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 …
Could this be possible?
the fund of Bill and Melinda Gates is preparing a new GM bomb, transgenic “golden” rice that causes cillae on fallopian tubes. Again, it is hidden behind charitable intents. Allegedly, the rice replenishes vitamin A and iron in the body. Recently Bill Gates gave a speech at a conference in Long Beach where he mentioned that he was looking forward to a vaccine that will reduce growth of the world population.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/health/113350-2/
If they ever start building these things, I’ll know exactly what company to sink my pennies into — Acme Deepwater Marine Salvage…
George Smith: if people could really control the world’s temperature by degrees, for reasonable price, it would be a big battle for influence. There would be lots of rich people or powerful politicians who would press it in one random direction while others could do something else. Bill Gates could think that Seattle is not cold and rainy enough so he could cool the planet, indeed. It could soon run out of control. 😉
REPLY: Just imagine the small scale “war of the thermostat” between husband and wife on a global scale. Yikes! -A
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3989.full.pdf
From this reference inked to above:
If world temperatures are to be kept steady with no carbon reduction, the
working fleet would have to be increased by approximately 50 vessels a year plus
extra ones to replace any lost. If the assumptions used for figure 3 are correct, the
cancellation of 3.7WmK2 associated with a doubling of pre-industrial CO2
will need a spray rate of approximately 45 m3 sK1 and perhaps less with skilful
vessel deployment. If 0.03 m3 sK1 is the right design choice for one spray
vessel, this could come from a working fleet of approximately 1500.
===============
The water is microfiltered and trash filtered so spray will be water.
read the document for full information!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
\harry
My favorite green Rube Goldberg fantasy machine was shown on the Discovery Channel a while ago. They had an elevator made of carbon nanotubules that carried an elevator to outer space, 30 miles long or so, so we did not have to launch shuttles any more. Yes, nanotubes are strong, but they have to be lined up to be strong, and they would have to carry their weight, any payload, and resist storms and lightning (yes nanotubes are perfect conductors). It was a real science fiction show, with little to recommend it to belong in a pragmatic science arena.
Another was a microwave transmitter feeding on solar and transmitting MW to earth below. Ya think that enough little critters are being killed by windmills? This would be crispy critters galore. Not to mention all the chemistry they would be doing in the atmosphere on the way down. Good luck with getting that idea through safety regs.
These guys appear serious, but they are not really. They are more than smart enough to know all these things. What keeps them holding a straight face is they are hoping that a side effect, or small facet of the technology will be patentable so they can hit the jackpot! Right now, they are just FAGTs (Feeders At Government Troughs) maneuvering for big $$$ from lightweights with more money than sense.
Post Modern Science. The New Scammery.
We only need to THINK that the project is cooling the Earth; it doesn’t have to work. It is a great way to excuse any global cooling, by claiming responsibility for it, and give a reason to compensate the Third World with $x billion, in this case for all the extra rainy day problems.
Willis, good article. Slight error:
“2.6 square km, or 2.6 million square metres.”
A kilometer is a thousand meters, so it should read “2.6 thousand square meters”
I’ll be attending this colloquium in about 0.5 hours, and I’ll post the link to the archive video when Fermilab makes it available on their website:
“Cloud feedbacks on climate: a challenging scientific problem”
Joel Norris, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
One reason it has been difficult to develop suitable social and economic policies to address global climate change is that projected global warming during the coming century has a large uncertainty range. The primary physical cause of this large uncertainty range is lack of understanding of the magnitude and even sign of cloud feedbacks on the climate system.
If Earth’s cloudiness responded to global warming by reflecting more solar radiation back to space or allowing more terrestrial radiation to be emitted to space, this would mitigate the warming produced by increased anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Contrastingly, a cloud response that reduced solar reflection or terrestrial emission would exacerbate anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
It is likely that a mixture of responses will occur depending on cloud type and meteorological regime, and at present, we do not know what the net effect will be.
This presentation will explain why cloud feedbacks have been a challenging scientific problem from the perspective of theory, modeling, and observations. Recent research results on observed multidecadal cloud-atmosphere-ocean variability over the Pacific Ocean will also be shown, along with suggestions for future research.
@ur momisugly Common Sense
ROFL – I lived in Denver in the mid-1970s, and it snowed on the last day of JUNE in 1974. So you’ve still got 7 weeks to go to match that.
This entire idea is, of course, absurd since it is getting colder rather warmer and AGW is a non-scietific political money grab, but before we pick at all the flycrap of how and why it will or will not be possible to execute, why no attmpts to answer the real upfront question: Even if it CAN be done, what would the effect be? Warmer climate, colder climate, too much rain, too little, more storms, less storms etc., etc.? Greenhouse gas vs solar radiation reflection. That would be a more interesting body of knowledge than how to sail the boats or squirt the freeking water!! Picking at fly turds!
Stephen Salter says:
May 12, 2010 at 8:04 am
Thanks, Stephen. The figures from that citation are much, much lower than those from the articles I had found. So let’s look at their numbers.
They say that spraying a total of ten tonnes of water per second into the air will be enough to reverse the supposed warming that is projected to happen from a doubling of CO2.
Global rain averaged over the surface of the planet is about a metre per year. The surface of the planet is about 5.11 x 10^14 square metres. Which means that the current amount of water going into the air is about sixteen million tonnes per second.
Do you truly think that adding another ten tonnes per second of water to the air (about 0.0001% of the current amount going into the air every second) will actually change the temperature of the planet?
PS – you say:
If you can get 150 kW of average power from a Flettner rotor ship in the wind, please build one and we can wire it into the power grid. Note that the “Cloudia” above produces 600 watts, and that is only when the wind is blowing … typical capacity factors for turbine wind plants are about 15%-20%, so to get 150 kW of average power, you’d need to have a turbine rated at about three quarters of a Megawatt, and that’s a very, very, very big Flettner rotor … big enough to tip over a 300 tonne ship when the wind kicked up. One of the problems with Flettner rotors is that the drag is huge.
The other problem with Flettner rotors is that they don’t work well at low wind speeds … which, of course, is most wind speeds. So their capacity factor will be even smaller than for turbine wind plants.
Look, Flettner rotors have been around for almost a century. If they were a practical way to provide the main motive power for ships, we’d see them used. We don’t because they are inefficient and have a huge drag. As a result, any Flettner rotor big enough to actually power a ship (rather than just add a bit of power, as with the ship Flettner had built) is big enough to tip the ship over. So they can add some power, but are impractical as the main power for a ship.
Costeau tried a similar system on a couple of boats, the “Moulin au Vent” and the Alcyone. Yes, it did work, and it reduced the amount of fuel needed to drive the Alcyone by a third … but that’s not a ringing endorsement, since the Alcyone didn’t require a lot of fuel to begin with. And it is certainly not enough to provide 150 kW average power for the cloudships.
Finally, according to the usual font of misinformation, Wikipedia,
Ooops …
Stephen Salter
The figure of ten tonnes of spray per second was NOT per vessel but was the estimate for total spray from a fleet of 300 ships and, depending assumptions for initial nuclei concentration and drop half life, we think would be enough reverse the cumulative warming since pre-industrial times.
So 10000 liters/300 ships=33 Liters/sec for each ship. Hmm, my kid has a super soaker that can put out about that much…
Lets get this straigh, a storm front stretching a few hundred miles with 20-40mph winds would kick up more salt mist into the atmosphere in a day then all these ships combined would achive in a year, I bet.
I haven’t noticed any preindustrial tendencies around here after one of these mundane fronts passes through.
David Schnare says:
May 12, 2010 at 8:16 am
Gosh, you mean that this cloud modification project has been actually demonstrated using real live computer climate models? The models that all modelers agree do very poorly at modeling the clouds? The models whose results of clouds by latitude look like this?
Figure 4. Modeled clouds and observed clouds by latitude. Black line is observations.
I thought you were interested in honest science …
PS – I’m not Anthony.
PPS – As I mentioned above, this is a solution to a non-problem. Come back when you can demonstrate (using, you know, evidence, not computer models) that human cause warming is a) detectable, and b) a problem. Me, I figure a bit of warmth in the extratropics at night in the winter is not an issue, human caused or not … but I suppose YMMV.
Julian Flood says:
May 12, 2010 at 10:41 am
A disappointing post with many disappointing comments. I am not an engineer, but the egregious misinterpretations of the paper indicate that I’m not alone.
————————
Reply:
I’m disappointed that someone would go to all that bother without credibly displaying the problem in the first place. As an engineer, it is a waste of time and money to find solutions to problems that don’t exist (the mental exercise is even a waste of time). By that I mean if Phil Jones could or would show us his data, I’d be more inclined. If Hansen was forthright with FOIA requests, I’d entertain the idea. And if Mann didn’t require an AG from Virginia to get his lab notes (and anything else, for that matter), which were paid for by the public’s tax dollar, I’d be open to suggestion.
But until that happens, you’re engineering a “solution” for which there is no valid, verifiable problem. (And no, Al Gore’s “testimonials” and self-righteous, self-promoting, and self-aggrandizing spiels aren’t sufficient. Not even close.)
I have a hard time getting serious about a non-problem solution.
David Schnare says:
May 12, 2010 at 8:37 am
David, your “homework” consists (as near as I can tell) of believing in computer model results (regarding clouds, of all things), claiming that putting ten tons per second of water into the air (0.0001% of the natural amount) will change the world’s temperature, and putting credence in totally impractical and unseaworthy remote controlled Flettner powered rotorships. Sorry, but as a man who has spent a good chunk of my life at sea, there’s not much I can do but laugh, it’s either that or cry and I prefer the former.
Failure of filtration – damn near killed the desalination plant project in Tampa. After spending 10s of millions more in redesign and installing of much more efficient continuous flushing system, they finally are producing 80-90% of their projected volume of 25m gal per day. Why only 80-90%? because they still have to shut it down on a regular basis to “replace” filters they can’t flush in-place. And that filtration was NOT to “purify” the water, it was to prevent clogging the system of valves, pipes, etc. That volume is about 1/9 of the volume they are talking about for these ships – out in the open ocean. ALL you GEO engineering types, I’d suggest you try sucking 10 ton of ocean water per sec. into a mockup of turbines on an old freighter and see what happens. Get it running for – 30 days? without stopping before you go spending any of Bill’s money on any of these “sexy” catamarans.
Willis “If you can get 150 kW of average power from a Flettner rotor ship in the wind, please build one and we can wire it into the power grid.”
The rotor produces a force, but no motion means no power. The most efficient thing to do with the rotor force is to drag the vessel through the water. If we try to convert that motion into something more useful, we introduce at least one more stage of conversion. By my reckoning, the net useable power will be less than half of the power developed by the rotor. Perhaps a lot less than that.
Willis – another fabulous post, great debate with excellent comments and commenters.
Automated; remote control
ha hahaha haha haha haha many times over !
I used to be Radio & Electronics Officer at sea. I am now a Process Control and AUTOMATION engineer.
I do bleeding edge remote support of factories on a GLOBAL basis.
and what happens when good old Sol wakes up & throws us a nice CME & all the satellites go off line for a couple of days – no sat nav; no remote control…….
excuse me while I recover from another outburst of hysterical laughter….
No country will authorize unmanned cargo ships. None; nada; zilch. They’ve been feasible (note feasible not just possible) for at least 10 years.
And a fully automated cargo ship would be several orders of magnitude simpler to control than one of these proposed vessels. (That’s before my amateur naval architect level skills send me off in paroxysms of hysterics again).
Despite every ship owners efforts to achieve maintenance free reliable ships this has still not been achieved.
I suggest the well intentioned dreamers be allowed the joy of being on a 60 000 ton Panamax tanker going through a hurricane; and experience the mind blowing experience of looking UP from the top of the 5 story block on top of the 10 metre above water level deck – looking up some 60 degrees to the top of the next wave; and then being the roller coaster carriage that 60 000 tons of cargo imitates for the next 3 days (72 continuous hours).
Don’t think this will float.
Don’t you think ‘Big Oil’ would have un-manned tankers & LNG carriers running around by now if this could done ?
ha haha ha ha haha ha
Ask the engineers FIRST; not last.
To the proponets of this idea:
Here is another observation. These ships would be most productive in equatorial areas. Increasing albedo there would have the most impact. However, what are you achieving? You are not cooling the air, you are cooling the ocean. Lets say a 5C drop in ocean temperature covering, say the equatorial area between Africa and South America. Hmm, that would do wonders to the Gulf stream etc. You speak about stopping the process in hours. How do you return those surface currents to their normal temperature and speeds in a few hours? You don’t, the impact would be massive and could last years.
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 12:52 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.”
______________________________________________________________________
WRONG, WRONG WRONG!
Before he goes spending any money, first he needs to prove the idea has at least some merit. How about tests using a conventional air plane like a crop duster. Then he has to prove the engineering of getting the water to the desired height. Use a stationary pilot operation on a sea coast. Then you might be ready to build a prototype on a manned ship. Other wise it is just another scam to bilk people of money like Molten Metal Technology Inc. (start at paragraph 10) http://sentinelradio.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/obama-maurice-strong-al-gore-key-players-cashing-in-on-chicago-climate-exchange/
There is a very good reason commercial corporations use pilot plants before going full scale. It saves them lots of money not to mention embarrassment.
Greg says:
May 12, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Willis, good article. Slight error:
“2.6 square km, or 2.6 million square metres.”
A kilometer is a thousand meters, so it should read “2.6 thousand square meters”
Greg, the keyword is “square” km
How about having a fleet of aircraft to seed the clouds with silver iodine or…or….DRY ICE! ….HA…..ha …..ha
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 10:39 am
anna v, thank you for your contribution, as always. I know that you and Stephen Salter are “disappointed”, but the proposal for remote-controlled Flettner rotorships is a sailor’s nightmare. The fact that you think this could work means you’ve never been in a big storm in a small boat. There is a reason that the rotors aren’t used for anything but a way to reduce fuel costs …
If anyone could actually show that it might stand a chance of working, I suppose that might make sense. But altering the temperature by changing the amount of water going up into the air by 0.0001% doesn’t strike me as a reasonable claim. And supporting things that won’t work and don’t seem reasonable, as a second or any other line of defense, just leads to people laughing at you … how does that help anyone?
For me, it is a solution to a non-problem. If you back it, you are implicitly agreeing that there is a problem … I’m sure you can see the problem.
No, they’re not. That ship has not yet sailed, it is still tied up to the dock. And when it does, we’ll see how much actual energy they get from the rotors … note also how big the ship has to be to support that size of rotors … that’s not a 300 tonne vessel as called for in the cloudship specs, that’s 10,500 tonnes.
I say again, if Flettner rotors worked as you guys claim, sailors all over the world would be using them. They aren’t being used because they can’t be reefed, are inefficient in light winds, and don’t provide much power. As a result, you need a huge ship to support a big rotor, so nothing is gained.
Finally, this whole idea is built around the concept of “cloud seeding”, making clouds by increasing the number of cloud nuclei. I remember the hype around cloud seeding when I was a kid … funny how that worked out. In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences said:
So we’re pretty sure the Flettner part won’t work, the idea of remote controlled ships seems mad to this old sailor, the weather modification part has never been scientifically demonstrated despite decades of trying, and the claim is that adding 0.0001% to the natural water going into the air will change the global temperature … hey, what’s not to like?
Funny, but for me, that’s not the important thing. I look for important things like “practical” and “possible to actually make work” and “basic principles are scientifically sound” and “might actually make a difference on a global scale” and “could be cost-effective” as well.
anna v., I always enjoy your posts, but when a supposedly scientific study starts proposing Flettner rotorships, you’ll forgive me if I don’t take it seriously. I’ve spent far too much time at sea for that.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Flettner rotor ships. The rotors don’t spin themselves. Flettner rotor ships need a motor, typically electric or diesel, to spin the rotors. So long the the rotors are spinning (about 200rpm is ideal) they act as very efficient sails. But the rotors themselves are not wind powered. Flettner himself abandoned the idea after practical tests showed that he’d be better off using the energy required to spin the rotors to power the boat directly with a standard propeller. In this proposal they plan to use a submerged propeller to extract energy from the boat’s motion through the water to turn the Flettner rotors. But if it takes more energy to spin the rotors than it does to push the boat through the water at the same speed with a propeller then doesn’t that mean you probably won’t be able to extract enough energy from a marine propeller to power the rotors to propel the boat.
Forget whether the thing will have any effect on clouds. What I’m asking myself is will the basic propulsive concept even work.
anna v says (May 12, 2010 at 12:52 pm): “A nondestructive geoengineering solution is much much preferable to cap and trade.”
Obliterating junk science trumps ’em both.