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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anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Oh, please, stop with the straw man accusations. I’m just taking the best numbers I can find. I notice that you have not cited a single number to date.
Well, since the ship hasn’t sailed yet, we don’t know how much energy it will produce. It’s easy to claim energy, but hard to produce it. Note that the vessel itself will be going at on the order of twenty knots from the engines, so part of the wind power comes from that. Also note that it is a 10,500 tonne ship, so it can hold up that size of rotors.
Finally, those rotors are about 25 metres by 4 metres, for an area of 100 square metres. This is the same as a turbine type windmill with an 11.2 metre diameter … by modern standards, tiny. The Danish Wind Industry Association has a calculator here. Their smallest windmill has a 10.7 metre diameter, close enough for our calculations … and at their windpower sites, the average annual production from a rotor of that size is between 1.5 and 5 kW … and that’s at good windpower sites.
Since Flettner rotors are less efficient than wind turbines (which is we use wind turbines), the numbers for the Flettner rotors are going to be smaller than that. Let’s be generous and say they each produce about two kilowatts at these random sites.
So perhaps you’d care to explain how you plan to pull 150 kW from your cloudship before you accuse me of “straw men” … are you going to line up 75 rotors, each of them 25 metres tall and 4 metres wide, on each ship?
anna, I’m doing my best back of the envelope calculation with the numbers I can dig up. If you don’t like my numbers, stop hand-waving about rotorships that have not yet sailed, and give us some better numbers.
Ian H says:
May 12, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Yeah, I broke out laughing when I saw that part. The reference quoted by anna v. and the others says:
Use motors to spin the rotors to catch the wind to move the boat to spin the turbines to make the electricity to both pump the water and to power the motors that spin the rotors … can you say “cumulative inefficiency”?
And they want to bust me for making fun of the proposal?
Doesn’t increased cloud cover can actually have an effect to trap heat. So things could get warmer?
Plus all this extra water vapour being sprayed into the atmosphere could lead to cause even more warming?
These guys should stick to playing Fantasy role playing games on their computers!
Many commentors have pointed out shortcomings of the proposed idea. I would like to add one more. Willis’ article didn’t say what the particles were that were “shot to 3000 feet” and then created cloud cover; but when I see navy celebrations where various ships shoot jets of water into the air, most of the water immediately falls back to the sea. Once back in the sea, no cloud cover cooling will occur. It seems to me that the particles that are shot into the air must stay there to do any good. One way to keep “sea water particles” aloft would be to (a) raise one tonne (1,000 kg) of sea water to 1000 meters (approximately 3000 feet) and then (b) evaporate the water. The amount of energy required to evaporate 1 gram of water at 15 degrees C is approximately 2,450 Joules. Thus, to evaporate 10 tonnes of water (10,000,000 grams) requires 24,500,000,000 Joules. To do this every second requires 24.5 gigawatts, which dwarfs the power required to simply raise 10 tonnes of water per second from sea level to an altitude of 1,000 meters. There may be other methods of keeping the “shot particles” (whatever they are) at 1,000 meter altitude, so my number of 24.5 gigawatts may be incorrect; but it raises an issue.
Then if you take into account inefficiencies (say 25% efficient on the average), why we’re talking about 100 gigawatts of power, most of which will be dissipated as heat. Thus, before any “cloud cooling” benefit is realized, we must (a) overcome the 75 gigajoules of heat per second we are introducing into the biosphere, and (b) as others have pointed out, overcome the greenhouse gas warming that the AGWers tell us will be created when the introduced worst of all greenhouse gases, water vapor, mixes throughout the atmosphere. It looks like we’re going to have to make a whole lot of clouds just to break even, much realize some amount of cooling.
What to me is really depressing about the proposed idea is that the people who conceived it just might be the brightest 1 % of the AGW alarmist community.
Well I tried to cut and paste that nifty cloudiness data that wissis has up there; so you’ll have to back upo there and look.
So here’s the challenge. From that sheet full of graphs, pick one; any one; your favorite example of global cloudiness; I don’t care which one you like.
Now using that cloudiness graph data, and assuming it to be gospel truth. plot a graph of the ground level solar irradiance, directly underneath that cloud. For simplicity, assume that these graphs are correct for either one of the equinoxes, so the sun is diriectly overhead at the equator, and there is sunlight at both poles (24 hours per day).
So I am sure that you now have enough information to perform the calculation take the TSI as being 1366 W/m^2; and you can assume (but state) any Air Mass One loss due to atmospheric absorption that you like. I’d pick either 70 or 75% transmission over the equator, and you can figure out the appropriate air mass for other latitudes, and take a simple linear (with AM) loss due to atmosheric absorption. I’ll accept results that ignore any spectral change due to air mass.
So that’s you homework for this evening.
I will warn you , that I do not have the correct answer; becuase in my algorithm; I need to know a whole lot more about the clouds than simply the cloudiness in percent. It’s a bit like the arctic ice problem; the “ice extent” doesn’t tell you what percentage is open water, and what is ice; and then it doesn’t tell you how thick that ice is; but yet it suffices to make predictions about when there will be no more arctic sea ice.
So same here; clouds is clouds; that’s all you need to know.
The impact this whole project would have on climate is given proper perspective to something I’ve posted in the past but is more pertinent than ever:
Dr Leonard F Khilyuk and Professor George V Chilingar (Geologists) University of Southern California concluded from their study [regarding the climate]:
“Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4–5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.”
And the “human controls” they mention include cloud-making ships.
Willis/Ian H
excuse me its quite late here in the UK; but the post at May 12, 2010 at 3:22 pm; if I read that right they seem to believe in perpetual motion machines ?
Is the architect working from Escher drawings by any chance ?
Since the remote/automation bit won’t work (Engineering term meaning : it won’t work); I didn’t bother checking out the rest.
So what is the PRIME mover going to be ? And with Fletner rotors giving at best a 30% SAVING if the wind is blowing then the PRIME Mover will still be required to supply a minimum of 70% of the max calculated load. And all of that saving is going to disappear in the overly complex messing around attempt to produce perpetual motion ?
KISS – especially at sea; why not just drive the electrical generator set directly from the prime mover ? All propellers exhibit slip – a measure of their efficiency; and the greater the load; the greater the slip; to try and convert the ship’s forward motion into electricity via a water driven turbine is just ; well stupid (Engineering term meaning : dreamt up by the non-engineering a-mathematical management or political types who never seem to grasp the basics – ie 2 + 2 ALWAYS = 4 no matter how much you wish otherwise).
Surely no one is taking this seriously ? Smoke & mirrors…
And now, a romantic interlude, from a noted ‘natural philosopher’ two-hundred years ago, penned in 1820:
[cue violin]
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky.
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores,
I change but I cannot die.
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.
[exit violin]
PB Shelley, ‘The Cloud’.
[interlude ends]
Ironically, Shelley’s boat, by some accounts, was later rammed and sank on Lake Geneva during a squall and his body cremated on the shore, much as I suspect will soon be the fate of this venture.
Crash and burn………….
Writes Peter_dm:
“Ask the engineers FIRST; not last.”
Oh, good heavens, no. Engineers live in the real world. People with that kind of attitude will tell you what can and cannot be done on the basis of real-world knowledge, and everyone knows that “Liberals” see beyond reality to the wonderful perfection of their visions of “Hope” and “Change.”
Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park was interviewed recently, and on his own behalf and that of his collaborator, Matt Stone, remarked:
“We hate liberals. More than we hate conservatives. And we really hate them.”
Sums up my political – and technological – position perfectly.
And,,,, it shall rain fish!
I believe that funding for Wilhelm Reich’s cloud busters might produce more results.
If we are really into messing things up, here is a simpler proposal.
Put a large insulated pipe to near the bottom of the ocean. There the water temp is 1C or lower, pump the water to the surface and spray it all over the place. Lifting that water up is not an issue so no need for super pumps spraying water 1000 meters into the air. Lets say 10,000 ships, each doing 50 tonnes per second. Yep, that might be more viable for cooling the surface waters. But, then again what will this do to our ocean currents. Law of unintended consequenses will apply….
“And they want to bust me for making fun of the proposal?”
I’m gonna fix a wind turbine to the front of my car, couple it to gears to step-up rotational speed to drive a turbo prop at the back. After a light shove, a virtuous circle of postive feedback should ensue: as the car speeds up there will be an increases in power to the turbine, increasing the power to the turbo prop. Speed will be controlled by applying a constant braking force to the turbine.
Once the concept has been demomstrated, a fuel-free aeroplane should be within our grasp – we can use that to fly to a height of 1000 m to throw water out the window. We will then be able to control the global temperature, creating green jobs and saving the world. Hurrah!
(That’s my draft grant application – d’ya think the Foundation will buy it?)
Does anyone have any idea of the cost of one of these submersibles and how much co2/energy is involved in their construction? I say submersible, because I suspect that will be where they end up.
I have a much cheeper idea which would solve the salt problem, the chlorine problem, the feul problem and the man hours proble all at one. Replace these pump ships with large floating shallow evaporation pools. You increase the natural evaporation, could gain the same mass of water in the atmosphere with significantly reduced production cost and running costs.
Also, if the water is swapped out before it is completely evaporated no plankton would be killed. It would make sailing on the oceans more hazardous, and the whales would probably regret it, but those are small potatoes.
There is a virus on the loose. Probably a secret weapon escaped from some secret CIA lab. The virus simply disconnect the locical parts of the brain from the rest, and isolates it.
I think I will call it the Avatar-virus.
This has been very entertaining. I am not an engineer, but I copped early on to the conundrum of how one would power what appears to be a perpetual motion machine. I think we need Steve Jobs on this one, not Bill Gates.
There’s nothing wrong with the notion of geoengineering per se, but it strikes me that proposals of this harebrained nature smack of a complete disconnect between desire and means. There are underestimates of scale in just about every regard here that can only be described in terms of multiple orders of magnitude between what might barely have a noticeable impact – for good or ill – and what would have no measurable effect at all.
And these for the expenditure of vast amounts of wealth representing hours and days and years of real human beings’ lives, concentrated and wielded by people who are fundamentally too stupid to do anything good with what they’ve gained.
Just because Bill Gates found a way to rip off the ideas of other computer designers and developers and turn those ideas into commercial hegemony in his market segment doesn’t mean that his expertise – such as it is – crosses over into other fields. Might as well have looked to Bartholomew Roberts for agronomy tips simply because he was one of the more successful commerce raiders of his time.
Hopefully they’ll give Wrong Way Willy a bit of room to wander. http://www.global-adventures.us/2010/05/12/grey-whale-mediterranean/
It wouldn’t be the first time someone from the Pacific Northwest dispatched a whale with dire consequences:
http://www.theexplodingwhale.com/
Personally I’d much rather Gates put his billions into wages for quality software engineers so Windows would be a less interesting target of software hackers interested in building spambot networks.
What about the poor sea kittens?
http://www.peta.org/sea_kittens/
The ship looks like a heck of hookah.
Naming suggestion: S.S. Cockamie.
First of all people they are not going to spray the seawater all of the way to the clouds, they are going to spray it into the air inside a ventilated column. Some of the water will evaporate into vapor, and as Willis has all ready demonstrated previously, water vapor is lighter than air and will rise. When the column of air/water vapor rises, it’ll create a local low pressure zone, and the surface air moving in will pick-up more water vapor from the sea which in turn will also rise. This is pretty much what happens everyday in the ocean tropical zone due to solar heating, i.e. it rains every day at about the same time. Think of this more as priming the pump and getting the clouds to form a bit earlier.
Personally I doubt it will make any real difference, but it’s more plausible than most of the comments are letting on. This is basically a cooling tower and this wikipedia article treats it in depth.
For all of the schemes I have seen to cool the planet, not once have I seen even a hairbrained scheme to warm the planet.
i.e. – UNDO button, what’s that?
So, without further ado, I propose that the planet is being prepared for a harebrained scheme to make it habitable for the Ice Aliens, who will be arriving in the Mother Ship on Dec 21, 2012. Don’t talk to Aliens.
Nice bote!
DavidQ says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:03 pm
This method is already being used to generate electricity (known as OTEC, for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), and for air conditioning in oceanside tropical resorts.
There actually is work involved, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. A column of water at 1°C weighs more than a column of water that varies from say 1°C to 30°C … hang on, let me find some numbers … OK, the difference between sea water at say average 15°C and 0°C is about 2.3 kg/cubic metre. So if we have a vertical pipe in the ocean that’s one metre in diameter and say 600 metres long, and the water in the pipe is at 0°C and the outside water averages 15°C, the water inside the pipe will weigh about a tonne more than the surrounding water.
So you’re pumping against a tonne of back pressure over an area of about .785 square metres (about 2PSI), which is not huge but is hardly something you can neglect in your calculations.