Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I noted on the news that there is a new plan afoot to cool down the planet. This one supposedly has been given big money by none other than Bill Gates.
The plan involves a fleet of ships that supposedly look like this:
Figure 1. Artist’s conception of cloud-making ships. Of course, the first storm would flip this over immediately, but heck, it’s only a fantasy, so who cares? SOURCE
The web site claims that:
Bill Gates Announces Funding for Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines
The machines, developed by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining, turn seawater into tiny particles that can be shot up over 3,000 feet in the air. The particles increase the density of clouds by increasing the amount of nuclei contained within. Silver Lining’s floating machines can suck up ten tons of water per second.
What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant plan?
First, as usual the hype in this seems to have vastly outpaced the reality. According to CBS News Tech Talk:
The machines, developed by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining, turn seawater into tiny particles that can be shot up over 3,000 feet in the air. The particles increase the density of clouds by increasing the amount of nuclei contained within. Silver Lining’s floating machines can suck up ten tons of water per second. If all goes well, Silver Lining plans to test the process with 10 ships spread throughout 3800 square miles of ocean. Geoengineering, an umbrella phrase to describe techniques that would allow humans to prevent global warming by manipulating the Earth’s climate, has yet to result in any major projects.
However, this is just a quote from the same web site that showed the ship above. CBS Tech Talk goes on to say:
A PR representative from Edelman later sent me this note from Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science: “Bill Gates made a grant to the University of Calgary to support research in possible unique solutions and responses to climate change. Administrating this research funding, David Keith of the University of Calgary and I made a grant to Armand Neukermanns for lab tests to investigate the technical feasibility of producing the fine seawater sprays required by the Latham cloud whitening proposal, one of many proposals for mitigating some of the adverse effects of climate change. This grant to Neukermanns is for lab tests only, not Silver Lining’s field trials.”
So Bill Gates isn’t funding the ships, and didn’t even decide to fund this particular fantasy, he just gave money to support research into “possible unique solutions”. Well, I’d say this one qualifies …
Next, after much searching I finally found the Silver Lining Project web site. It says on the home page:
The Silver Lining Project is a not-for-profit international scientific research collaboration to study the effects of particles (aerosols) on clouds, and the influence of these cloud effects on climate systems.
Well, that sure sounds impressive. Unfortunately, the web site is only four pages, and contains almost no information at all.
Intrigued, I emailed them at the address given on their web site, which is info(a)silverliningproj.org. I quickly got this reply:
Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
info@silverliningproj.org
The recipient’s e-mail address was not found in the recipient’s e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
Hmmmm … not a good sign, four page web site, email address is dead … but onwards, ever onwards. Let’s look at a few numbers here.
First, over the tropical oceans, the rainfall is typically on the order of a couple of metres per year. Per the info above, they are going to test the plan with one ship for every 380 square miles. A square mile is about 2.6 square km, or 2.6 million square metres. Three hundred eighty square miles is about a thousand square km. Two metres of rainfall in that area is about two billion tonnes of water …
They say their ships will suck up “ten tonnes of water per second”. That’s about a third of a billion tonnes per year. So if they run full-time, they will increase the amount of water in the air by about 15% … which of course means 15% more rain. I don’t know how folks in rainy zones will feel about a 15% increase in their rainfall, but I foresee legalarity in the future …
Next, how much fuel will this use? The basic equation for pumps is:
Water flow (in liters per second) = 5.43 x pump power (kilowatts) / pressure (bars)
So to pump 10,000 litres per second (neglecting efficiency losses) with a pressure of 3 bars (100 psi) will require about 5,500 kilowatts. This means about 50 million kilowatt-hours per year. Figuring around 0.3 litres of fuel per kilowatt-hour (again without inefficiencies), this means that each ship will burn about fifteen million litres of fuel per year, so call it maybe twenty five million litres per year including all of the inefficiencies plus some fuel to actually move the ship around the ocean. All of these numbers are very generous, it will likely take more fuel than that. But we’ll use them.
Next, the money to do this … ho, ho, ho …
You can buy a used fire fighting ship for about fifteen million dollars, but it will only pump about 0.8 tonnes/second. So a new ship to pump ten tonnes per second might cost on the order of say twenty million US dollars.
You’d need a crew of about twelve guys to run the ship 24/7. That’s three eight-hour shifts of four men per shift. On average they will likely cost about US$80,000 per year including food and benefits and miscellaneous, so that’s about a million per year.
Then we have fuel costs of say US$ 0.75 per litre, so there’s about ten million bucks per year there.
Another web site says:
A study commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, a European think-tank, has estimated that a wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships to cruise the world’s oceans, spraying sea water from towers to create and brighten clouds, could be built for $9 billion. The idea would be to operate most of the ships far offshore in the Pacific so they would not interfere with weather on land.
My numbers say $38 billion for the ships … and “wind-powered”? As a long time sailor, I can only say “get real” …
However, that’s just for the ships. Remember that we are talking about $11 million per ship for annual pumping fuel costs plus labour … which is an annual cost of another $20 billion dollars …
Finally, they say that they are going to test this using one ship per 380 square miles … and that they can blanket the world with 1,900 ships. That makes a total of around three quarters of a million square miles covered by the 1,900 ships.
The surface of the world ocean, however, is about 140 million square miles, so they will be covering about half a percent of the world ocean with the 1,900 ships. Half a percent. If that were all in the Pacific Ocean per the citation above, here’s how much it would cover:
Figure 2. Area covered by 1,900 cloud making ships.
Yeah, brightening that would make a huge difference, especially considering half of the time it wouldn’t even see the sun …
See, my problem is that I’m a practical guy, and I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working with machinery around the ocean. Which is why I don’t have a lot of time for “think-tanks” and “research groups”. Before I start a project, I do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if it makes sense.
My calculations show that this will cost forty billion dollars to start, and twenty billion per year to run, not counting things like ship maintenance and redundancy and emergencies and machinery replacement and insurance and a fleet of tankers to refuel the pump ships at sea and, and, and …
And for all of that, we may make a slight difference on half a percent of the ocean surface. Even if I’ve overestimated the costs by 100% (always possible, although things usually cost more than estimated rather than less), that’s a huge amount of money for a change too small to measure on a global scale.
Now Bill Gates is a smart guy. But on this one, I think he may have let his heart rule his head. One of the web sites quoted above closes by saying:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday, nor did U.S. entrepreneur Kelly Wanser, who is leading the Silver Lining Project.
Smart move … what we have here is a non-viable non-solution to a non-problem. I wouldn’t want to comment either, especially since this non-solution will burn about 27 billion litres (about 7 billion US gallons) of fuel per year to supposedly “solve” the problem supposedly caused by CO2 from burning fuel …
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Jeff Id says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:56 am
Thanks, Jeff, you are quite correct. Like I said, I was being generous in my numbers to favor their plan. I saw but ignored the “lift to 3,000 feet” part of the equation, figuring that was just someone’s fantasy, and that they would figure that the mist would be lifted that high by turbulence or something. But no matter how you figure it, it doesn’t pencil out.
Steve Salter and Anna V have shown there are proto types. See the paper is called :
Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming
B Y STEPHEN S ALTER , GRAHAM SORTINO & J OHN LATHAM
Institute for Energy Systems, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh,
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Phil.Trans.%20Seagoing%20hardware.pdf
“…. If the possible power increase of 3.7 W mK2 from double pre-industrial CO2 is divided by the 24-hour solar input of 340 W mK2, a global albedo increase of only 1.1 per cent will produce a sufficient offset. The method is not intended to make new clouds. It will just make existing clouds whiter. This paper describes the design of 300 tonne ships powered by Flettner rotors rather than conventional sails…..”
From our favorite place wiki Flettner rotors:
“Flettner’s spinning bodies were vertical cylinders; the basic idea was to use the Magnus effect. The idea worked, but the propulsion force generated was less than the motor would have generated if it had been connected to a standard marine propeller.[2] These types of propulsion cylinders are now commonly called Flettner rotors….
The University of Flensburg is developing the Flensburg catamaran or Uni-cat Flensburg, a rotor-driven catamaran.
The German wind-turbine manufacturer Enercon launched and christened its new rotor-ship E-Ship 1 on the 2nd of August 2008. The ship will be used to transport turbines and other equipment to locations around the world.
In 2009 the Finland-based maritime engineering company Wärtsilä unveiled a concept for a cruiseferry that would utilise flettner rotors as means of reducing fuel consumption. This concept has been linked with the Finnish ferry operator Viking Line,[4] who have stated they will make a decision on whether or not they’ll order new ships during 2010.[5]
Stephen H. Salter and John Latham recently proposed the building of 1,500 robotic rotor-ships to mitigate global warming. The ships would spray seawater into the air to enhance cloud reflectivity.[6][7] A prototype Rotor ship was tested on Discovery Project Earth. The rotors were made of carbon fibre and were attached to a retrofitted trimaran and successfully propelled the vessel stably through the water at a speed of six knots. The focus of the experiment was based on the ability for the boat to move emissions free for a specialized purpose leaving it unclear whether or not the efficiency of the rotors was on parity or superior to conventionally propelled vessels….”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
So the pictured catamaran is fitted with Flettner rotors rather than conventional sails. Enercon is a wind turbine manufacturer and produced the Flettner rotor ASSISTED propulsion ship E-1. A neutral engineering type analysis of flettner rotor and other green sea-going tech is available here: http://www.admiroutes.asso.fr/larevue/2009/95/windpropulsionforship.pdf
So far the Flettner rotors seem to be in use as an auxiliary to the main power source.
Where I have a real problem is getting that water up to 3,000 feet THAT I do not think is possible. Better to just boil the water and let it rise on its own.
Here is the information from the latest up to date firefighting ships:
“The primary firefighting equipment aboard the FiFi 1 class tug Eleanor F. Moran, delivered to Moran Towing in March 2007 by Washburn & Doughty, includes two remote-controlled FiFi monitors, each capable of delivering 5,280 gpm of water for a distance of 394 feet and reaching a height of 148 feet.” professional mariner
If we assume it actually is possible and it is powered by solar cells:
Just pumping H2O up 260ft from my well takes a LOT of electricity (energy). I need a big 5000 watt generator for standby power for my pump.
Looking up a 5000 watt solar system I get
12 solar panels 56.1″ x 25.7″ [125 watts 7.20a / 17.4v] or 14ft by 9 ft of solar panels
and
(12) 360 amp hour, 6 volt deep cycle batteries
Willis came up with 5,500 kilowatts which has to be corrected by dividing by 300 thats 18333 watts or four times the power used to operate my 3/4 horse pump.
Jeff ID calculated the power required to lift 10 tonnes per second to 3000 ft and came up with 81,345,000 watts (again divided by 300) or 271150 watts or 54 times the power of my pump. This does not include all the problems of dealing with pumping “dirty water” and cleaning filters. That I have dealt with and even with “clean” city water it is a real nightmare. (I will never drink city water again after taking care of a DI water system – yuck)
I am not an engineer but you are looking at a lot of solar cells and perhaps batteries to run this mother taking it you can actually build a machine capable of doing it.. If it is any thing like a normal pump, the power to get it going is much greater than the power to keep it going.
Doing this; getting the water to 3,000 feet AND of the correct particle size AND using green energy is an engineering feat similar to putting a man on the moon.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 12, 2010 at 5:29 am
They said 3,800 square miles would be covered by 10 ships, which is 380 square miles per ship.
The imagination of a 6-year-old is a wondrous thing.
Has their application for taxpayer funding been approved yet? (Er, sorry about that, so to be PC , let’s say “Government Funding” instead, hoping that a few million rich guys like Bill Gates, Al Gore et al will have no objection to their being stung deeply for those idiotic costs, and us ordinary peon taxpayers will not be.) Yeah.
David Schnare says:
May 12, 2010 at 5:47 am
What? You mean that computer models show that this will work? Heck, if I had known that this had been verified by actual computer models, I wouldn’t have … oh, wait, never mind …
PS – I went to the Geoengineering Google Group and found this … surely that’s not what you are talking about. Do you have a link?
I wonder how they are going to get all that water to 3000 feet altitude. In a perfect vacuum it would require an exhaust velocity of about 300 mph to get to that altitude. However we are not in a vacuum, and the only way to get those small droplets that high would be to entrain them in a massive airflow, so you would actually need to lift rather more than 10 tons per second. Also I wonder if in the real world you wouldn’t be nudging the speed of sound to get an airstream that high. Considering the amount of shear I think the sound level would create serious engineering problems.
Alternatively you could heat the air/water mixture and use convection, however this would require an even more massive energy expenditure.
For a field test I would suggest upending a really large low bypass-ratio jet engine, injecting sea-water into the afterburner and sea how high that gets you.
Henry chance says:
May 12, 2010 at 6:28 am
True with one caveat. Over the ocean, salt crystals are one of the main cloud nuclei, so rain over the ocean does contain a bit of salt.
Julian Flood says: “I am not an engineer, but the egregious misinterpretations of the paper indicate that I’m not alone … Nature does not need huge pressures to boost those particles to 3000 ft, it happens naturally.”
I am an engineer Julian, and I agree with others on this thread who calculate that it would take about 100 MW to lift 10 tonnes of water per second to a height of 1000m. That only rests on conservation of energy.
We could lift water to a much lower level and leave the rest to atmospheric turbulance. But then only a small proportion of the water would ever reach the 1000 m level. To get the same outcome, we’d need to pump much more water, so I wouldn’t expect savings in power requirements.
And I agree – it is good to see Dr Salter here. (Sorry for the typo and getting his name wrong in my previous post).
How about this. My kids sail Hobie Cat sailboats. With a brisk breeze they will pull a water skier. If we can install a little rooster tail generator on the end of the skis, we have disrupted the waters and created mist.
I see nothing wrong with this Gates solution. If it fails, we will have signed up for an extended service relationship and as someone already mentioned, just download Service Pack 1 to upgrade the vessel.
I suppose, if one WANTED to do this badly enough, you could mount the equipment on a solid chunk of island and run it with a nuke reactor. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Bikini Atoll is probably still available.
You’d still have problems with Bioaerosols. During some red-tide conditions, seawater is quite toxic. All you would need to shut this thing down forever would be a nice plume of bioaerosols that decide to settle upon a human population somewhere. http://www.whoi.edu/redtide/page.do?pid=9679&tid=523&cid=27689
I’m not entirely convinced that aerosolized seawater, no matter the level of algal toxins, wouldn’t be toxic by itself, as it contains selenium and other metals. Rain is, after all, seawater that has evaporated, leaving all that stuff behind.
There are still too many unknowns about seawater aerosols even suggest such a plan at this point, the environmental impact studies would take years.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/aerosols/
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 10:39 am
It should be supported by skeptics as a second line of defense and as an alternative to the idiotic cap and trade stuff being rammed down our throats.
A defense against what, exactly? Warming? But, you know that warming isn’t a problem, nor is it man-made. So, in other words, the whole reason for doing it, and for we skeptics/climate realists to support it is to mollify the Alarmists, provide them with a “security blanket” if you will. No, sorry. That won’t fly. Coddling them only encourages them. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile, camels nose under the tent, take your pick. The truth is winning. This is no time for bargaining.
Willis,
Whoa there,
another strawman with the 600 watt yacht engine.
The ship designed by Enercon
A large portion of the
energy required to propel the ship will be supplied
by four sailing rotors – large, rotating,
vertical metal cylinders, 25 metres tall.
http://www.enercon.de/www/en/windblatt.nsf/vwAnzeige/4DA5AEEBACEAEDFDC12574A500418221/$FILE/WB-0308-en.pdf
In http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/35693
they talk of 30% economy , and that is quite a hefty energy slice.
The ships they propose to build will be lighter than the commercial ones.
PNG might need this ship! http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=53471
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 7:11 am
anna v., before you get off the bandwagon, your first link above says:
How do you plan to force seawater through the “incredibly fine mesh” without pumps?
Mr. Schnare
Steve Salter, Anna V and I all provided you links to the literature. If you can keep up with this blog, you can understand that literature and form your own conclusions. All I ask is that before the buffoonery and bluster one might at least do some homework on the issue before posting an article like the one Willis posted above.
What you have in the cites are all things that suggest that many of the individual elements of the project are theoretically possible. However if one does some homework on the issue any suggestion that this scheme might be put into operation within our grandchildren’s lifetimes vanishes.
For example the Flettner ship technology is, to be kind, in its infancy. Yes, the theory has been around since early in the last century, but there’s only one ship -about- to be launched (e-Ship -1) http://uglyships.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/e-ship-1/ . The only ships using the technology were built in the 30’s and the ships developed serious mechanical problems because of the constant vibration of the rotors and they still relied on wind for this type of propulsion. So at the time rotors did not offer a significant advantage over existing technologies, they merely offered added complexity and unreliability http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=254231
In best of these cases, the ships have given a savings of roughly 35% in fuel costs.
Now, for this project we are to build fleets of giant (ultra-giant?) examples of these unproven vessels out of futuristic materials combining multiple unproven technologies in ways that they have never been combined, powering them with energy sources that haven’t been proven to generate the amounts of power necessary in, and put them into very difficult environmental conditions without a crew, with the expectation that they will operate autonomously day and night year after year.
Frankly, if you do more than skim paragraphs such as the one quoted below, the phrase pie-in-the-sky will come unbidden into your mind.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3989.full
Electrical energy for spray and rotor drive will be generated by a pair of 2.4 m diameter axial-flow turbines on either side of the hull as shown in figure 10. These are very much larger than any propellers needed for a vessel of this size but can act as propellers for 10 hours in windless conditions using energy from a bank of Toshiba SCiB batteries. The vessels will also carry a liquid-cooled version of the Zoche ZO 01A radial diesel aero engine to give trans-ocean range in emergency. The turbine rotation speed will be limited by cavitation to approximately 80 r.p.m. This is fast enough for the use of polyphase permanent-magnet rim generators built into the turbine ducts. Tiles of neodymium-boron magnets will be moved past wet printed-circuit pancake stator windings sealed in glass-flake epoxy Parylene.
If you could show me where these technologies are in use in this kind of combination -anywhere in the world- I might be able to stop laughing.
What the
college kidsengineers who envision this project have done is to take dozens of theoretical technological possibilities and combine them and assume that they will work continuously at their ideal functional rates without any losses or errors.Anyone who has actually had to build something, anything, just begins to giggle when the difficulties of such small problems (compared to the other hurdles to be faced here) as filtering 10,000 litres per second of seawater are dismissed with explanations such as A weakness of the micro-nozzle approach is that particles much smaller than a nozzle can form an arch to clog it. Fortunately, the need to remove viruses from ground water for drinking purposes has produced a good selection of ultrafiltration products that can filter to a better level than is needed. Suppliers guarantee a life of 5 years provided that back-flushing can be done at the right intervals.
Of course, we will just need to design an autonomous system shipborne to back-flush the filters at regular intervals and the suppliers will guarantee them for 5 years! How simple!
Of course if you want to accuse me of nit-picking on details like filters, and just focus on more basic issues, perhaps you could distract me by explaining the power and propulsion systems in more detail for me.
Numbers of remotely controlled spray vessels will sail back and forth, perpendicular to the local prevailing wind. The motion through the water will drive underwater ‘propellers’ acting in reverse as turbines to generate electrical energy needed for spray production.
You see I get confused here. The Flettner’s spinning bodies have been proven at best to save 35 percent on fuel costs ( prototype Rotor ship was tested on Discovery Project Earth. The rotors were made of carbon fibre and were attached to a retrofitted trimaran and successfully propelled the vessel stably through the water at a speed of six knots. The focus of the experiment was based on the ability for the boat to move emissions free for a specialized purpose leaving it unclear whether or not the efficiency of the rotors was on parity or superior to conventionally propelled vessels.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship
, but here they are not only to propel the ship but to move it with enough force to power turbines that are spun by the movement of the ship through the water. I do understand that they will be supplemented by solar panels, albeit the ones currently available can’t supply the power for a typical American home.
To summarize – these guys have done the equivalent of combining the old tips for saving gasoline by tuning up your car, checking your tire inflation, accelerating slowly etc, where when the sum of the savings of all the tips is combined you improve by more than 100% on your fuel economy.
Except they’re doing it by combining a dozen unproven technologies.
Was that enough homework for you?
Gail Combs says: “Where I have a real problem is getting that water up to 3,000 feet THAT I do not think is possible. Better to just boil the water and let it rise on its own.”
True – every time we introduce a mechanical or electrical conversion process, energy is going to to be lost and it takes more input energy to achieve the same outcome. The KISS principle suggests it would be better to create a plume of warm water vapour.
Just like all those power stations and large industrial complexes are doing every day. My question remains – how much cooling do we expect from those millions of tonnes being raised into middle atmospheric levels (easily exceeding heights of 1000 m)
..Ignatieff, Suzuki, IPCC, Gore and their dangerous ilk (including some academics here in Lethbridge) want the world to waste trillions because they wrongly believe they have power over the world’s climate. In the meantime hundreds of millions of the world’s poor don’t have adequate health care and clean water. An immoral crime.
Clive Schaupmeyer
Coaldale, Alberta
Clive, I’ve been reading this blog for a few years now and have suspected that you were the “Clive” from Southern Alberta who’s comments I’ve been reading.
Universities world wide are breeding grounds for “group-think” mentality.
Government funding to find solutions to non issues pretty much ensures consensus of post normal science.
When I was a Management Systems consultant, I had a saying: “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made prolonging the problem”.
Fish on Clive,
Manfred Kintop
Calgary, Alberta
Considering that here in CO we had several inches of snow last night and it’s currenlty 36 degrees on May 12th at 1:30pm, and we’ve had a cold wet spring following a very cold snowy winter, I could do with some warming, not cooling.
I thought the AGW’ers from the IPCC were still claiming that clouds are a net positive forcing?
WUWT??!
Paragraph 5 of
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Phil.Trans.%20Seagoing%20hardware.pdf
I should have said ” a conventional pump” for which you were calculating energy needs. It is all in the rotor package.
Say, maybe they can use surplus Space Shuttle High-Pressure Oxidizer Turbopumps to blast the seawater up into the sky. There should be a lot of those available on E-bay very soon.
Better than all this – considering the immense energy requirements and the doubtfulness about getting the mist 3,000 feet in the air:
Balloons on tethers.
BIG Balloons on tethers, with hoses reaching down to the water.
BIG balloons on tethers, with hoses reaching down to the water, and pumps every so often in order to overcome the weight of the water.
BIG balloons on tethers, with hoses reaching down to the water, and pumps every so often in order to overcome the weight of the water, and then have mist-ers up at the balloons to vaporize the water.
BIG balloons on tethers, with hoses reaching down to the water, and pumps every so often in order to overcome the weight of the water, and then have mist-ers up at the balloons to vaporize the water, plus some way of getting rid of the salt and minerals that are going to clog it all up.
Doing it THEIR way:
@ur momisugly tty says: May 12, 2010 at 12:11 pm
There ARE nozzles from a company called Vortec that will entrain something like 10 times the air flow from the surrounding air as passes through the nozzle. However, the velocity rapidly drops to zero within several feet – perhaps 20-30 feet – and that is on the horizontal. It sounds POSSIBLE that a series of Vortec nozzles could be used in the stacks, once the water is vaporized. But how high the vapor can be lifted is anybody’s guess. But to get to 3,000 feet? You’d need 2,975 feet of stack with nozzles every 25 feet or so – and every one of them has to be supplied with compressed air. And compressing air costs a LOT of money. And 10 tons of water would take probably 20 tons of air – every second – to move it at all. The air volume is immense. How many cubic feet per minute it is I don’t know off the top of my head, but I doubt there is a compressor in the world that big.
All I can say is I’d want to have stock in the power company supplying even ONE of them.
I have to say:
The green folks are just too caught up in the idea that energy comes free. They believe that solar panels and wind farms can supply the world’s energy needs, and they just don’t have any idea how FEEBLE all the green technologies are, as compared to what they are asking of them. They throw out this silly half-baked idea and thinkit will solve all the world’s problems. But it would suck up so much of the world’s energy. Gazillions of megawatts don’t come free.
Perhaps they just want Peak Oil (don’t get me started) to happen that much earlier…
Just as the Catlin expedition was ready to claim their prize as “most silly and banal 2010” Bill and Melinda Gates steal the show and the prize. What a shame, poor Catlin. Last year B&M pulled off a similar coup with their “End hurricanes in our lifetime” scheme using strategically placed ships in the gulf of Mexico to pump deep, cold water to the ocean surface. Oh well, there’s always next year and I’m sure Catlin will think up something new. I just hope they don’t underestimate the sheer stupidity of Bill & Melinda Gates again.
Lokki says:
May 12, 2010 at 12:27 pm
When one is making a new proposal, one may talk of hundreds of ships, but of course one should build an experimental vessel that will demonstrate feasibility.
It is an ingenious proposal, by a professor with a wide experience, (not college students)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Salter
and it should be given the funds to go into a prototype. Considering the billions spent on climate studies, the funds required are minimal. Considering that the cost of cap and trade to society will be enormous, the cost of the prototype is minimal.
A nondestructive geoengineering solution is much much preferable to cap and trade.