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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Bills better stick to his WWF-scheme of mosquito bourne fertillity vaccines.
If he manages to sterilize 40% of the african women, he will reduce future agw significantly.
Copenhagen could have starved millions to death also, but it failed:(
http://dieoff.org/page119.htm
…for a living planet!
http://www.wwf.or.th/about_our_earth/teacher_resources/webfieldtrips/population_growth/pop_density/
mad scientists any?
Maybe youve seen “Dominic (Maurice) Green”, the eco-villain in the Bond movie “Quantum of solace”, that is of course “Maurice Strong”.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0056473/
Will Bill Gates be the next Bond villain? Or maybe Holdren, Obamas science tzar?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/21/obamas-science-czar-considered-forced-abortions-sterilization-population-growth/
Reality really is stranger than fiction.
Sure, it’s impractical, unaffordable and impossible …BUT… those are cool looking ships.
AJStrata says:
May 12, 2010 at 6:56 am
Hey, AJ, don’t windmills, too, act as giant bird swatters, with windmill farms killing thousands upon thousands of migrating birds? Some have proposed putting road-kill cafes at the base of windmills to harvest the carnage. Can we expect fishing ships following these cloud ships with their nets, not under the sea, but up in the air? Makes me wonder about the laws of unintended consequences. With Bill Gates, I also think about the Peter Principle.
A fool and his money are soon parted….
I gota say though, looking at them again, the ships are kind of – – sexy. Maybe when it doesn’t work, we could pick one up cheap, replace those – pipes? (& sell them as insulators?) with sails and we could have decent wind powered cruse ship – for WUWT members only, of course.
See this the problem with skeptics website, you are skeptical, don’t you know that this is the age of “yes we can”. So get on board and drop the negativity. You must be one of the people who when the first rockets from NASA failed said ” man will never walk on Mars”. …… well ok . But just look at how far we have come with cold fusion since it was discovered….ok then how about… Oh never mind it won’t work.
I think they ought to be patient another 2 or 3 years and watch how the planet will cool all by itself. Helping it along might make many of us sorry.
I strongly suspect the only real sucking involved here is a (so far successful) attempt to suck millions of dollars from Bill Gates’s wallet. A con man’s best mark is an arrogant dude like Bill who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
Willis:
Obviously these ships will be solar powered, so have no annual fuel costs:
http://www.buffalosolarboats.com/new_e_boats.html
They will be automatic, so no need for “twelve guys to run the ship 24/7” – think of a Roomba on the ocean, GPS guided to a set cloudmaking pattern:
http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?order_num=-1&SKU=14707697
They will use intermittent capacitor-fired mass driver (electromagnetic catapult) seawater launchers, which are highly efficient and electrically powered. The ships structure will be made mainly of recycled 2 liter soda bottles, in China, for a total cost of $3 million each, not $20 million. Expected maintenance free lifetime: 30 years.
With economies of scale, this
idioticinnovative concept can be implemented far cheaper and quicker than you would expect. And by reflecting incoming solar radiation over vast swaths of the tropical oceans just a kilometer from the surface, humans won’t have to launch that 8000 mile by 8000 mile reflective shield to cool the planet – that would have been an eyesore, and some say, an expensive boondoggle.Or we could just take the salt that New York City restaurants will not allow to serve, and throw it in the air.
Oh, it’s viable all right. But as your calculations show, one would have to break the bank in most western countries, redirect all foreign aid into this project, and drive the world into its deepest financial crisis in modern history. The project would take on the scale of a century or so to get into full swing, that is assuming that enough alternate fuels are obtained, as by then there would be insufficient fossil fuels to drive this project plus run the world.
The kicker is that the project would probably begin to have noticable effects just in time to accellerate the pace of the end of the current interglacial and drive the world into its next deep freeze state.
Perhaps Bill Gates could be nominated for a superduper-sized Darwin Award. Come to think of it, this may be good evidence that it’s time our race moved on and left room for someone a bit smarter … or, rather, wiser.
The figure of ten tonnes of spray per second was NOT per vessel but was the estimate for total spray from a fleet of 300 ships and, depending assumptions for initial nuclei concentration and drop half life, we think would be enough reverse the cumulative warming since pre-industrial times. Vessel displacement is 300 tonnes and plant rating about 150 kW all of which would come from the wind. This gives a rough cost estimate of $2 to $3 million each. Plankton have to be filtered from the water and will be returned to the sea. More detail from
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Phil.Trans.%20Seagoing%20hardware.pdf
Not just plankton would get sucked up by this; what would happen to fish swimming near the surface? I imagine they’d be pulversized. Enjoyed this example of climate looniness – we need a good laugh.
hey.. you guys don’t see the value of it… they tackle multiple problems at the same time: at least cooling by introducing more clouds and sea level rising. And this for a mere 9 bn with a govmnt and non-profit NGA over-running the budget 300%.
it sounds like a plan to me. being sarcastic of course.
Man, money is so easy! Damn my scruples!!
Well, if I could control the climate, I would also warm it up by 5 degrees Celsius or so, and reduce the clouds.
And like others, I have been disappointed by Bill Gates’ attitude to the AGW – because I am a big Bill Gates fan.
On the other hand, this stuff is not that bad. If I had dozens of billions of dollars, I would also play with similar stuff. Whatever signs are, playing with the weather is clearly a fashionable goal for ambitious and rich players. And i do think that it makes sense to attack this problem via the influence on the cloud cover: I wanted to approach the problem in the same way. 😉
So Bill Gates, I am not gonna criticize you here. Willis’ practical comments are surely useful – but I guess that with one amount of money or another, all of them can be resolved.
Yes. When the Sears Tower was built, they grappled with extreme water pressures to supply sinks and toilets on the top floors. One way would be to mount an oil well pump up at 3,000 feet and lift water. This problem is at the 5th grade level. If the nozzles were at 3,000 feet, the boat would blow over in the slightest breeze unless they had a 1,000 foot deep keel or stabilizing pontoons 800 feet appart.
Anything is possible with “models” or a good photo shop software.
When I was young, a Me TOO boat builder invited a newspaper out and some friends with cameras to see a new sailboat launch. It was under 20′ length overall. When dropped in the water, it turtled. That means the center of gravity was above the waterline and the boat was top heavy. It turned upside down without help.
Anthony:
I thought you were interested in honest science. If you, and the rest of the folks weighing in on this idea, want to do your homework, you might begin with this paper and peruse the citations in it. The concept is valid, cost-effective and sensible as an insurance policy should we ever need it.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/4/4/045112/fulltext
Geoengineering by cloud seeding: influence on sea ice and climate system
Philip J Rasch1, John Latham2,3 and Chih-Chieh (Jack) Chen2
1 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 902 Battelle Boulevard, PO Box 999, MSIN K9-34, Richland, WA 99352, USA
2 National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80303, USA
3 SEAES, University of Manchester, PO Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, UK
Received 10 August 2009
Accepted 20 November 2009
Published 18 December 2009
Abstract. General circulation model computations using a fully coupled ocean–atmosphere model indicate that increasing cloud reflectivity by seeding maritime boundary layer clouds with particles made from seawater may compensate for some of the effects on climate of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The chosen seeding strategy (one of many possible scenarios) can restore global averages of temperature, precipitation and sea ice to present day values, but not simultaneously. The response varies nonlinearly with the extent of seeding, and geoengineering generates local changes to important climatic features. The global tradeoffs of restoring ice cover, and cooling the planet, must be assessed alongside the local changes to climate features.
Stephen Salter says:
May 12, 2010 at 8:04 am
“The figure of ten tonnes of spray per second was NOT per vessel but was the estimate for total spray from a fleet of 300 ships and, depending assumptions for initial nuclei concentration and drop half life, we think would be enough reverse the cumulative warming since pre-industrial times. ”
Oh, please don’t make me laugh. 10 cubic metres of water per second are going to cool the whole earth significantly. That’s equivalent to the rate of precipitation over the acreage of a small farm when it’s raining. Give us a break.
The people problem here is you put emotional people onto technical problems. Hoping and anxious behavior will not get the water pumped. For every wild idea from an eco weenie, there come up obvious eco weenie problems.
I do not see people on this board favor dirty air , water or harm to wild life.
The vacum pumps will draw in and kill the tiny fishies. Who wants to kill the fishies? That is why they shut down irrigation pumps in California because of the little fishies being killed by the pumps. Now the same pumps for this wild notion will also kill little fishies. Sea kittens.
With negative pressures that draw 10,000 tonnes persecond, it will pull the whiskers off a catfish from 1 kilometer away from the boat water intakes.
Oh come on now….they’re going to power it with Unicorns and Rainbows. Then it’ll all be fine….
Shame!
It is entirely unfair to subject the ideas of “Liberals” to logical and rigorous analysis. Such schemes are not ever intended to actually do anything effective, are they?
I have a better idea. Don’t steal it, my patent is pending.
First, build a fleet of aircraft that fly at high altitude. Use jet propulsion. These will create high streaks of water vapor, some of which will block incoming sunlight. Sometimes these “vapor trails” will even cause clouds to form around them, but that’s okay, the main goal is to block some incoming sunlight.
We’d need thousands of these things, just basically flying willy nilly all over the planet. So in order to make them dual purpose we could fit them with seats and allow people to use them for transportation. They could fly regularly scheduled routes.
Now, since Bill Gates lives just a stone’s throw away from a little startup company called “Boeing”, he could discuss directly with them the best way to get this giant fleet of sunlight blocking aircraft into the skies.
Again, don’t steal this idea, it’s mine, I’m the only one who ever thought about it. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
“”” 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. “””
So quick now; here’s the third grade science question. for $1500.
Assuming just gravity (no air resistance drag); calculate the required launch velocity to fire a water particle to a height of 3000 feet.
And for $2000, the 4th grade science question, is; assuming the machine is operating properly at the ten ton per second rate, calculate the downward force on the ship, and estimate how fast it will sink deep enough to shut off the contraption.
How about a demo right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge; sink that sucker right in the middle of the shipping channel.
Henry chance says: …and they are electrically powered..(It rains after not before lightnings).