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 …
I think what really bothers me with this concept:
1) We really don’t understand the systems involved with climate
2) If CO2 is responsible for the global climate “change” – what fuel source would be dense enough to power these ships to do what they are conceived to do?
Finally, how does Bill Gates acquire the EIS to undertake a project of this scope, scale and impact?
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 12, 2010 at 2:38 pm
My last on this.
There is a basic misunderstanding in this thread:
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.
That is not what the proposal is about.
It is about seeding clouds . Salt is plenty in the oceans, as well as other salts, and the whole design is in order to get these salts in the cloud cover to increase the albedo by 1%. It is not increase in humidity that is being proposed.
Cloud seeding works:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cloud-seeding-china-snow
And this particular seeding just wants to increase the albedo, not bring rain.
Prototypes are what are necessary to demonstrate feasibility of a new idea.
If they work, one can go further.
If they do not work, the project stops. I trust that a professor of engineering will have more ability than back of the envelope calculations to moot such a proposal.
All projects go through strict calculations and I do not think that Gates or anybody will give blank checks for projects.
All I am saying is that the project is promising.
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.
For me it is a stop gap toy to give to deluded people until the weather non problem is seen for what it is. The cost is small, and it shuts them up effectively if it works.
The main problem is the meme that has dominated governments that believe CO2 is the devil
That is the problem to solve, how to neutralize the AGW meme, because it will take human societies back to the 19th century and cause untold suffering. How to change the meme. Geo engineering proposals can shut up cap and trade solutions, and this particular project is the most innocuous of all I have read about. And cheap as opposed to the billions spent on AGW studies currently.
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.
Again, prototyping is what will show whether it is practical. And I would trust engineers more than back of the envelope in this case.
And important is when little children die, which will certainly happen with cap and trade in force.
There is a political problem and this is a political solution.
DavidQ says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Jordan says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:18 pm
I’ve got a better idea. We cast a huge, say 500 meter by 1000 meter, and centimeter thick, sheet of lead. Lead has a fair heat capacity. Using power from a nuclear or solar plant, and a large refrigeration unit, we cool the sheet to -200°C or thereabouts (the technology currently exists to cool things even to a lower temperature! Watch my other hand). Then we float the sheet, using large air floats (the technology already exists, so look here at the cute little monkey), and dragged by simple tugboats (the tugboats exist – look at that furry Chewbaka) out to sea. The atmospheric anthropogenic heat is absorbed by the supercooled lead sheet. When warmed until ambient, the sheet is dragged back and refrigerated again until all of the malus anthropus pollution is purged. All of this technology presently exists.
Whatcha think?
Bit of a mishmash of replies, sorry.
“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). ”
All very well for an engineer, someone who thinks in terms of reality. With AGW we are not dealing with reality, we are dealing with politics, and politicians live in a world where truth is what people believe. AGW is a political truth. Imagine you are a Cameroon/Cleggite and you have just read a new bit of research which refutes, 100% and no wiggle room, the whole CO2 theory. You don’t think ‘yippee’ and cancel the Climate Change Bill, immediately saving £18 billion per year, you think ‘Oh G&*^!, if people get to hear about this I’ll look a damn fool and no-one will re-elect me. How the hell do I get out of this?’ You can seize the chance to build a couple of Salter and Latham’s aerosol ships and buy time. Over a period of a few years you can change your stance and be ready to say ‘I told you so’ when the wheels finally fall off the AGW bus. Or, if AGW turns out to be real, then you have positioned yourself to be the saviour of the world. It’s difficult to comprehend the mindset if you deal each day with facts, but, I assure you, that’s how they work. Shouting that it’s a concession to poor science may be true in reality, but it’s bad politics. If you read the original Salter and Latham paper you’ll see that the demo was designed to produce a visible plume, not because it was needed to prove the concept but because without a visible result the politicians would not understand. Mad. But that’s the world our rulers live in.
“Doesn’t increased cloud cover can actually have an effect to trap heat. So things could get warmer?”
Low level stratocumulus cloud reflects incoming short wave radiation. This cools. It also reflects LR radiation back towards the surface but this effect is dwarfed by the first one. So, low level clouds cool.
“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. ”
Thanks, that’s very clear. 30% of the ocean is covered with stratocu cloud, average height something like 1500 ft. That’s 21% of the world covered with these clouds. Maybe you could now do the calculation of the power required to get it there and explain where the power is coming from? This elevation of spray particles is happening every day, millions of tonnes of water is turned into tiny droplets as waves break and bubbles burst. Did you look at the ship tracks? When the air does not contain enough CCNs the water vapour just sits there, waiting for something to trigger the formation of droplets. The ship exhaust provides the CCNs (cloud condensation nuclei) and the natural turbulence over the surface mixes the droplets into a cloud layer. The way some of the calculations are being done here disproves the ability of cloud layers to form naturally, so perhaps someone could work out how much energy is needed from the ship-track ship to create those trails in its wake.
Here’s one image: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5488
But perhaps I have misunderstood your point.
“Engineers live in the real world. ” and
“the engineering of getting the water to the desired height”
Professor Salter is the Salter of the Salter Duck: maybe people have seen the retrospective endorsement of the Duck — the ‘engineer’ who proved to the Government that it wouldn’t work had got his sums wrong. I’d back Salter’s engineering intuition against even Willis.
“Replace these pump ships with large floating shallow evaporation pools. ”
The point of the exercise is not to push water vapour into the air, it’s to create salt particles which allow droplets to form. Evaporation does not create particles.
“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. ”
Easy. Spread the oceans with oil sheen. Invent a surfactant (let’s call it Tide) which is non-biodegradeable. Pour that in millions of tonnes down the sewers of the world and let it pollute CCNs such that they scavenge out cloud droplets, raining the clouds to a thinner state. Lower albedo, more warming. Simples.
Professor Salter, how about rewarding me for my spirited defence by cuffing a post-grad round the ear and sending it to calculate by how much ocean pollution has degraded strato-cu cover? And maybe you’ll be able to invite me to Stockholm….
JF
It seems that even the computer models underlying this fantasy aren’t cooperating: “These numerical simulations of marine stratocumulus and trade wind cumulus clouds revealed some situations where nonlinear dynamical responses to increasing CCN actually decreased cloud liquid water content and either decreased or did not change the albedo”.
re: anna v
Snap! (Do USians play snap? It’s a card game where the players shout Snap! when the cards laid down match. I explain this in case I have just written something obscene.)
JF
peter_dtm asks:
It isn’t quite perpetual motion that is being proposed. When the rotors are spinning they act as sails. The rotors don’t just push the boat with the energy fed in to keep them spinning. Instead the spinning rotors bend the wind flow in exactly the same way that a sail does, and this bending of the wind extracts energy from the wind to push the boat through the water in much the same way that ordinary sails do.
Because energy can be extracted from the wind in this way, this isn’t a zero sum game, which takes the proposal out of the perpetual motion category. It is not inconceivable that under perfect wind conditions and with perfectly efficient turbines and rotor engines you might just be able to get this Heath Robinson contraption to go.
What I doubt is whether it’ll work well enough under realistic wind conditions to make it practical. If not enough energy can be extracted from the turbines to keep the rotor spinning at its most efficient speed, then rotor speed will decline, the boat will slow, turbine efficiency will drop and so on around and around until the boat ends up essentially adrift with its rotors turning too slowly to act as sails and the water flowing too slowly through its turbines to generate significant power.
That is before we even start to talk about extracting additional energy from the system to power the giant salt water `humidifier’.
Julian Flood says:
May 12, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Well, I am greek and live in Greece. We have a verbal game called: touch red.
🙂
Julian Flood writes:
“With AGW we are not dealing with reality, we are dealing with politics, and politicians live in a world where truth is what people believe.”
Reminds me just too goddam much of a Dilbert cartoon sequence some years ago, in which the title character – an engineer, natch – convinces one of the marketing boobs in the company for which they both work that a focus group had come up with the opinion that all marketing boobs were turning into weasels.
Whereupon the marketing boob in question began taking on the physical characteristics of Mustela frenata, complete to pointy nose and quivering whiskers.
Had to be convinced that the focus groups had changed their minds before the marketing boob could turn back into something resembling a human being.
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 9:44 pm
anna v., surely you are not citing the Scientific American. They are among the worst spreaders of hogwash disguised as science. They are a joke. I gave a citation above from the NAS stating that the scientific case for cloud seeding has not been established. The Scientific American article doesn’t make the claim that cloud seeding works either, it’s just a review of the science. They say in the article that it is extremely hard to determine if seeding works or not …
We’ve been looking for evidence of it for years, so if it works, it’s not doing much, or we would be able to detect it.
Next, you are correct that the amount of water is not the issue, it is the amount of salt in the air. But like water in the air, the amount of that is large as well. Every time a wave breaks, whether at sea or on the shore, lots and lots of salt goes up into the air. Lets look at the numbers
The rate of production of salt nuclei at the ocean surface is estimated at 1000 nuclei per square centimetre per second. Over the surface of the ocean, this adds up to 3.58E+21 nuclei per second.
Now our ships are producing 10 tonnes of water per second. There’s about 35 kg of salt per tonne. A cloud nucleating salt crystal weighs on the order of 6.3E-14 grams. That means that the ships are producing a maximum of 5.6E+18 salt crystals per second.
So once again, the numbers don’t pencil out. The cloud ships are only adding 0.01% to the natural airborne salt crystal production.
Like I said, anna, it’s easy to sit back and make various claims. But for me, I greatly prefer to run the numbers before I run my mouth …
Boy, you have more confidence in people who are being offered money than I do. Ken Caldeira was given a bunch of money by Bill Gates to give to “unique solutions”. So he went to folks who had unique solutions and offered them the money … do you truly think he ran the numbers first?
I don’t. If he had, when he was questioned about the proposal he’d say “Look, here’s the preliminary calculations that say that it will work”. He hasn’t done so. Might be just an oversight, but I doubt it. You and Stephen cited the study that claimed that this will all work … but where are the numbers in that? That’s what I keep asking you for, and you keep giving me words instead of numbers …
Again, I respectfully disagree. Sure, if the numbers penciled out, we might talk about it … but this is pie-in-the-sky. Supporting it is supporting bad science and wrong numbers, and I am unwilling to do that.
I agree about the importance of the issue, and that cap and trade is lethal. But how will a prototype overcome a couple of orders of magnitude of bad numbers? I’m sorry, but I don’t see fighting bad science with worse science is a good tactic or a good strategy.
Like I said, show me some numbers that indicate that it will work and that the ships will stay afloat, and we can discuss the question. But advocating some cockamamie scheme involving dangerously top-heavy ships that can’t work doing too little to ever make a difference? Sorry, but this old seaman is not going to sign off on that.
The Flettner rotors are a perfect example. My numbers above show that to get the 150 kW they claim is needed (I say they need more power) would take a minimum of 75 Flettner rotors, each 25 metres tall and 4 metres in diameter. Assuming we need about double the diameter between each one for clear space for the wind to pass, that’s a ship that’s 900 metres long … or we could put them in two rows and make it only 450 metres long … and they show a ship with three rotors, impossibly tall, that would flip over in a gentle breeze?
Can you sit there with a straight face and tell me that these folks have actually run the numbers on that charming plan? Really? Because I don’t think so. They have motors to turn the rotors to drive the ship to power the turbines to make the energy to turn the rotors and pump the water … where are their numbers on that? Where are their numbers on any of it? You and Stephen keep flogging that paper as though it was worth something, but there’s no real analysis in any of it. No efficiency figures. No numbers on rotor power, just the claim that three rotors 24 metres tall by 2.4 metres diameter will drive the ship fast enough to produce 200 kW … riiiight. No numbers on how much power the pumps will draw. Just lots of feel-good ideas and miscellaneous meaningless numbers (bearing specifications?) that seem to have you and Steven convinced, but me?
I believe numbers, and the fact that they don’t have any real numbers speaks volumes. If you want to get 200 kW from a modern efficient wind turbine, you need a good wind site and an intercept area of about 2,300 square metres … and that’s without the lesser efficiency of Flettners, and the power to turn them, and the friction of the ship. And they think that three rotors with a total intercept area of 24 x 2.4 x 3 = 173 square metres will do it with all of those inefficiencies?
I’m sorry, anna, but they definitely have not run the numbers, they are out by orders of magnitude. You say “do the prototype”. I say “first, show me the numbers, then do the prototype”.
If this plan would ever go ahead on full scale than it will wise to start buying shares of marine-salvage companies like Smit International (My dad used for them for about 30 years before retiring). If there is one thing that i learned from them is that the sea is big, as in really big and that no boat is large enough.
These guys have really no idea what it is out there on the full ocean, i used to sail on Dutch historical sailing ships (150-300 tonnes) in the past during holidays, only in Dutch waters and even there it can be hairraising at times, let alone that you would be caught in a 10-12 Bft storm in the mid-atlantic.
Still if you need an idea for a vacation, sailing those ships is hard work, but so rewarding, something i regard as good quality time.
I’ve been thinking about numbers. For me, when I look at numbers in a variety of fields, I often have an innate sense of whether they are of the right order of magnitude, or whether they are obviously way out of line.
After much thought about this ability, my conclusion is that I can do that because I didn’t have a calculator as a kid. I had a slide rule.
A slide rule doesn’t have decimals, so the first thing that you have to do with a slide rule is figure out the rough size of the answer. If the slide rule says “34”, are we looking at 0.34, or 3.4, or 34, or 3,400? I was taught by my hard-core math teacher to do that first, to figure out how big the answer should be, and to be sure to do it before pulling out the slipstick to calculate the digits.
This habit has stayed with me despite calculators and spreadsheets, and has been extremely useful. When I first looked at their cloudship design I couldn’t say how much power it would put out … but I knew it wasn’t 200 kilowatts. Way too big.
I would recommend this same exercise to everyone when they are given an unusual or unknown claim. Before doing anything, ask yourselves, “Are their claims of the right order of magnitude? Does it make sense that the claimed cause would be enough to create the claimed effect?”
Before looking up the cloud nucleus production rates for the post immediately above, I didn’t know what answer I would find … but I knew the old seaman’s prayer, “Dear Lord, your ocean is so big and my ship is so small” … and I knew that 300 ships spraying ten tons of water per second would only create a tiny fraction of natural production.
Give it a try when you see these kind of claims, take a guess at what the answer will be. Then run the calculations, and get a rough estimate of the actual numbers. It is that process that drew me to this claim in the first place, I looked at their claims that 300 ships could cool the earth, and I though … umm … I thought, “That’s ” … well, this is a family blog, so let me just say I wasn’t impressed. And when I ran the numbers, it made no sense.
Julian Flood, you say:
I remember when the Duck was invented, I thought it was a brilliant idea. And I have seen that about the Duck, that the numbers were wrong and that delayed implementation.
At this point, though, it’s been 35 years since the Duck was invented, and I’ve never seen a report of one actually being used. I don’t know why, perhaps Professor Salter could enlighten us.
However, I’ve seen hundreds of inventions like that (see old copies of Popular Science) that fell by the wayside … why? Because they were great ideas, but couldn’t survive the real world. The ocean is incredibly harsh, and there are not waves all the time, so we have all of the usual problems with renewable energy. I do find the following, which may or may not be true:
I notice that Professor Salter started out strong in this thread, but when I have given actual numbers he has not come back to contradict them. Perhaps my numbers are wrong, I’ve been wrong before … but until Professor Salter says where, I’ll go with my numbers.
We could start with Professor Salter’s numbers for the power output of the Flettner rotors that lead to their claim that three rotors of 24 x 2.4 metres could move a 300 tonne ship fast enough to generate 200 kW … Professor Salter, the floor is yours.
bubbagyro
I feel that we are leaving the garden gnomes out of the fun… ; )
Willis Eschenbach
I didn’t do a calculation, I don’t have enough engineering know how. I agree that the cold water would need work to be brought up as it would be denser than the warmer water.
OTEC is interesting, after writing my post I found out about it. To me low density energy solutions can be very good if tuned to the specifics problem. I like the idea of what Bora Bora did pumping up cold sea water to provide cheap air conditioning. Not OTEC but based on the same idea.
In the end I feel strongly that tossing salt in the air to create clouds would work in hot, low wind and cloud free areas. The very idea of cooling off these areas makes me believe that we must understand the effect on ocean temperature and currents. Imagine these machines running for years, what would happen to El Ninos and La Ninas and other ocean current/wind/temperature events? Imagine the mess we could create by using industrial level cooling tricks on the oceans? Moonsoons going missing etc. Of all ideas this is misguided unless you know the long term consequences. As one of the proponents said in this threat: “you can turn it off and the clouds would dissipate within hours”, but what about the cumulative effect of the cooling? That could be month or years to resolve itself…
The discussion here about how to get the spray to 3000 feet is unnecessary according to the inventors. They are just gouing to spray it into the air 20 feet up and trust to nature to handle things. Since spraying water droplets into air is an excellent way to cool said air I suspect that they will promptly sink back to the sea surface.
Another interesting engineering problem is that these ships will be operating in tropical waters and in a constant fog of microscopic salt water droplets. That is just about the worst conceivable operating conditions for both mechanical and electronic equipment. Everything will need to be vacuum sealed and all exposed surfaces made from corrosion-proof materials (composites or stainless steel). This is going to be a very, very, very expensive type of vessel.
Incidentally the paper Phil Trans. R. Soc. where the inventor expounds his ideas reveals that he does not understand how an aircraft wing works (nor the peer reviewers presumably), which may explain the aerodynamic/energetic absurdities of the scheme.
“They say in the article that it is extremely hard to determine if seeding works or not …
We’ve been looking for evidence of it for years, so if it works, it’s not doing much, or we would be able to detect it.”
Then I suggest someone look at
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=37455
Those tracks are being seeded by the tiny amount of CCNs pushed out by a ship’s engine. But no doubt the ship has immense pumps to boost its exhaust up to the correct height for the clouds to form*. Or something. Perhaps the pictures are of something else entirely, not CCN-mediated droplets at all. Let’s ignore data that disproves our thesis….
For more fun pictures of this impossible-to-detect phenomenon, google “Nasa ship tracks.”
Droplet production of the cloud ships is by feeding water onto a spinning plate, IIRC.
“And I have seen that about the Duck, that the numbers were wrong and that delayed implementation. ”
There was a recent report that the assessment of the technology got its numbers wrong. It was civil servants reporting to The Minister, the Whitehall machine assessing something they didn’t like. Maybe I’m maligning the authors but I got the impression that someone misplaced a decimal point. Let’s miscalculate the data that doesn’t agree with our thesis….
There are two things called ‘the boundary layer’ involved in all this, one the layer of air above the ocean where drag and interaction with the surface causes turbulence (just like a wing) and one which is the layer of water, organic debris and pollution that makes the skin of the sea, a couple of millimetres which mediate the reactions of the water and the air.
I think of the strato-cu cover as akin to the control grid of an old-fashioned triode. Put a signal on it and out comes an amplified warming/cooling signal. Pollute the air and I bet you alter the stratocu. Diddle with the ocean surface and the same thing will happen at second remove, altering bubble production, a control grid for the control grid. I expect engineers call that something like a two-stage amplifier, but it’s a long time since I built the Cranwell superhet….
JF
*Sorry, but it’s frustrating that people don’t seem to understand that much of the ‘power’ needed for this scheme to work is free and operates every day. Add a slew of CCNs at sea level and clouds whiten. It’s nothing difficult, it’s just (just!) taking advantage of a readily available natural system. Of course, if I’m right about the kriegesmarine effect then it’s just correcting a problem that we have caused.
RE: “Of course, the first storm would flip this over immediately…”
Urgent Design Modification Directive 361: Add balast tanks and partial submersion capability to a depth of [TBD] …
The nonsense about not needing pumps, using fine mesh to atomize, etc. is very funny!
I happen to know a lot about seawater cooling systems, we are designing one for a new 1100 MW powerplant. The plant needs approx 100.000 m3/h of seawater, supplied by three *huge* pumps. The discharge line from the pump is 2200mm diameter (about 6,5 ft. for our american friends). So each pump does 33.000 m3/h, or approx 9.500 liters/s (same as these ships are supposed to do).
To bring this enormous amount of water up to a pressure of about 2.5 bar abs., it requires an electromotor of approx 1,6 MW!
On top of that, since we use seawater, we require extensive measures against corrosion and biological fouling, such as applying exotic materials (GRP, stainless steel, titanium), and maintain high flow velocities in the system. You have to keep the flow velocity in the pipes above 2 m/s at least (so: pressure required!), or the pipe will grow full of mussels and other life and clog up.
On top of that you require very expensive self cleaning filters to filter the water. So: more pressure required. Our filters have a pressure drop of at least 200-300 mbar, but are only mesh size 5mm.
If they want to force seawater through VERY FINE mesh in order to atomize it, you’ll require upstream self cleaning filters of at least the same mesh size, in order to protect your “atomizing mesh” from clogging. This extremely fine filtering will cost you even more pressure drop, my guestimate is 1-1,5 bar at least.
So, even if you do *not* need to pump it to 3000 ft, but just atomize it with a mesh screen, this will require a pumping power in the order of what Willis stated, 2-3 bar!
This idea will nehehehever work!
Good luck getting 1,5-2 MW of (pumping-) power from a “green” power generator (windmill, solar panel, etc.) installed on a ship. I say:
hahahahahahahahaha!! Thanks for the laugh though!
Re: Jim Clarke says:
May 12, 2010 at 6:40 am
“The ideas that are getting funded are so stupid that I am sure we could come up with something a little better. Of course, we would have to do it on the condition that our propositions never actually get implemented. Humans can cause changes to the environment unintentionally, but it is when they deliberately try to ‘fix’ the environment that they can really screw things up! (see the history of Yellowstone National Park)”
One of the reasons I’m skeptical is many of the solutions being proposed seem better aimed at transferring wealth than solving any quantifiable problems. If this is the greatest threat to mankind, why are patents and profiteering permitted?
As for proposals being implemented, I think it’s more about ensuring proposals don’t leave the drawing board and money wasted, especially public money until after the numbers have been run. As Willis keeps pointing out, the numbers don’t seem to add up and collectively we can probably crowdsource a more efficient solution. But being engineers, that can’t happen until the requirements have been quantified, otherwise it’s a moveable feast. For traditional consultancies, that’s a great way to bill more.
The proposal seems classic greenwash. Lots of neat and imaginative ideas, no real substance, but as a sales prospectus goes it’s enough to attract money, especially if that’s tax deductable. Because it’s a ‘green’ project, it limits itself and increases costs by relying on ‘green’ tech, like the rotors. If those were practical, I’m sure ship owners would have been using them already given the desire to cut costs.
The problem seems to be the energy required, which the proposed power plants can’t generate. Naval reactors can, but they’d not be ‘green’. They would however provide plenty of energy to test different CCN production and dispersal techniques.
As for Yellowstone, that unfortunatly is a lesson we don’t seem to have learned from given current land use and land management policies in places like Australia, US and UK.
(also curious about this ‘kriegesmarine effect, if that exists, CVBG/CSG might demonstrate it given ship density. Also a flat-top would make a convenient test bed, assuming we could convince the Navy to let us borrow one..)
Photo of the E-Ship 1 mentioned by Anna V in the german wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1
Costeaus’s Turbosail BTW didn’t use the Magnus effect, it’s a different invention though it shares the vertical mast optics.
Personally, i’m interested in Flettner rotors as a means for aviation… it promises to create more lift than a standard aerofoil per area, though it should be very difficult to control.
I love this article. Very nicely done!
Willis Eschenbach :
May 12, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I’m sorry, anna, but they definitely have not run the numbers, they are out by orders of magnitude. You say “do the prototype”. I say “first, show me the numbers, then do the prototype”.
Well, Willis, I think you out on a limb with the way you are looking at this.
1) Flettner rotors work. In the information available, they are supposed to be ten times more efficient than sails in utilizing wind energy. Sails have been used for millenia over the seas and oceans, thus one has an automotive power, I do not care about the joules. They can be robotized. People are being killed with robot drones,so rotors and ships could be equally well programmed and controlled.
2) catamarans work and ballast works. Ship design is not a novel art.
3)The objective of the proposal is not to move cargo, but to move up and down paths that are chosen for wind efficiency and to maximize the seeding effect. The seeding effect works experimentally, when one sees the clouds over the ships routes. I do not think megajoules are being wasted in the exhaust of the ships engines.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimm-08.html
and the effect will be simulated by centrifugal pumps with small energy needs. Instead of exhaust from fuel it will be sea spray.
If you went at the car engine design the way you are going against this idea, you would be concluding it would never work. Controlled explosions in a chamber? Small finicky thingamajigs doing small finicky thngamajigs? Bah Humbug.
Let alone the human body.
It is a very simple idea and can be implemented. The cost of a prototype is not prohibitive.
Will it work? Only a prototype could show whether the seeding would be enough to change the albedo appreciably. Models, robust or not, and back of the envelope calculations are useless.
And as Julian Flood also says, the problem of AGW is political, and this is a cheap face saving idea for politicians to latch onto. You are doing a disservice to the community of thinking people by dismissing/ridiculing this out of hand so lightly.
Is it April the 1st? I don’t know about ‘legalarity’…more like ‘total hilarity’!
“anna v says:
[…]
They can be robotized. People are being killed with robot drones,so rotors and ships could be equally well programmed and controlled.”
This is not a good comparison. You fly drones in suitable conditions and avoid storm fronts. You can’t do this easily with a ship, it’s too slow.
Consider automatic driving: It’s rather easy to do on a sunny day but to become a mainstream technology it would have to work under all weather + road + traffic conditions. We’re not there yet. We might get there in a few years, but at the moment it’s unproven to non-existant technology.
Now, being a developer myself, i’m all for pouring money at some teams to twiddle with such problems but don’t say we can do it now. Maybe in a few years.
Oh, and another word about the “robot drones”: The ones that are used for attacks are remote-controlled. There is some lo-level on-board intelligence but they are constantly controlled by a pilot in the HQ while on the mission.