Newest geo-engineering plan is salt water daffy

How can one be green
and yet to plants be mean?
They simply cannot do
without a gas called CO2.
So please do not be blind
to the needs of all plant-kind.

“After all, they want me to pagan for my use of carbon fuels” Dee Norris
It would be a lot less expensive if they were pagan. Then they could trust Gaia or whoever with the climate.

For those of you who followed the link to the Sunday Times article where the author was fulminating on the “Jason” (sic) conspiracy allow me to elucidate. The JASONs are a panel of distinguished scientists from various fields that spend a few months each year studying various scientific problems at the behest of the Defense Department. Sometimes the problems are military, sometimes they are purely scientific, and once in awhile they are about practical matters like what is the best source for the next generation of logic chips.
They are called JASONs because the panel is in session in July, August, September, October, and November. In July they listen to a bunch of pitches from various organizations seeking assistance with their difficult problems. They select the ones they are going to work on by the end of July and then report out the results in November. Nothing too spooky going on. I have worked with them a number of times and always found them to be interesting since they approach problems in a very pragmatic way from many different directions. They were always a big help to my projects.
Cheers,
John S.

Patrick: If present trends continue, those cute PB’s could be frolicking in Memorial Park (a bit east of downtown Colorado Springs). Of course, it won’t continue. It could be in the 80’s next week. Or not. Keep your sunblock and snow shovel handy.
Most of these {omitted to avoid snip} ideas face plant on energy requirements. It will take far more than dragging a turbine or a few solar panels to power this boondoggle. (assuming it doesn’t just tip over and sink) The solar power satellite is a good exmple. Didn’t take much to shoot it down in the 80’s, yet it still has proponents and even a few governments trying to fund it.
The perception that governments have to “do something” far outweighs anything resembling common sense.

My word, these ships have generated lots of interest.
I am not a climatologist, I am not a cloud physicist, so take what I say with a pinch of salt (ahem, sorry about that).
First, I’m surprised that people aren’t aware that a previous President of the US used to say ‘ It’s the economy, stupid’ to remind himself of a self-evident fact. I use the phrase ‘it’s the clouds, stupid’ in exactly the same way, an addressing of the mirror to reflect something so obvious that it has been ignored. So, no-one’s been called stupid except the person looking in the mirror. Which in this case is me. OK? Maybe Clinton is so long ago people have forgotten him.
Cloud formation: it’s a long time since I did aviation met, but one of the interesting things about clouds is that they don’t just form out of thin air — the droplets form on a particle, a CCN. It can, as I said, be many things. Dimethyl sulphide is one produced by lots of plankton — Lovelock mentions it in one of his Gaia books. Smoke particles are another. Salt particles are ubiquitous, all over the world, but they are tiny, so small that they’ll have no effect on your veggies, so there’s no need to worry about them (it’s useful to work out how few particles these ships will produce compared to the natural background — the number is miniscule but they’re in the right place to form clouds).
From the paper we’re discussing: quote Clean marine air masses normally have a deficit of
cloud condensation nuclei, often below 100 per cm3 and
sometimes as low as 20 per cm3. The salty residue left after the
evaporation of a small drop of sea water is an ideal cloud
condensation nucleus.
unquote
Note that small drop is of submicron size, so the salt particle is going to be pretty tiny. Here’s a relevant snippet:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14083689
A volume of air containing water vapour can be cooled down until the humidity reaches a critical value when droplets form. However, the droplets are reluctant to form unless they have something to form on — you may have seen a really clean flask being boiled with just one sand grain in the bottom and noticed how the boiling bubbles form first on that grain. It’s the same thing, aided and abetted by the fact that some of the CCNs are hygroscopic and attract water. But what happens when there are no CCNs? The air can become supersaturated, longing for something to condense onto. In cloud chambers (that dates me) a passing sub-atomic particle will do the trick, and maybe it can in the atmosphere but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. That’s why a ship steaming through one of these areas with no nuclei can so readily leave a persistent trail. I hope people bothered to Google “Nasa and ship tracks”.
Tropical clouds: if you were to catch one of those huge tropical raindrops when it was first beginning to form you would find a CCN there right at the beginning. One of the salt particles generated by a wave breaking on a beach may stay airborne for a week or more. If it’s blown along at ten knots then it can get a very long way. Some of the rain falling on Tampa contains CCNs that have come all the way from China. Follow that Chinese CCN as it gets sucked up in a thermal, its surrounding air is cooled and becomes saturated with water vapour (cool air can hold less water vapour that warm air). A tiny droplet forms on the CCN, the droplet attracts other droplets, before you know it, it’s pouring. But why, you ask, does the droplet dry out in the first place when the particle remaining is keen to get wet again? Because the humidity of the place is dries out in is below the critical level. Some bits of air are dry, some wet. In wet bits, CCNs form cloud droplets. How do we know that a bit of air has reached critical humidity? It goes all cloudy. How do we know that on a foggy morning the air has warmed sufficiently to get below the critical level? The fog lifts.
(Seven weeks in Florida, six in Singapore and Borneo and a lifetime in the UK: believe me, Tom, I know about rain… Most of your CCNs probably come from the coast but yes, literally, a few of them will be from the other side of the Pacific.)
BTW, you wrote about the haar quote Isn’t that fog caused by cooler air travelling over warmer water? unquote. In just the same way as clouds form when air cools as it rises, warm air over the cold sea become more humid as it cools. Nuclei at the heart of every drop, you can bet on it. I was using the haar as an illustration of how much heat you lose by being under a cloud. Not the ideal illustration perhaps, but not many people have gone from sunlight into the shade of marine strato-cu. The stuff is strange — sometimes you can see up through it but not down. I once played hide and seek with a fighter above the cloud while we whizzed about underneath: sort of net curtain effect.
The CCN business is not my idea, it’s long-established and uncontroversial science.
Flettner rotors: the reason they are chosen is simple — they can be automated easily and they can provide rotation for the device that produces the spray. I doubt they’ll fall over, any more than a tall ship with _its_ enormous top hamper falls over. They work on the same principle as a swing bowler in cricket — I expect there’s a similar system in baseball where the pitcher can make the ball move unexpectedly through the air, and one would expect them to be more robust than ropes and nylon canvas. I’d be interested in more engineering details — I’ve not seen a lot about them.
I have a certain sympathy with the poster who holds the position ‘it’s not warming, it’s cooling, the climate can cope’. You are not trying to convince me, you are trying to counter some very clever propaganda which has put the science on the back foot. Regardless of the science or data, the AGW case has convinced the politicians. Or so they say. Even the dimmest political hack will look at the unadjusted data (if you can persuade him to look) and say ‘something fishy here’ but he has his voters to worry about, the press, the vast media bandwagon that is Anthropogenic Climate Chaos. One power company in the UK has been given 1 billion pounds worth of carbon credits — do you think they will draw the attention of anyone to a cooling trend? Politicians just care about votes. He or she is in a bind. They’ve got to make the mouth-music or they’ll be out of office.
This system will allow a politician wiggle room. ‘Let’s just try it and see how it works out’ he’ll say, while thinking ‘buy time, maybe the deniers are right, maybe it’s not a problem. If we buy a few years without going mad on carbon credits and banning drilling and coal extraction, maybe we’ll come out smelling of roses after all.’ Anything to stop the business of pumping CO2 away from coal power stations — it screws the economics and it may even be worse than the disease.
It’s not science that matters here. It’s not even the engineering. Or the economy. It’s the politics.
JF

Problems:
1) The perpetrators of the project will be sued by everyone who suffers some sort of weather-related loss.
2) No money in it for Al Gore, who sells carbon indulg–er, “credits”, and no money in it for everyone else who stands to benefit from carbon dioxide emission “reduction”. If it’s ever funded, the project would be in addition to all the other nonsense going on, not as a replacement.

Mike Walsh said: “Here ya go…..in the words of Mr Paul “mankind is a virus” Watson himself. … Watson was one of the original founders of Greenpeace, leaving to form the Sea Shepherds because they weren’t militant enough, was affiliated with Earth First, and from 2003-2006 was on the board of directors of the Sierra Club.”
This hardly qualifies as the statements of a mainstream environmental organization. Of the two mainstream environmental organizations that he has had affiliations with, Greenpeace and Sierra Club, he’s had fallings-out with both. In fact, he was expelled from Greenpeace (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watson ). As for the Sierra Club, he ended up resigning from the board. So, it doesn’t sound like either organization was very receptive to his views. (As to how he got on the Board in the 1st place, Sierra Club has a very democratic process for electing people to their board which, combined with the fact that so few members actually exercise their right to vote for the Board…let alone make an educated vote…has made it easy for candidates who have a small but well-organized faction of support to get on the Board. In fact, a few years ago, there was a strong attempt by a group of people who were staunchly anti-imigration to stack the board with like-minded people in order to reverse the Club’s neutral stance on that issue.)
To say that Watson’s positions represent those of the Sierra Club is pretty much equivalent to saying that David Duke’s positions on race represent the Republican Party.
And, I don’t see why it is “misdirection” to ask you to show these are the views of mainstream environmental groups. Otherwise, you are just arguing that extremists exist on the AGW / environmental side, a fact that noone would debate. In fact, I would be completely justified in ignoring environmental groups altogether and restricting myself to talking about organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ford, Shell, BP, and Dupont, all of whom have endorsed taking significant actions on climate change…and are hence presumably part of the “A0g0w0 gang” that Mike Bryant referred to. I was being generous to him by choosing some of the more politically partisan members of that gang.

Fernando,
“3 – We have to make a peace agreement with the greens”
I am all for this. The non-negotiable parts of this agreement should be (1) The immediate opening of as many nuclear plants as we can put online (2) Of course fossil fuels would have to be used until nuclear is up and running. And (3) Solar and wind must be recognized for the small part they will play in a post carbon USA.
This should be the absolute minimum a thinking person should expect from the greens.

I’m very much with Julian on this one
For the moment, leaving aside for a different thread the argument about whether we have warming or cooling going, and assuming that warming is what’s going on, and assuming we have to do something about it (yeah, pretty assumptive, but let’s just say), then I’m all for this Salter&Latham idea if it can be made to work.
It’s disappointing to see so many dismiss offhand the idea – Salter&Latham are scientists who (to me at least) seem to have ideas that can work, and that do think through the net effect of their idea (i.e. increase in reflection minus reduction in evaporation and phytoplankton activity, still bringing a net cooling effect – I don’t know this for sure, and may invest some time in reading their papers, but what I won’t do is just dismiss their idea offhand).
However, the practicalities haven’t been resolved yet, so this is not yet a workable solution (and might never be). From what I can see, what they have yet to technically solve is:
1. How to produce the minisule salt particles using onboard renewable (solar or wind or wave) power (note that what you need to send upwards is the particles, not the water) – burning flares is NOT the way this thing will work.
2. How such a vessel can withstand rough weather in the open ocean
3. Sorting out the auto-controls and navigation system (this should be the easy computerising bit)
Of course there’s the funding and political problems to overcome too.
But I’m all for having a go at overcoming the technical issues to see if this can be made to work.