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 …
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Such ambition! Man believes himself master of the planet.
Once the climate is fully under control, maybe we should turn our minds to controlling the sun. Pesky thing is due to turn into a red giant. Solutions on a postcard please.
Apparently those at Silver Lining are either very smart or very dumb. My bet is on very smart, they got their grant and will produce nothing. Nice work when you can get it.
Not to split hairs here but it would take considerably more than 3 bar pressure to pump water 3000 feet into the air. Probably more like 300 bar.
Cloud machines? Surely they’re not Ceres.
Sure Gates is smart. He knows a money-making scheme when he sees one.
Rocky Road and others already talked about the salt problems, but my other question is wouldn’t these low-lying clouds be the wrong type of clouds? I thought that higher clouds did a better job of reflecting than low clouds. Please enlighten–thanks.
For 40 billion $ they could build a ~15 000MW solar PV plant…
Alan the Brit says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:10 am
They must be barking mad – it’ll never fly!
(…)
Now, where is there a volcano I can play games with?
————
Reply: Got one just 80 miles north of me–Yellowstone! When I was a grad student at the U of U, professors there had just finished up a study of the heat gradient under Yellowstone Lake using borehole data. It was calculated that if somehow the lake level dropped just 4 feet instantly, the whole thing would go up like a pressure cooker with the top popped off.
So, I propose if they REALLY want to cool the planet, they’ll induce Yellowstone. Use nukes if you want; at that point it becomes immaterial. Hey, it won’t matter that the earth will be plunged into 2 or 3 years of no summer (hence elimination of much of the CO2-spewing population due to starvation), at least we’ll get this BOILING EARTH PHENOMENA under control! And it would be a lot cheaper than continuously pumping a gazillion gallons of seawater into the atmosphere. (Just think of the tickets you could sell to spectators to watch the Yellowstone show, although finding a safe site might be difficult!)
My vocabulary can’t begin to denigrate these “AGW geoengineers”, but suffice it to say the same unprintable description applicable to our politicians also applies to them.
3800 square miles, Willis, not 380.
[snip… 5 sentences of snark deleted. ~dbs, mod.]
Willis,
Your 3 bar pressure on the discharge side of the pump will only get the water 30 metres up in the air. They are talking about 3000 feet (900 metres). This would require 90 bar pressure. That is one serious pump…
40 comments, and nobody used it yet. Here goes.
“Great, now he wants to BSOD the whole planet”
Jon says:
“Not good for surface sealife … airborne plankton?”
Not a problem. Gate’s will fund a project to genetically engineer flying whales.
Talk about geoengineering..
A Google search on “stephen schneider”, autocomplete line 3 and 4:
stephen schneider global warming
stephen schneider global cooling
What a guy!
Gawd, you would think it would be easy to block out the sun. They did it in the Matrix. But then again they all had to live 4km underground where it was warm.
Willis, you didn’t really do your homework on this one. The Lantham approach has been examined in rather a lot of detail. If you’d like to see the discussions on this, go to the geoengineering google group and take a look at the discussions there. They’ve run quite of bit of modeling on what is needed and what it will do. At present, they would target the arctic (they think it is melting). They have already tested the elements of the ship design and it is not as expensive as a naval ship by any means, and is a “drone” ship operated by a land-based operator.
The proponents believe it ought be tested, including field tests, because it has the smallest potential adverse effects of the various geoengineering techniques under serious consideration.
In general, the geoengineering community believes these kinds of techniques, at least three of which appear to be cost-effective, feasible and effective, would only be developed as an insurance policy should temperatures actually rise. Because the cost of cooling the planet (should it actually heat up) would be so much less by using geoengineering than by carbon reduction, it provides a means to transition out of carbon over a period of many decades at a cost that is not unreasonable and is one to ten thousand times less expensive than carbon reduction.
The problem is that those droplets are not ionized as water droplets in clouds. For a more crazy idea:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/31252283/Electric-Tree
December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk, NC
Today, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio made the first, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. Wilbur and Orville Wright, bicycle makers, mechanics and tinkerers combined wood, fabric and a gasoline engine of their own design to make a device they are calling an airplane.
Within the next hundred years, it is envisioned that fleets of giant airplanes made of exotic materials and powered by oil burning turbines will economically carry millions of people on trips from city to city and across the oceans at speeds greater than 500 miles per hour.
There will be an additional charge for checked baggage.
I think this must be run through IPCC’s climate models first…. heck, for all you know, the temperature could go up!
Wasnt the roof of that Wood-guy’s greenhouse-experiment made of Salt-chloride or something? (You remember, that experiment that debunks the AGW theory….)
hehe
stevengoddard says: LOL!…just imagine, if run on Windows Vista it would DUPLICATE the vessel and it couldn´t be deleted the vessel´s copy…
It would also UPDATE every morning just when the crew was preparing to sow new clouds
It would also need a ROBUST antivirus to prevent sudden sinking…etc.
In the end they should have to launch Vessel Version Windows 7.
Thinking it well they better buy an Apple vessel.
Note from Bill to Willis
“Detail! Details! Details!
Don’t bother me with details Willis!
Just send the 30 second grab out. That’s all the unwashed masses understand”
Doesn’t salt, when carried high into the atmosphere, form ozone destroying chemicals?
You guys have all missed the real point – this is not about reducing CO2, it is a conspiracy designed to increase biodiversity. Spraying trillions of living plankton and fish larvae into the air for years on end is bound to result in the evolution of plankton that live in clouds and fish that can truly fly! Imagine that, green clouds and schools of fish swooping and diving around our yards. And all that airborne plankton would suck up LOTS of CO2. Of course, we would then be living at the bottom of the atmospheric “ocean” and would have to deal with the rain of dead plankton that would probably kill off many of the surface plants.
I live in the tropics where we have lots of clouds and I say, GO FOR IT!!
David Schnare,
The only ‘geo-engineering’ technique with real potential is to fertilize the oceans.
And then when it fails, you have at least improved fishery production.
I would not trust the ‘geo-engineering’ community to make a lego castle at this point.
[snip… 5 sentences of snark deleted. ~dbs, mod.]
Five sentences of snark in response to a post filled with snark… Willis is tougher than that, mod
The clouds that will be sent up will be in the shape of letters: sky writing!
They’ll sell advertising to offset costs. Imagine the ads that will float across the skies of the world.
First ad: “BP – For A Greener Tomorrow”
;o)
Commenters are saying that the ships will use solar or wind power. 5,500 kilowatts to do the pumping, so the ships have to find a place outside the doldrums where the wind is blowing faster than the ocean current, then shut off the engines and drift as long as possible. The best place to mount a 6MW wind turbine would be on the stern, so drag would tend to keep the adrift ship pointing into the wind, but then your turbine is on the leeward side of the tall water pipes. And if you’re using a 6MW turbine, you can only pump at full speed when the turbine encounters conditions when it can run at full power. Good luck with that. I wonder how many wind turbines one can fit on a ship.