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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Even More Bad Numbers
My thanks to Ian H. who provided some actual numbers for the actual Flettner ship. He is correct that the equivalent area of the rotors is larger than the cross section, so my numbers of rotors were too large. However, that doesn’t come anywhere near rescuing the proposal.
From that article, they say they sailed:
“… 6200 miles across the Atlantic, using only 12 tons of fuel oil, as compared with 45 tons for a motor ship of the same size without rotors …”
It’s a bit sketchy, since we don’t have actual numbers from the actual ship with no rotors to compare with. However, it appears that they saved some 33 tons (US) of fuel oil during the trip.
Now, 33 tons (US) of fuel oil contains about 350,000 kWh of energy. However, a ship is not very efficient. The shaft efficiency in those days was about 30%, meaning that 30% of the energy in the fuel went to turning the shaft. And the propellor efficiency is about 50%, so the overall efficiency is about 15%. This means that the Flettner rotors provided about 52,500 kWh of actual propulsive energy during the trip.
According to the article, the trip averaged 5.2 knots, so it took 1192 hours. This means that on average the rotors put out 52,500 kW-hours / 1192 hours = 44 kW instantaneous. This is the net figure of energy saved, so it is the energy in addition to the energy for the two motors that spun the rotors.
The ship design shown in the Salter paper has three rotors, not two, and they are about the same size as the ones used in the original Flettner ship. This means that they might get maybe 75 kW out of them … but by their own figures, they need to get 150kW out of them, plus drive the ship …
Now, to get 150kW of electrical energy out of a turbine, you need to put in more than that. Their paper, curiously, does not contain the word “efficiency”, but for low-head axial-flow turbines it runs on the order of 75% or so if the speed is varying (peak efficiency at just the right speed is higher). That means that they will need to use about 200 kW of wind power to get 150 kW from the turbines … plus the energy needed to move the ship itself.
Now, underwater turbines are not new. In the East River off of New York, the current runs at up to four knots, so we’re in the right range. They are now testing six 35 kW underwater turbines there. How big are they? Well … 4.9 metres diameter, with a cross sectional area of 18.7 square metres. The size of the turbines in the Salter paper? The two turbines combined have an area of 9.8 square metres … so I don’t think they’ll get 150 kW out of them. There’s another 35 kW unit going into the Mississippi, with a picture here.
Now look, folks, if it takes a turbine that size to produce 35 kW, and you need 150 kW, you need four of those plus a bit … me, I don’t think three Flettner rotors will come anywhere near providing enough power to drag that assemblage through the water at four miles per hour.
Again, if Professor Salter has the numbers to contradict this, he should bring them up now. He has had one project scuttled by false numbers in the past, so if these numbers are incorrect, this is the time for him to give us the correct numbers. I admit when I am wrong, I’ve been wrong before. So let’s see the numbers.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 16, 2010 at 1:23 pm
This is true but misleading. Clouds currently reflect about 79 W/m2. So rather than a 1.1% increase in global albedo being required, global cloud albedo will need to increase by 4.7%.
They are taking this into account.
calculate an albedo of A(Z, L, n)=0.495.
to the new concentration of cloud drops will be 191 cm−3. This will make the new value of A(Z, L, n)=0.584.
That is close to 10%
When I read it, I had the aha thought, that the tropical albedo is not the world albedo.
That sounds like a lot … but it is only 0.4% of the earth’s surface. Now remember that we need to increase the global cloud albedo by 4.7%. So how much do we need to increase the albedo of 4% of the earth’s surface to give us a global increase of 4.7%?
The intelligent cruising means going where the clouds are, so the actual question is:
How much of the world cloud albedo is within their intelligent cruising grid. Proposed in fig4.
If it is 50% and that would bring the change induced within your 4.7%.
BTW do you have a link for the 79watts/m^2 albedo from clouds?
For some reason, you are not being objective about this proposal.
Continuing on albedo,
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/571_Cloud_Feedback_Notes.pdf
Estimates from ERBE (Ramanathan, et al. 1989, Harrison, et al. 1990)
showed that clouds approximately double the albedo of Earth from an estimated clear-sky value of 0.15, to its average value with clouds of 0.3.
So it does seem that clouds add 0.15 to the average albedo, and the real values can go from very low, for low optical thickness, to 60%
http://www.brockmann-consult.de/mapp/ATBD_Pdf/07_MAPP-ATBD-CACOT.pdf
An additional reason for the grid being over the ocean is that snowed up land and ice have high albedos, which will be masked when clouds are there, whereas the ocean has low albedo, from 1 to 10%.
http://www.climatedata.info/Forcing/Forcing/albedo.html
anna v, thank you for persevering with your honest questioning.
May 16, 2010 at 9:57 pm (Edit)
I said that it was true but misleading.
Not true. They are only able to cover a very small percentage of the planet, whether they cruise intelligently or not. That is the problem.
It is from Trenberth et al., Earth’s Global Energy Budget.
Dear anna, it is true that I don’t have a lot of patience with landlubbers pretending to know something about sailing, mea culpa. However, I am trying to be as objective as possible. They say that they can increase the albedo by 30 W/m2. I did the math above, it is very simple. The math shows that they need to alter the albedo of a minimum of 12% of the earth’s surface to get a 3.7 w/m2 increase in reflected sunlight. Even with intelligent cruising, that is obviously the theoretical minimum. Having done thousands and thousands of miles of sailboat cruising myself, I can assure you that many times the boats (for a host of reasons, due to both weather and cruising speed) will not be in a favorable area for cloud modification.
This means that they will need to cover something more like 20% of the global surface or so … which at 380 square miles per cloudship means 100,000 ships … and using their figure of two million dollars per ship, that’s about $200 billion for ships alone. Objective enough for you?
You keep saying I’m not being objective … please run the numbers yourself. I have shown that:
1. They need to cover 20% of the globe with cloudships.
2. Their Flettner rotor calculations are extremely optimistic. Remember that they need to move the ships as well as generate power. This will require on the order of 250 kW (200 kW to generate 150 kW of electricity, say 50 kW to move the ships). The rotors on the original Flettner ship, of nearly the same size, put out about 22 kW, so you’d need ten or so per ship, not three.
3. Their underwater turbines are way undersized. They figure a cross sectional area of 9.8 metres will generate 150 kW. Real world actual underwater turbines to generate that amount have a cross sectional area of 75 square metres … you will need some real power to push that around the ocean. And since you can’t remove the turbines from the water, parasitic drag will be huge. As a result, the cloudships will take a long, long bout of cruising to get the the next location, no matter how intelligently planned.
Now, I’ve given you the best numbers I can come up with. They are estimates, not exact figures, but are likely quite close to reality. That’s what I call being “objective”, facing the numbers squarely. If you or Professor Salter have better numbers, please bring them up. I calculate they need to increase the albedo, under theoretically perfect conditions (ships always in the right place, clouds always achieving a 30 w/m2 albedo increase), of 12% of the planet to achieve their objective. That means in the real world at least 20% of the planet will have to be covered, and very possibly more.
If you find fault with my calculations, then I invite you to give me an objective calculation that shows something different. Until then, I’ll stick to my figures.
It seems in their paper that they concentrate on the map “cells” which have an area of 7720km^2, about 20 times your estimated coverage area. Nevertheless they say”
These crude engineering lumped calculations should be performed with the actual values at a representative sample of times for every cell that has not been excluded on grounds of being downwind of land with dirty air, upwind of drought-stricken regions or too close to busy shipping routes. The wind speed data for each cell should be checked to ensure that there is enough input power for, as will be developed shortly, wind energy provides the principal source for driving the vessels and creating the spray. With an efficient generator, the 30 kg s−1 flow rate will be reached at 8 m s−1 wind speed. If the nucleus lifetime was the longest estimate of 5 days (Houghton 2004), this would bring the concentration up to levels found over land and lead to much reduced effectiveness. Cells will be placed in rank order to see how many are needed to achieve any target cooling and either how many vessels should be put in each cell or how many cells should be treated by one vessel. Vessel movements can be planned by looking at the best-cell list for the next month.
Bold mine. So, if it is possible for one vessel to treat many cells, the estimate of 380km^2 from the news releases is too low. You take a two mile width. But the vessel is moving perpendicular to the prevailing wind so in effect the width should be much larger , since the wind will be sweeping the swath released. Can that be the difference?
You are right that they are not providing clear numbers for this.
I found this for smoke dispersion :
http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/fire99/PDF/f99159.pdf
A calculation from static conditions.
The swath in length is kilometers, and for the moving vessel in discussion, this would be continuous swaths released perpendicular to the wind.
anna v says:
May 17, 2010 at 9:41 pm (Edit)
Anna, many thanks for the numbers. But you are missing the elephant in the room. To do the brightening they propose, regardless of cell size, they will need to brighten about 20% of the world’s surface. Call me crazy, but I just don’t see covering that area, no matter what cell size they use.
w.
PS – the paper says:
By my calculation, that’s 77,200 square km. per cell, not 7,720 per your figures. Perhaps a single ship can double the cloud brightness of 30,000 square miles (77k sq km) or even more of clouds, as they speculate … but I kinda doubt it …
Here are some world cloud amounts from
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2006_EOS.pdf
Lets take from this that 50% of the earth is covered in clouds on average
If we can go where the clouds are, that makes your 20% into 10% of the globes area.
If we can change 10% of cloud cover albedo, that would go to world albedo 1.5 percent since clouds contribute 15% of the 30% albedo of the earth. They aim at a change of 1% to overcome the the CO2 supposed effect, so considering that ocean is 70% and most clouds are over the ocean and that the ships will move in the tropics where heat input is larger, the numbers in watts may well be working out.
So the question for me is if a ship can really cover with spray output one of their cells of 7700km^2.
If it can then 1900 ships will do, since there are 6000 something cells over the ocean.
In any case, I do not think there is a CO2 problem, but the ship is an intriguing proposal and one prototype should be built and tested. It will be like a fire extinguisher, there if necessary. An innocuous precautionary principle.
By the time this is done maybe we will be looking at geo engineering for heating the earth 🙂 in case of the ice age coming. Like mirrors in space to increase sunshine.
you are correct, about the 77.000 per cell.
Anna v. — your favorite, adding to Planes’ exhaust — is an old Lovelock favorite. Yes, Mr. Green Himself. For a Decade he has wanted SOMETHING built, & kept in Reserve, so if things started Changing, we had an alternative to:
Everybody dieing.
… I guess People are part of Gaia, too.
PS: It’s easy to REVERSE Cooling: — lots of SOOT will warm the Arctic. Just turn off the Coal Plant Scrubbers.
Example: The high Soot years in Greenland Ice were 1900-1920, explaining the Low Ice of 1922. Soot is figure 3’s “BC” (Black Carbon)
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12140.figures-only
Charles Wilson says:
May 19, 2010 at 6:26 pm
In case of “the ice age cometh”, soot would work if there is sun to shine on the snow.
If there is extensive cloud cover around the poles and lower, where the snow is, this will not make a difference.
Another version of “it is the clouds, ….” .
It needs a lot of study to know what to do against the sure prophecy of an ice age, but people are running like Chicken Little to stop a small increase in temperature they should be grateful for.
Fermilab posted the video for the colloquia presentation “Cloud feedbacks on climate: a challenging scientific problem” by Dr. Joel Norris, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
It was quite fascinating, he goes into great detail about the issues we’ve been discussing. The IPCC models pretty much collapsed regarding the effects of clouds, according to Joel.
http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100512Norris/index.htm#
I haven’t read all the responses but I am inclined to think that a high-tech solution is not the right answer. So what is? Well, I suggest planting billions of trees on a worldwide scale, in all countries. Trees transpire, which involves taking up water thru their root system and literally pumping it out into the air to stay cool. This adds moisture to the atmosphere. Furthermore, trees can create a microclimate, where crops can be planted under their canopy. Their roots bind the earth together, preventing the formation of dust bowls and deserts. And they give fruit, nuts, timber and other valuable products. What a gift of God! I have planted approx. 900 trees in my life, even though I have no land of my own, and I’m not in the business. If we are serious about cooling the planet, let’s get planting! Throwing multiple billions at a high-tech solution is a white elephant.
2 things, firstly the ships would be wind powered, so no fuel costs…
secondly, they would be unmanned, so no crew requirement…
(Salter et al. 2008)
Take a read of this paper:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3989.full
To have been published in a peer reviewed journal suggests reasonably strong support to their conclusions regarding the projects feasability…
James Rayner says:
May 22, 2010 at 1:28 pm
I have discussed both of these specious claims above at length. Repeating the claim makes it no stronger. Provide numbers if you don’t believe mine.
That’s the paper we have been discussing since the start.
You have a vastly overinflated idea of the thoroughness and meaning of peer review. For example, Richard Horton, the editor of the prestigious and peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, said:
In other words, the fact that the paper passed peer review means nothing about whether it is a practical, feasible program.
anna v says:
May 18, 2010 at 11:01 pm (Edit)
If clouds constantly covered half the planet and never moved from there, your point would be correct. Then we could just go where the clouds are.
But clouds don’t do that, they appear and disappear. So we can’t just concentrate on some mythical area which is always covered by clouds. We have to cover 20% of the planet’s surface if we want to affect 20% of the planet’s clouds.
Once again, the numbers are worse than that. Their 6,000 cells cover the entire ocean. But their numbers giving a 30 W/m increase are based on tropical insolation, which is higher than the global average. So if you are talking about the globe, we’d need more than 20% coverage.
There’s another problem that I hadn’t considered. It turns out that most of the CCNs over the ocean are not sea salt as I had assumed. From Nature Magazine:
This raises three new problems. The first is that phytoplankton produce these CCNs in response to temperature and sunlight. If you cut down the temperature and sunlight, you’ll reduce the number of natural CCNs, which will warm the earth … like the old saw goes, “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw”.
The second problem is that the ocean naturally produces about 1000 sea salt particles per square cm. per second. Over the area of a gridcell, this is about 7.7E17 particles per second.
The Salter plan is for each ship to insert 30 kg of water per second in the form of 0.8 micron drops into the atmosphere. This is about 4.5E16 drops, leading to the formation of the same number of salt particles.
Note that with one ship per gridcell, this is on the same order as the natural production of sea salt particles. Yet that number of natural particles only supplies a small percentage of the cloud nuclei … so doubling that number of particles cannot do more than double a small percentage of the cloud nuclei. The same natural phenomena that make it so that most of the sea salt crystals don’t make it up to the 3,000 foot level to form clouds, whatever those natural phenomena may be, will affect the injected salt particles as well. This means that the change in albedo will perforce be much smaller than the Salter calculations indicate.
The third problem is that they say “To counteract the warming due to doubling of atmospheric CO2, an approximate doubling of CCN would be needed.” This agrees with the Salter calculation regarding the 30 kg/sec from the ships, which approximately equals the natural production of sea salt crystals. They think that would double the number of CCNs.
But this means we’d need a doubling of CCN over the entire ocean surface, not just 10% or 20% of the oceans, but the entire surface. And remember that sea salt crystals are only a small part of the CCNs, so we can’t just use 30 kg/sec. We’d need to use much more water, and over the entire ocean surface …
So for all of these reasons, I hold that this proposal is eminently impractical, and that the numbers are out by orders of magnitude.
FURTHER PROBLEMS
Well, there’s more troubles for the proposal. Salter et al. identify a variety of areas where they think that the scheme might work. These are mainly in the tropics, and so they propose putting their ships in the tropics.
I found a very interesting study entitled Automatic detection of ship tracks in ATSR-2 satellite imagery. It uses computer detection of ship tracks to see where the phenomenon is actually occurring. Here are the results:
As you can see, the phenomena is very limited spatially. You would think that this is because the most ships are in those areas, but the paper shows that this is not the case. That’s just where the conditions are right for the phenomenon. The total area where the tracks are occurring is about 10% of the earth’s surface … which means that it will take a very large change there to make a difference to the world.
But wait, there’s more. In addition to being limited spatially, the effect is also severely limited by season. Seven months out of the year there are almost no ships tracks. Eighty percent of the tracks occur during the period between April and August. This means that for more than half the year there is little point in doing the cloud seeding.
The combination of spatial and temporal restrictions reduces the effective area where the effect may work to only about 5% of the planetary surface. To change the global albedo by 3.7 W/m2, we’d have to change the albedo of that area by 75 W/m2 … and that seems beyond belief. That’s a huge change in albedo, even Salter’s very optimistic figures show a change in albedo of 30 W/m2, less than half of that. Not going to happen, in my opinion.
Well, Willis,
You are determined to see the glass 9/10ths empty, whereas I am determined to see it 2/10ths full :).
The map is interesting, but for sure there would be similar regions in the southern hemisphere, and there there are no ship lanes. I do not buy the “they say it is not so”. Certainly I would need a map of the tracks of the planned routes of ships and the frequency and size etc to be convinced, not by a simple handwave, that what is being displayed is what happens where there are enough ships to leave tracks.
Lets leave it at this. In any case my defense has to do with using this solution tactically until nature takes over and makes null and void any worry about AGW.
Kelly Wanser has a history of making bold statements on behalf of other people, most recently as CEO of ColdSpark, where she frequently put completely fabricated customer quotes on public facing materials. This sounds exactly like what she’s done here.
I cannot believe this is a serious scientific endeavor! In the natural world when our sun heats up the earth and the oceans the naturally cleanse the saline water to fresh water into clouds! Now they, are proposing to pump SALT water into the atmosphere? Never in the history of our earth has this happened!!!! What would be the outcome? Just imagine a saline cloud dumping salt water over the Amazon jungle!! Or the Congo! Or your back yard! We would in a sense be killing off all green plants on this EARTH. Are they insane? Has anyone thought of what would happen if this was to become a reality?