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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You folks might want to take a quick glance at This Chart.
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/khebab2200808.gif
The folks that put it together have spent years studying new projects coming online; and, have been way more “right” than “wrong” over the years.
“Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.” – Paul Watson, Mainstream Environmentalist
I was reading Julian Floods post and was amused…..
Look.. 1500 ships wandering about the oceans pumping water into the air is simply like peeing in the oceans in order to raise the sea level….
For a start, they will only work when the wind is blowing…. However when the wind is blowing the waves throw salt spume into the the air over a much greater area and effect…. all for free.
This is just stupid. Go down to the beach on a really windy day and have a look.
If they make it any colder in Colorado, I’m filing a class-action suit. It is much too cold here for early September. June was very cool, and it has been possibly the shortest summer on record. The weather got warm on July 4, and cooled down well below normal by the first week in August. Mid-August we had high temperatures close to 50F.
Bill Marsh (18:35:40) :
“Retired Engineer,
That was my initial thought as well. Exactly how much power are these turbines going to need to generate to make the water vapor rather than water droplets. If they just make water droplets how much energy is going to be needed to get them to the cloud layer?”
Supposed to be self propelled, no power other than solar.
“My other ‘concern’ with this idea is that water vapor is NOT a cloud condensation nuclei, pumping more of it into the 100 meters above the ocean is not going to make more clouds or increase cloud albedo, there’s already plenty of water vapor there, just not enough condensation nuclei, which this, er, idea, will not address.”
It is the salt in the spume that gives the nuclei for condensation. The water will evaporate but the salt will reach cloud level is the theory I think.
J.Hansford. (20:36:42)
“For a start, they will only work when the wind is blowing…. However when the wind is blowing the waves throw salt spume into the the air over a much greater area and effect…. all for”
Not to a height of 1 km.
Have you read about not eating meat. The #1 head honcho form the UN IPCC on global warming said the best way to stop global warming is to not eat meat. Dumber than hell, but it’s real. I got a comment on my blog which left me laughing to tears for 30 minutes. If you stop by it won’t be all that, but damn, it’s funny how the public thinks
Best time blogging I have ever had.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/no-meat-for-you-there-are-nuts-on-top-of-the-un-ipcc-granola-bar/
I have spoken on this before.
We have to be pragmatic. Is the skeptic community making a dent and stopping the momentum of all the carbon follies ?
I think not. The only thing that will stop the AGW momentum would be the Mediterranean freezing this winter, or something similar.
I am convinced that carbon taxes and trading are unethical and will contribute to the misery of the third world, worse than the ethanol fiasco.
Here is a proposal that gives a technological solution. I say lets fund it. I thought only 20 ships were needed and now see it is 1500. By the time this project is built a decade will have gone where if we are lucky, the cooling will be established. A much smaller price to pay than the carbon gimmick which will make Gore and Co. rich.
It will give an out to politicians who are for drilling.
If warming returns, i will be a tool for weather control, much better than trying to control Carbon emissions.
Anna:
I worry more about a cooling planet than a warming planet. Warm is inconvenient. Cold is deadly.
Save the weather control to prevent the next ice age.
In the case of global cooling,
they could switch to reverse mode to pump the clouds back into the water
I think most people are suffering from the mistaken belief that this scheme is somehow connected to the warmist camp: far from it, — as a cheap way of holding the fort while we get the science right it is the last thing people who are trying to scare the world into CO2 reductions would want. It frightens me a damn sight less than pumping CO2 back into the ground.
I’m just a simple nurseryman, but let me try to explain what’s going on here, as far as I can judge.
When the wind blows over the ocean surface, it sets up a certain depth of turbulent air which is capped at about 2 or 3 thousand feet by stability. A wave breaks, bubbles form in the water, the bubbles rise and break and billions of drops of seawater drift up and down in the boundary layer. They do not, in normal circumstances, drift higher. The droplets dry to make salt particles and these particles hover in the turbulent air until they reach an area which is of a sufficiently high humidity. The water then condenses onto the particle and cloud forms, marine stratocumulus. Seen from below this cloud is dark, from above, white. Anyone who has bothered to look out of the window as their flight takes them over the ocean will have seen them about 30% of the time, because that’s how much of the sea surface is covered with marine strato-cu. There are various things that help droplets to condense — bacterial remains, dust, sulphur dioxide, salt particles and dimethyl sulphide (the latter emitted by plankton trying to reduce the warming on the top of their world). Collectively these particles are called cloud condensation nuclei, CCNs.
You will no doubt have seen the arguments on the blogs where someone has stoutly declared that they don’t believe in global warming because the science is bad and been answered with the riposte ‘if you don’t think it’s CO2 then what’s your theory?’ Well, I decided that I needed a theory and started to look for mechanisms that really control the planet’s heat balance.
It’s the clouds, [snip].
Low level clouds reflect high frequency radiation back into space. That’s why when you stand on the NE coast of England on a haar day (when the strato-cu rolls in off the sea and blots out the sun) your toes get cold and your nose turns blue. No incoming high frequency radiation, no warming. Low level clouds cool the earth like putting limewash on your greenhouse. (Someone might tell IPCC — they don’t seem to have noticed this).
The albedo of open water is, essentially zero. The albedo of strato-cu is 60. Round figures, to make the sums easy, I’m just this nurseryman, remember? The sun sends us about 300 ish watts per square metre. So, a section of open water exposed directly to the sun will take in 300 watts per m^2, but if we cover it with strato-cu it will get 300 – (300*.6) watts per m^2, 120 watts/m^2 less! Does anyone recall the enormous power of CO2 warming, even if you pump it so full with water vapour feedbacks that it sloshes when it moves? 4 watts/m^2? Wow, no wonder the Earth’s in trouble when 4 w/m^2 causes all this climate chaos and Nature’s got a whole extra 116 watts to play with at will.
quote Using the temperature response demonstrated by Idso (1998) of 0.1°C per watt/m2, this difference of 0.4 watts/m2 equates to an increase in atmospheric temperature of 0.04°C. unquote
So that’s 116 times .1 deg C. No, can’t be right. Can it? Wow!
Power required: quote It is the NUMBER of condensation nuclei disseminated, not the
mass of spray, which matters. The inescapable minimum
energy required for the ideal spray generator is the amount
required to create the new surface area against surface
tension. The surface area of a 1-micron drop is 3.14 x 10-12 m2
and the surface tension of sea water is 0.078 N/m so the very
minimum energy is 2.45 x 10 -13 Joules per drop. This amounts
to only 245 kW to cope with present world annual CO2
increases. However the energy requirement of practical spray
generators now being designed is likely to be at least 50 times
more. Even so the ratio of the wind power required to make the
spray relative to the reflected solar power is probably between
6 and 8 orders of magnitude. unquote
245 kilowatts: you can hardly run a mansion is Nashville on that little power.
So, not a lot then.
quote Latham calculated that the quantities of spray needed in
suitable regions are surprisingly small. An annual increase of
the spray rate by 10^18 drops per second would allow the
present rate of rise of CO2 to continue with no temperature rise.
If the spray were done from 50 new sources each year, spraying
one micron drops, the water mass would be only ten kilograms
of sea water per second from each source. Unquote
The average amount of evaporation from the sea
surface is about 120 cm/yr. Call that a metre^3 from every square metre. Now work out how much water vapour is pushed into the boundary layer over the whole ocean and calculate by what percentage Salter and Latham’s solution to generating extra CCNs will add to the total. I don’t think we need to worry about the ships making it warmer through water vapour warming.
From above: quote However when the wind is blowing the waves throw salt spume into the the air over a much greater area and effect…. all for free. [] This is just stupid. Go down to the beach on a really windy day and have a look. unquote.
The waves on the beach are exactly where you can see the effect. However, out at sea, in the deep water, waves break less easily, (not having the land to break them, I think you forgot to allow for that) — there’s a critical wind speed at which they do not break at all and salt particle production ceases. Have a look at
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages /images.php3?img_id=11271
to see how critical the balance can be — the contrails like lines are ship tracks, lines where the exhaust from a ships engines are enough to tip the air into cloud formation. No clouds, 120 watts/m^2 extra, remember?
I can understand why this idea is attacked so vehemently by warmers: it would get us off the ‘panic now, buy this, do what I say or you’re doomed’ hysterical hook used by hucksters throughout history. No, I won’t buy your panic. Let’s do a trial on these methods and we’ll keep funding the science to see if we can get a better understanding of cloud modulation of heating effects. If I’m wrong and CO2 really is the worst thing we’ve ever faced then we will have lost nothing. We can always cool things off later.
Warmers can be forgiven for their reaction, they want to keep up the momentum of fear; I’m disappointed to see the unthinking rejection by others of a neat, even elegant response to the need to have an engineered cooling machine ready if things go wrong. However, no-one has given me a billion pounds worth of carbon trading indulgences so I can afford to wait for the science to be got right. The state of the science of clouds? Look at the IPCC’s own assessment of its level of understanding of cloud forcings.
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/climate-change-ar4/images/figure-spm-2-p4.jpg
I have got used to feeding frenzies on other blogs where advocates of non-conformist opinions are unthinkingly attacked: I expected better here — Salter and Latham’s paper is a direct engineering solution with many advantages which is cheap, easily implemented and enables those who don’t wish to panic to hold the line. Get hold of the paper and read it with an open mind, compare it with the launching of solar mirrors, the injection of sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere or the closing of 80% of our power plants. Ok, which would _you_ choose?
JF
Yes, I got my alternative theory — it boils down to ‘it’s the clouds, stupid’ with added complications. It’s slightly tongue in cheek but it covers all bases better than some theories I could name… I think we’ve polluted the ocean surface and reduced the number of CCNs, with the effect most marked during the Battle of the Atlantic. http://www.floodsclimbers.co.uk. Or it’s just natural variation, but where’s the Nobel prize in that?
Robert Wood (16:41:33) : wrote
quote One of the authors is named Salter? unquote
Yes. Of the Salter duck, a wave energy device that actually worked but, because a civil servant made a mistake with a decimal place, was never put into production.
JF
!,500 ships ???? that would be the same a catching a fly and putting it in a bathtub of water and waiting until he emptied the bathtub.
About 1 in 500 million people on this planet have a vague idea of how big the oceans are, if you have a globe of the world, remove it from its stand and turn it so as Antarctica is facing you, then look at the size of the ocean, to increase the natural evaporation by 0.01%, a figure of 1,500,000 ships would not be sufficient. But who cares, it’s only money.
Ok, lets see what we got.
We got a movement that are afraid we are changing earths climate and want us to stop with it. Great, we should take care of our environment.
We got a movment that wants to change earths climate with global-scale-constructions because they think we change our climate…WHAT?
As Penn and Teller would have said, What the *beeep* is this? Do they *beeep* want to us top stop chainging our *beep* climate or not? Are they totally *beeep* up?
Meassurements from reality shows we obviosuly do not know enough about how our climate works and still the AGW movement now wants to manually change it?
Scary. It is really scary if they suceed getting money for it.
Saltwater up in the clouds?How would that affect us?
How will it affect rainfall and droughts?
How will wildlife respond to such change?
There is a phage about to vanish to the rear of the sun. Is the holographic method for reporting sunspots at the rear, sensitive enough to detect a possible pore if that is all this phage may become? If not, then why are pores such as the one/s on August 21st given any credence?
This will do nothing to mitigate catastrophic global warming, but it will be of much more immediate benefit to mankind IMHO — http://cybernetnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/wedge-proof-underwear.jpg
As a non expert (enthusiastic hobbyist) won’t this cause salty rain and kill off the green and pleasant planet?
Julian Flood: “The droplets dry to make salt particles ”
Where does the water go during the dryng phase?
“Seen from below this cloud is dark”
It is dark because there is no sunlight reflecting off the bottom of the cloud or shining through it.
“That’s why when you stand on the NE coast of England on a haar day (when the strato-cu rolls in off the sea and blots out the sun) your toes get cold and your nose turns blue”
Isn’t that fog caused by cooler air traveling over warmer water?
Your theory does not even come close to explaining why clouds form over tropical land. Have you ever lived in a tropical place? It’s evaporation [snip – ad hominem]! As the evaporated water vapor rises in gets into colder air which causes condensation and clouds form. In Florida it happens every day in the summer. Clear morings, cloudy thunderstorms in the afternoon. Somtimes it cloudy mornings and clear afternoons, depends on which way the wind is blowing. No waves, no salt rising in Orlando but lots of clouds and rain.
statePoet1775:
“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.
Even better, how about a wicker man? Completely sustainable, all natural-sourced fuel, and it can serve to appease the climate gods at the same time. Perfect.
A wicker man is also a useful way to dispose of nosy environmentalists trying to measure one’s carbon foot print!
Anna v,
“It is the salt in the spume that gives the nuclei for condensation. The water will evaporate but the salt will reach cloud level is the theory I think.”
Has anyone shown that ‘salt’ is a CCD? I thought that CCD had to be extremely small and over the ocean tend to be droplets of sulfuric acid formed from dimethyl sulfide (the waste produced by phytoplankton that gives the ocean its ‘sea’ smell) converted to sulfuric acid by ultraviolet radiation. I suspect that salt is too large to make a good CCD.
I wonder how these devices will cope with the plastic bags and debris in the oceans?
Dee Norris (04:42:49) :
A wicker man is also a useful way to dispose of nosy environmentalists trying to measure one’s carbon foot print!
Wouldn’t that be rather Druid?
Jullian Flood,
According to JPL and thier new Argo buoy network the oceans have been cooling since 2003.
Warmers can be forgiven for their reaction, they want to keep up the momentum of fear; I’m disappointed to see the unthinking rejection by others of a neat, even elegant response to the need to have an engineered cooling machine ready if things go wrong.
Julian, I couldn’t care less about AGWers reactions to the idea, or why they reject it. A bad idea is a bad idea, and this one is a stinker. True, it isn’t as bad as some of the other whacko ideas, but so what? As far as an “engineered cooling machine ready if things go wrong” goes, what “things” are you talking about? The climate is fine, and has been all along. Meddling with it is not only stupid, needless, and wasteful, it is a recipe for things going wrong, as in the law of unintended consequences. The only thing man has to do is to learn how to adapt to climate change, and to not mess with mother nature’s natural defenses such as wetlands. Adapting to cooling will be the big challenge now, which is what we should be working on, not idiotic schemes like this.
@statePoet1775 (05:28:31) :
But why not? After all, they want me to pagan for my use of carbon fuels