Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve written before about the “no-regrets” option when one is faced with uncertainty. It relates to one of my favorite rules of thumb. I often live my life by my “rules of thumb”, general guidelines for when things aren’t clear. One that I’ve used for decades goes like this:
“Do what you know, and let the rest go.”
I use it when say I’m stuck on a building project, maybe I’m not sure how to install a particular window. It’s easy to get paralyzed by the decision, or to force the decision, or to make the wrong decision. But what I do instead is, I know there’s always things I can do that I know will move the project forwards. So I do what I know will be of use, what I know the project needs, and I let the unknowns take care of themselves for a while. More things are always revealed in the fullness of time, and meanwhile, the workshop still needs sweeping and a hundred important tasks await. I do what I know, and I let the rest go.
These days this same concept is called the “no-regrets option”, a much clearer term but not a rule of thumb. Applied to the vexing CO2 madness, a “no-regrets option” is an action we won’t regret, whether or not CO2 is the secret knob controlling global temperature. I’m convinced CO2 is not, but others disagree. A no-regrets option is one that is of value no matter which side is right.
So I was pleased to see the following in Science Magazine (paywalled here )
I live in the redwood forest. The redwood trees harvest the ocean fog very efficiently. Often in the morning the open ground will be bone dry, while the ground under the redwoods is quite wet, with a slow, steady rain falling underneath the majestic trees. Having watched that for decades, it was no surprise that people have started utilizing the same phenomenon … we’re just not that good at it yet, but that’s changing. I wrote about harvesting fog using nets in my piece called Climate, Caution, and Precaution. Water shortages (along with floods, curiously) are supposed to be one of the Seven Horsemen of Thermal Apocalypse, all the alarmists agree. But we already face this problem today, so how about we attack the problem and not the CO2, duh? That way more people have more water, no matter what CO2 does or doesn’t do.
So I was fascinated to see the possibility of using biomimicry to improve fog harvesting techniques. Since Nature Communications is also paywalled, I did an end run and found the paper from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, available here.
In that paper they elucidate the secrets of the ancients. Here’s how the cactus fog harvesting system works:
How sweet is that? It illustrates a principle I call “NWA”, for “Nature Wins Again”, life always comes up with some ingenious solution.
So what are my conclusions from all of this?
1. Any problems that might result from a few degrees of temperature rise are ongoing problems today, and have been for millennia. Humans have always and ever been plagued by droughts and floods and heat waves and rising sea levels and cold spells and storms and the like.
2. Attacking the problems is the no-regrets solution, duh. Since all of these problems exist today, if we work to alleviate them, we’re better off no matter if it warms or not, or whether CO2 is the culprit or not.
3. Nature itself, that first and best of scientists, has run literally millions and millions of experiments in how to most effectively harvest water from the air. We’d be fools not to learn from and build on that previous scientific work, in this and all aspects of science, and in fact biomimicry is being used in more and more arenas.
4. “Imagination is free,” as my beloved father used to say. Seeing this kind of work reminds me that the only limits to, say, how much water we have are the limits of our imagination.
So what I’m doing is throwing open this thread to a discussion of actual examples of viable no-regrets solutions, whether they involve biomimicry or not. The requirements are that they have to solve problems caused by the weather, and they have to be dirt-cheap for widespread adoption. Here’s one:
Bargain Technology Allows Chile To Harvest Fog For Thirsty Village
July 18, 1993|By Gary Marx, Tribune Staff Writer.
CHUNGUNGO, Chile — The landscape around this poor fishing village is rocky and bone dry. But Daisy Sasmayo’s garden is in full bloom, with flowers, vegetables and a young apple tree.
This once-parched community now has its first fresh water in decades, thanks to an ingenious system of plastic nets fixed on a nearby mountain to capture fog as it rolls in from the ocean.
“When the water first started flowing last year, we went crazy,” Sasmayo said as she gently watered her garden. “We had a huge party and were dousing each other with water. It has changed our lives 100 percent.”
Regards to everyone,
w.
[UPDATE] Secret source WS sends me the paper, my thanks to him, from which I extract this:
Astounding. The barbs act as a one way valve for the coalescing of the drops, pumping the water horizontally without one single moving part … as a man with a portion of a patent for a kind of pump, I can only dip my head in awe.
… what an astounding force life is, exploring and constantly perfecting survival in the harshest conditions.
w.
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And there’s that Engineer’s Saying: “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.”
Very good Willis,thank you.
Alfred
Reminds me of how Velcro was invented..
The hook-and-loop fastener was conceived in 1941 by Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral[2][8][9] who lived in Commugny, Switzerland
The idea came to him one day after returning from a hunting trip with his dog in the Alps. He took a close look at the burrs (seeds) of burdock that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog’s fur. He examined them under a microscope, and noted their hundreds of “hooks” that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair.[5] He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops.[2][9] This inspiration from nature or the copying of nature’s mechanisms (called bionics or biomimesis) is viewed by some like Steven Vogel[10] or Werner Nachtigall[11] as a key example.
Ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro
Any blocking, capturing, harvesting of something could have results we didn’t anticipate. Covering the ground with houses, shopping centers, roads and parking lots has prevented the soil from soaking up rain water. This has left man and the land we live on dealing with flash floods from more runoff.
Before we capture fog we better make sure of all the ways nature uses it.
Kilimanjaro receives less snow after man cut down the trees around it. Less water vapor, less snow. Not letting the fog evaporate off the mountains might effect the weather downwind.
Don’t need to cause a new problem by solving an old one.
We want to make sure that your number 2 truly is a no regrets solution.
Where I live at 32 degrees south, the summer sun will burn and wilt most vegetables that people from temperate zones are used to. Even plants you would think of as heat tolerant like pepper plants.
So, this year, I decided I would buy or make some shade frames to go over vegetables. If you are familiar with a cold frame, then the same thing except shade cloth instead of polythene, and around 30cm high.
All that is required to make them is some heavy gauge wire and shade cloth. My local hardware store sells both, except the wire comes in 100+ meter rolls. I only need half dozen shade frames, so I decide better to buy them pre-assembled.
To my great surprise, after diligently searching online and asking at a few garden centres, nobody sells pre-assembled wire shade frames in Australia.
I don’t know whether shade frames suitable for gardens are available elsewhere in the world, but their availability would allow growing a wider range of vegetables in hotter climates, and higher value vegetables that could be sold. They would be simple and cheap to make.
I only add this because the IPCC talks of water pollution caused by
weatherclimate.————–
In short, plastic bottled water, shake then put on roof exposing it to the sun. Six hours later UV kills bugs.
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/15/sodis-roolz/
A bricoleur might say, “Fix until broke.” Note the clear double entendre.
N. N.Taleb makes much of flaneurs and bricoleurs, being antifragile.
One other point about wire shade frames is that with the right wire they could be shipped flat and bent to the required shape. The ends of the wire are then pushed into the ground at the required location.
Just curious as you say you live in the redwood forest, ” . . . . “the trees may live 2000 years (compared to 3000 for the sequoia), a more typical life span for the giants is 500-700 years.”
When these trees get [too] old to live . . . do we harvest them or do ‘we’ let them just go back to nature or do we rail that the ‘deaths’ are man made?
And being from “not the redwood forest area” wouldn’t trying to plant a redwood forest of my own be considered introducing and a non-native species as there are none here now.
Do you reckon that the ones that planted the redwood forest regret it? They never got to harvest one tree.
Until we can ascertain realities, see “historically”, and circumspect there is no such a critter as The No-Regrets Option.
While I agree with you in general, I do believe that you still need to be careful about “no regrets” policies. One example that sticks out to me:
Many lists of the cost-benefit analyses of energy saving actions put better building insulation at the top of the list, with straight savings in energy use over the years easily covering the initial cost. So it seems to be a good idea regardless of any effect on climate — a classic “no regrets” issue, it would seem.
Based on this logic, the Australian government started providing significant monetary incentives for people to increase the insulation in their homes. This caused a rush of inexperienced contractors to enter the field, lured by these incentives. These contractors badly botched many of the installations. In dozens of homes, they did not take sufficient care to ensure that the metal foil layer* of the insulation was kept properly isolated from electrical wires, causing shorts that burned down the houses. I think there were some regrets there…
*Note to skydragon slayers: The metal foil layer in home insulation acts as a radiative barrier to heat transfer. (The spun fiberglass acts as a conductive/convective barrier.) In winter, even though this foil is colder than the inside of the house, it helps “keep the house warm”. In reality, of course, it’s the furnace that heats the house, and the foil helps reduce radiative heat loss by reflection and absorption/re-radiation.
In the 1920s to the 1960s, farmers and ranchers in remote areas used cisterns to store rainwater trapped and transported by roof gutters. This is still done in dry islands such as Bermuda. Today, Master Gardners are teaching and encouraging the concept of “water harvesting”, which in principle is the same as cisterns but the rainwater is stored in aboveground galvanized tanks and used for plants.
Several groups are also encouraging use of plants with low water requirements. Purdue has discovered a gene that allows plants to use less water without loss of biomass. Israel pioneered use of drip watering for orchards 50 years ago. There are many ways to save water including a pitcher and wash bowl/basin. Some are painless and some are not.
Here is an observation for thought. The temperature was in the lower 40’s(F) for 72 hours over moist soil. Today it has warmed 30 degrees and the humidity is maxed. There are trickles of water in low spots from the moisture condensing from the air onto the soil. The soil was previously saturated so it is just running off.
Cool huh?
I’ve always liked this quote:
“There Is No Such Thing As Bad Weather, Only Inappropriate Clothing.”
“Covering the ground with houses, shopping centers, roads and parking lots has prevented the soil from soaking up rain water.”
And in return we got houses, shopping centers, roads…well, you know the rest.
The coast of Namibia is a desert, the Namib Desert. It is very, very dry and stretches over 1,000 miles along the coast. Along the coast it has received about 0.2mm of rainfall a year for the last 50-80 million years but it gets dense fog for 180-200 days a year, it’s thickest around dawn.
Go out on the vast beaches and, with the aid of a pair of binoculars, look at the ridges of the dunes towering inland. There’s a thin line of black on every dune crest.
The next day, go up on the lee side of the dune crest and sit and watch. From nowhere at dawn millions of beetles appear. They line the dune crest and promptly stand on their heads with their legs out-stretched. The fog droplets condense on their legs and on their carapace, run down to the beetle’s mouth-parts where they are sucked in. Spiders, too, assemble in their billions on the ridges. They spin mini-webs and hold them up into the fog with their hind legs, drinking the water which the web collects. It is known that the spiders don’t put blobs of web-sticky on their water-collecting webs, and it is thought, though not yet proven, that they somehow coat the web-strands with a ‘water-friendly- substance.
All I know is that in one of the driest deserts known insect life is abundant due solely to these amazing moisture capturing behaviours.
Chris Beal @NJSnowFan says:
February 21, 2013 at 12:57 pm
Reminds me of how Velcro was invented..
The hook-and-loop fastener was conceived in 1941 by Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral[2][8][9] who lived in Commugny, Switzerland
———————————————————————————————————
Damn! I always thought that velcro was something we got from the aliens that crash landed at Roswell. The timing seems very co-incidental …
Building and zoning codes here limit the impermeable fraction, that includes the structure roof.
About redwoods, sequoias, I believe that all Sequoiadendron giganteum are protected and that Sequoia sempervirens is cropped and in great demand. I believe that most is sold in Japan.
I planted a scion, in 1957, from the same parent S. sempervirens that populated California State Normal School (later San Jose State College, now San Jose State University) at 1548 W. Hedding Street. It is clearly visible on G00gle Earth (N37°20’06.12″ W121°55’47.05″)
There is weather, any way you might want it, everywhere.
Transportation of said weather, seems to be the crux of the problem.
Does this qualify?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903
There used to be a “Rain Farm” here in north Queensland that used to do a similar thing; harvest fog/mist from the rainforest. Was some of the best ‘bottled’water around until a cyclone messed thing up and I guess the business never recovered.
If water is condensed where it would not usually be, part of it will evaporate and be transpired by new growth. Part of it will escape downward into the water table. If one wants to avoid that downward loss they can put something to hold the water in place, lining gardens with clay or “hydrophobic sand” bags. This might be a bit much in cost and effort for non-profit greenbelts unless they protect farms from sand and wind. Some desert land doesn’t have much problem with downward loss and suffers more from flash flood runoff which green belts help mitigate and can be further helped with simple holes full of rocks covered with mulch.
As a recent post on this site said, it really seems that rain falls where plants grow rather than just plants growing where rains fall.
Just like in all of Australia’s deserts, Acacia aneura, of which there are 9 sub species have microscopic grooves down the twigs and stems to funnel scarce water resources to the roots. This is the most common species of shrub in Australia and grows from one side of the country to the other. It’s common name is Mulga, and has a number of uses for the indigenous population, it is highly prized as a food source for livestock as well as native fauna.
Pliny talked about an island where it never rained but the inhabitants obtained ALL their water needs by catching (in pitchers) the water which cascaded down their trunks in the dawn. These trees were likely the Foetid Laurel a small grove of which yet persists on Chaco, Madeira. The greatest rivers on Earth are in the sky. It is this bounty we may harvest by the judicious planting of the right trees, transforming what WAS harsh desert into gardens which will provide shade and sustenance to man and beasts alike. LOVE your posts, byt the way…http://www.finnsheep.com/Steve%27s%20Blog.htm
Here’s a thread on Judy’s blog on No-Regrets measures:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/31/climate-pragmatism/
Agreed. In addition, if this finding gives warmists “an outlet” to expend their pent-up energies on implementing, it’s all to the good. It should be part of a “no-regrets” suite of mitigation measures.
See also the Book Prescription for the Planet at http://www.amazon.com/Prescription-Planet-Painless-Remedy-Environmental/dp/1419655825/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236568501&sr=1-1
1. Serious encouragement of natural gas for heating and truck fuel.
2. Serious encouragement of insulation upgrades and in building codes. (E.g., the unemployed could be trained to install insulation, for which the gov’t. would pay upfront, taking compensation by getting an option on a share of the profit on the house when it is sold.)
2a. Similar encouragement for heat pumps for heating/cooling in regions with “continental” weather patterns (wide winter/summer swings).
3. Serious encouragement of innovative-technology (e.g., pebble bed) nuclear plants.
4. Serious encouragement of “deep geothermal” in rural areas.
5. Coal liquefaction as a fuel for trains and vehicles.
6. Encouragement of videoconferencing for business meetings. (The gov’t. could take the lead here.)
7. Encouragement of research on longshots with breakthrough potential like cold fusion and other fringe stuff.
8. A higher gasoline tax, rather than more stringent mileage requirements for vehicles.
9. Diesel cars (like Europe’s),
10. Incentives for battery assisted bicycles (like China’s),
11. Increased use of hydro-power
What I have in mind as incentives for homeowners are low-interest loans and maybe (if needed) mild tax breaks. I wouldn’t offer these for investments that wouldn’t have a good and quick payoff, like solar or wind (for most uses). They could be phased in gradually or regionally, to avoid going all-in all-at-once on something unproven. The “break” offered could be modest.
Here are four investments that paid off quickly for me about 15 years ago (I did the installation):
* Large (20 by 16 and 16 by 16) retractable summer awnings on the two sunny sides of the house. These cost about $1600 from Sunsetter.
* Attic fan and thermostatically controlled on/off switch–cost about $200.
* Blown-in wall insulation. Cost maybe $350.
* Plywood sheathing all around the upper half of my basement wall (the cripple wall). Cost maybe $250. Helpfully reduced shaking in subsequent earthquakes–may save my house if the Big One hits. Also provides a little insulation effect.
These cut my heating bills and enabled me to avoid installing air conditioning. These would be good investments for others in a similar situation to mine. I didn’t need subsidies, because I have foresight. But most people don’t, and they suffer from inertia. A little nudge would get them moving.
On the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii, there is a “renewable energy” lab near the Kona airport. The original idea for the lab was to exploit the temperature difference between the hot ocean surface and the cold lower ocean for electricity production (it’s called “ocean thermal energy conversion”). That never proved remotely feasible, but they do have the capability to pump up water from the deep ocean to the surface.
The last time I checked, all they were doing with this capability was to pump the colder water through a special network of pipes above the land to condense water from the humid tropical air and collect this fresh water. I have no idea how cost effective this is compared to other methods, but I’m not optimistic.