From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, more ideas on geoengineering:
PACIFIC GROVE, CALIFORNIA—In an effort to curb global warming, scientists have proposed everything from launching sunlight-blocking dust into the stratosphere to boosting the number of carbon-sucking algae in the oceans. Now, a Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. “Since water covers most of the earth, don’t dim the sun,” says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research here. “Brighten the water.”
Natural bubbles already brighten turbulent seas and provide a luster known as “undershine” below the ocean’s surface. But these bubbles only lightly brighten the planet, contributing less than one-tenth of 1% of Earth’s reflectivity, or albedo. What Seitz imagines is pumping even smaller bubbles, about one-five-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter, into the sea. Such “microbubbles” are essentially “mirrors made of air,” says Seitz, and they might be created off boats by using devices that mix water supercharged with compressed air into swirling jets of water. “I’m emulating a natural ocean phenomenon and amplifying it just by changing the physics—the ingredients remain the same.”
Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3°C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water” to the journal Climatic Change.
In addition to helping curb global warming, the microbubble strategy could also help conserve water by reducing evaporation in rivers and lakes, says Seitz. That’s a problem that leads to the loss of billions of tons of freshwater each year in California alone.
Seitz says adding bubbles to a 1-square-kilometer patch of ocean is feasible, but scaling it up may be technically difficult. Energy is not the limiting factor, he says, estimating that the energy output of 1000 windmills might be sufficient to add bubbles to an entire ocean. The larger challenge to large-scale deployment, he says, would be ensuring that the bubbles last as long as possible. In nature, a bubble’s lifetime depends on the level of dissolved organic matter and nanoparticles, without which small bubbles rapidly shrink and disappear. If the water is too clean, the bubbles might not last long enough to be effectively spread over large areas, Seitz says.
One way to test the viability of the idea might be to study the impact of bubbles created in the wakes of ships, says oceanographer Peter Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California. “It’s something nobody’s talked about,” he says of Seitz’s technique.
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Larry (22:06:17) “The only “bubbles” that exist in this story are the bubbles inside the brains of Seitz and others who propose such fanciful stuff without proper consideration of the possible consequences. They are bubbleheads.”
Amen.
April the first, all year round it seems.
There is even another reason why you don’t want bubbles in the water, especially on such a large scale. It al has to do with a Eureka moment by some ancient Greek a long time ago.
Still in my opinion it would be much easier, most likely also a lot cheaper to introduce some chemicals to the ocean surface that have the same effect. Far more effective, within a few months ocean temperatures will drop sharpely, followed by atmospheric temperatures and before you know it you are back into a full scale ice-age, but this time it would be more like “Snowball Earth”.
Rumor has it that within the American Association for the Advancement of Science this is known as the Sea Habitat Optical Light Enhancement System. Commonly referred to as AAASSHOLES.
Wasn’t there a “Bubble Theory” for the Bermuda Triangle, where gas released from fissures on the ocean floor created bubble fields on the surface, which ships suddenly sank into? As long as the bubbles in this story are on the surface, I guess we won’t lose shipping. Still, I don’t like the idea of all this.
You may omit the “i” in “Clark”.
Having worked as a commercial fisherman and done sailboat deliveries, I know that the ocean is … well … huge beyond belief. So, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations …
Boat going 10 m/sec = 20 knots.
Spreads bubbles in a swath 10 metres wide.
We’ll say we have one hundred bubble boats.
That’s 10,000 square metres bubbleized per second.
Area of the world’s oceans is 360,000,000,000,000 square metres.
Time to bubbleize say half of the oceans is 17,892,270,924 seconds, or
298,204,515 minutes, or
4,970,075 hours, or
207,086 days, or only
5,874 years.
So a fleet of only a hundred thousand boats could get the job done in five point nine years. Of course, the bubbles will all disperse in say a month (probably more like a week or even a day, but I’m a generous man), so we’ll need 140 times that many boats to maintain the bubbles.
So all we need is 14 million boats. And a thousand windmills. Oh, and the fuel for the boats. Let’s see, a boat going 20 knots might burn five gallons of fuel per hour, 14 million boats, that’s 70 million gallons of fuel an hour at a cost of three bucks a gallon, that’s a constant running cost of $210,000,000 per hour forever, or
$5 billion dollars per day, or
$1.8 trillion dollars per year in perpetuity.
Ooops, forgot the crew’s wages, say four crewpersons per boat, that’s a work force of 52 million men and women. Say they’re each getting $40k per year because of the long hours and the time away from home. That’s another $2 trillion dollars per year. And not counting the cost of the boats. And not counting the maintenance on the boats and the machinery.
Now we just need the grant money …
As dumb as this might sound on the surface. It’s several orders of magnitude less dumb than spending trillions and trillions of dollars (a year!) on crackpot socialist carbon schemes.
Willis,
We (you) are up early today. Actually, I am not. It is 3:40 pm here.
Where are you?
John
Lolz….”estimating that the energy output of 1000 windmills might be sufficient to add bubbles to an entire ocean. ”
I believe he’s referring to 1000 magic fairy windmills which will of course be sufficient.
But seriously if they try this I think they can just scale up the process used by Coke etc al. to make fizzy drinks. Seems reasonable.
& you can be sure he calculated the number of windmills on their rated power ! So he’s got an 80% shortfall straight away
it’s a good job these Eco-nuts aren’t engineers
Willis, won’t this increase sea levels? What about the volume of displacement? How big the bubbas?
Here is Dr. Seitz demonstrating the efficacy of his theory by using his own hot tub and a bottle of Walmart dishwashing liquid that was on sale for $1.27:
(ROTFL) We could save the 70 mill gal of gas by using windmills to power the boats, and instead of using air we could use CO2 for the bubbas (kill 2 birds).
“pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures.”
Here on earth we call that wind. If there are many bubbles and lots of cooling we call that a storm.
This would probably work. Which is very dangerous. If you make the earth colder, the risk is ending the current interglacial period.
The earth’s climate currently (last few million years) switches between ice (100,000 years) and interglacial (10 to 20,000 years) .
The current interglacial has lasted 12,000 years.
I don’t know what temperature drop would be needed to start the Ice age, but once started the ice albedo feedback means it can’t be stopped.
Ice ages only end when the earth’s orbital parameters force the ice to retreat, which will be a long wait. As per above about 100,000 years.
Bloody Hell what about the mermaids, what about the mermaid’s kids, they like green water and Kelp and Plankton and all kinds of green stuff.
They like swimming around in the nuddy, and now this Boffin wants Mermaids and their pups to wear cardigans and wetsuits.
This bloke keeps it up, I will sool PETA on the basket. Now he wants to freeze fish before we catch them.
Mad I tell ya mad. Freaken mad.
In Queensland reflective roofs make sense, we only wear a jumper about 6 weeks a year.
What I never understood is why we dont dry clothes in the roof space. Its hot up there I know.
Mad Random Jack.
Why don’t we just paint the oceans white? We would just have to make sure we start in the corner opposite the door. I’m sure Dr. Chu would approve.
The bubbles at work here are the bubble like voids that pervade brain tissue of someone suffering from senile dementia.
Let’s start small with this idea. Test it in a small reservoir for a few years and see if there are any untoward effects, if it really does slow down evaporation, and how costly it is.
Just another example of the conceit and arrogance of certain humans on this planet.
Destroy us all they will if continue to meddle they must.
I wonder what happens when i press this big red butto………..
I have a much better idea. Turn the water in the oceans into BEER.
I think the only way to solve this problem is to do the following:
Every Federal or Bank Holiday we need to have a little, old fashioned ‘Sacrifice to the Climate Gods’ to placate their anger at us for all our transgressions, the only way to do this is to offer up the World’s Top Climatologist as an offering, either by tossing them into a nice Hawaiian Volcano or by cutting their heart out at a little pyramid in Mexico City. True, these individuals will become a matter of short supply in a few years, so it’s only reasonable to then turn to individuals in category two – of which there is an infinite supply – Current and Former Politicians Who Want To Safe The World.
You’ll have to admit, I’m sure, that this trick seemed to work fairly well during the past 12,000 years.
slrtx (22:47:44) : So, this skeptic is of the opinion that there’s significant evidence that AGW/ACC is real. But, it may be too late to offset the negative effects.
You only believe there is “significant evidence”, i.e. you take it on faith. You haven’t actually examined the evidence to see whether there might be flaws, which simply makes you a Believer. How’s that kool-aid taste?
The reason geoengineering is a bad idea is two-fold: first and foremost, it is completely unnecessary, and therefor a waste of energy and resources, and secondly, we have no idea what the actual environmental consequences would be.
“Ocean Alkar Selzer.” (Don’t know how you spell it.) Anyway we’d have no more complaints about acidity.
Nature may have already beaten us to it. As Willlis will testify, above a certain windspeed the sea produces more surface bubbles automatically, in the form of foam.
This opens up the possibility of discovering a new feedback mechanism, and possibly even a driver, for global warming!
Firstly, from the various weather records we need a global average yearly windspeed for the past 100 years or so.
Then we will need a function showing foam increase against windspeed.
We could then show the variation of albedo with windspeed on a historical basis, and produce an equivalent W/m2 value.
(If there is a correlation with the temperature record, I reckon it should be called the ‘WUWT Effect’ )