed the Atlantic in 1926.
So the question is: who’s gonna fund this? And, how do we know the cure isn’t worse than the “disease”? Such hubris.
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You realize, of course, that if we are undergoing global cooling – even temporarily – that this plan, if workable and effective, would only worsen the problem. We would then be a direct and decisive cause in the climate change that would then occur. There would be no need to really debate THAT particular aspect. Ironic really…to achieve such mitigation, if indeed it did work as advertised, only to make things worse instead of better. Delicious.
I think I read that spraying salt water into freezing air is a cheap way to desalinate it. So maybe those boats can be converted for that purpose. It might be cheaper than melting your neighborhood glacier if you live by the ocean.
Let’s see billions versus trillions, and technology that can be simply turned off. Sounds like a bargain!! Of course, we may want to spend the billions on something we actually need.
Another example of the sheer arrogance of the AGW faith.
Hubris? I don’t think so. It uses wind power and salt water. What’s not to like? If you get worried that it’s doing the wrong thing (if, eg, you suddenly discover that the world’s not warming at all) then you can just switch it off and in one week you’re back to the status quo ante: try to do that with sulphur dioxide clouds.
It’s cheap. Anyone who thinks that 5.3 billion dollars is a lot of money has not been paying attention to the carbon trading figures or, come to that, the loss of GDP caused by fiddling with our power supplies.
From: Sea-Going Hardware for the Implementation of the Cloud Albedo
Control Method for the Reduction of Global Warming.
xxxx
Engineering and Electronics, University of Edinburgh.
quote: The carbon-trading market works very much like the Papal
indulgences which so annoyed Martin Luther. It is intended to
keep emissions at 5.2% below 1990 levels by requiring that
people wanting to exceed that level should pay others to
counteract the increase. Recent high and low spot values were
€28.6 and €18.6 per tonne of CO2. A prediction for the total
market for 2005 is €5 billion. The potential market for albedo
control would be this amount minus removals by carbon
sequestration times a factor for any increased perception of the
dangers of global warming.
However the carbon-trading markets were set up by people
who were unaware of the potential of albedo control. Some
renegotiation will be necessary if commercial investment is to
fund it.
The prediction for 2020 is for an increase of atmospheric CO2
by a factor of 1.7. At a cost of €20 per tonne this would represent
an annual market of €3500 billion. unquote
Hubris? It’s not Salter and Latham who suffer from hubris.
There’s another reason I like it — well, two reasons. First it cools the oceans. There was a recent paper which demonstrated that global warming is, in fact, ocean warming extended to the land, so the problem is tackled right where it is happening. Second, it lets politicians prevaricate, not always a good idea but in this case I am fairly sure it is. The idea that the oceans will continue to lose alkalinity is overstated — the measurement of saturation in the RS paper was taken in a bay where different mixing and biochemical rules would be expected. Delay of a few years might save trillions of dollars and even many lives.
Thirdly… Google ship tracks and NASA. Look at the pictures of how starved certain ocean areas are of cloud condensation nuclei. Google marine boundary layer and marine stratus. Google Palle/’s results on the drop of albedo and work out the extra wattage on the surface. It all looks much more convincing than water vapour feedback after a tiny greenhouse forcing. Global warming is the result of a lower albedo caused by cloud cover reduction.
JF
Why not use all this geo-engineering prowess and billions of dollars at a time to generate some clean energy instead.
How much “power” does it take to shoot sea water way up into the air. How about if we shoot some water down some turbines and generate some electricity instead.
If we get all 1,500 ships lined up at the equator in the Pacific at noon then the force of the spray will move the earth far enough away from the sun and thus cool us all down.
Then, when we want to warm things up again, we just put them there at midnight.
Of course, some deniers will argue that the gravitational pull of the sun will be hard for the ships to overcome – as if the sun affects anything here on Earth!
Anyway, even if this were true, it would simply provide us with an easy and safe way to tour the galaxy.
Don’t they get it? The A0g0w0 gang doesn’t want a technological fix. Technology is ruining the Earth. We must return to nature. No more power houses, no eating meat. We must live in harmony with Mother Eartk… Think Dark Ages….. Got it??
Mike Bryant says: “Don’t they get it? The A0g0w0 gang doesn’t want a technological fix. Technology is ruining the Earth. We must return to nature. No more power houses, no eating meat. We must live in harmony with Mother Eartk… Think Dark Ages….. Got it??”
Do you care to provide cites to any mainstream environmental organizations which are blasting all technology and calling for a return to the Dark Ages? It seems to me it is more the AGW-naysayers who are in the Dark Ages…preferring to milk yesterday’s energy technology forever rather than get with the 21st century.
Has AGW become the scientific equivalent of blood letting?
Just to add to my last post, my girlfriend says that Thomas Friedman was on one of the Sunday morning talk shows and noted that the cheer at the Republican convention of “Drill, baby, drill!!” could just as well have been a cheer like, “Yea, IBM typewriter ribbons!!”
It is the nations that develop the new energy sources and energy efficiency technologies that are going to prosper and those that stick their heads in the sand that are going to end up as yesterday’s technological powers.
The ships will not be constructed.
“preferring to milk yesterday’s energy technology forever rather than get with the 21st century.” Joel
Actually, I prefer burning cow manure.
or a straw man will do in a pinch.
Let me understand this. Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas. Shooting water into the atmosphere will increase the water vapor and that will cool the earth. Of course, the new cloud layer will trap heat after the sun sets and reduce radiational cooling at night. I can see how this will work.
Even at $1000 a barrel, oil is dirt cheap compared to alternative energy sources. There is nothing else out there with the fantastic energy density of oil — except nuclear. Wind, solar, geothermal, and wave energy are expensive and have larger environmental impacts than just using oil. The path forward is to use oil to bridge the gap to nuclear.
Countries that do not invest in nuclear, and instead invest in politically-motivated alternative energies will be yesterday’s technological powers.
Always nice to see an abstruse undergraduate lecture topic (Flettner) raise its head. By the way, I knew Salter decades ago: an admirably fertile engineering mind and sound on wind-power i.e. knew it to be silly.
Wind-power for electricity generation, I mean, not for ships.
You are correct Joel, I think we all should be able to agree that nuclear and natural gas is our future. We can drill to get us through the construction and turnaround.
This idiocy makes me ashamed to call myself a physicist.
Stupid, stupid stupid
@ur momisugly Frank Ravizza
Blood letting sucks your blood but you can say no.
AGW sucks your money and you can NOT say no. Quite different beasts.
Here’s what the BBC has to say about this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/6354759.stm
I find it interesting that Flettner abandoned the original idea as it was less efficient than conventional propulsion, but these folks claim is is more efficient than sails. Really. When I sailed, we never used a drop of fuel. This ship will generate power by dragging a turbine behind. That generates power to spin the rotors. Which power the ship. And pump a lot of salt water far up into the air, 1 km or more. That’s gonna take one h— of a turbine. Might even make a good perpetual motion machine.
If they will only cost a few million bucks each, let Al Gore fund one and test it. Not to see if it cools the earth, just see if it can move and pump anything out the rotors. Of course, with full ‘peer review’. Like a bunch of folks standing around to see if it can clear port.
This makes about as much sense as getting funds from that dead dictator’s bank account in Nigeria.
I still think we should try my boneless chicken cannons first…
I can’t help thinking of the billions of tiny sea creatures being sucked up, grinded up and spewed heavenward. this is even worse than the holocaust of chickens that happens every day.
“{The proposal] involves increasing the reflectivity”
My eyes are bad,
they’re not very keen
but in the quote above
I sometime see green
Is it your site
or just my machine?