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 …
It’s raining poor little fish !!! And look over there, there goes a dolphin !!!
A disappointing post with many disappointing comments. I am not an engineer, but the egregious misinterpretations of the paper indicate that I’m not alone.
First, the clouds: how does a blanket of clouds form over 30% of the world ocean at heights around zero to three thousand feet? This zone is known as the boundary layer and within it turbulence takes dimethyl sulphide particles from plankton and diatoms, salt particles from breaking waves and biological particles from dead bacteria, plankton etc. The particles reach a cooler area where the water vapour is at the right temperature to condense on them and form reflective droplets. If there are lots of particles there will be lots of droplets, high albedo and lots of incoming radiation from the sun will be bounced back into space.
Nature does not need huge pressures to boost those particles to 3000 ft, it happens naturally. The same would happen with Salter’s cloud ships. Did anyone look at the cloud trails from ships sailing through areas deficient in CCNs, cloud condensing nuclei? That’s the effect these cloud ships are designed to produce, not huge rain clouds (which would waste good reflecting droplets), not tonnes of salt dropping on parched farmland (which would waste good CCNs), just lots and lots of tiny reflective droplets which stay airborne as long as possible in that turbulent zone.
What if it causes problems? You switch it off. Bang, just like that, the droplets disperse over a few hours, the reflectivity of the boundary layer clouds returns to normal and you are back to the status quo ante. Other methods, sulphur or silver nitrate, cannot be controlled with anything like the same accuracy. As for shoving the sulphur out of planes… high clouds warm, low clouds cool, that’s the general rule. And, please, sodium chloride is not chlorine….
I have another reason to approve of these ships; eventually someone is going to wonder about the ‘normal’ production of CCNs from the ocean surface. From there it’s only a step to wondering what happens if you pour 700 million gallons of oil onto the ocean together with a like quantity of surfactants. That’s enough oil to coat the surface with a sheen of oil every two weeks, all of it, all the oceans. I’d bet a pint that we are changing the albedo of the strato-cumulus layer and, unlike Professor Salter’s ships, it’s an uncontrolled experiment in the wrong direction.
Barbara Nozière of Stockholm University, Sweden, and colleagues suggest that surfactants secreted by many species of bacteria could also influence the weather. While these are normally used to transport nutrients through membranes, the team have shown that they also break down the surface tension of water better than any other substance in nature. This led them to suspect that if the detergent was found in clouds it would stimulate the formation of water droplets. I’ve read, but cannot find, a paper which found the same thing but using light oil — droplets coalesce more readily and fall out, reducing albedo. Lower albedo, less sunlight reflected, more warming.
Tom Wigley, in the UEA emails, complains about the unexplained blip during WWII: you can find the non-bucket-corrected graph at Climate Audit. The graph had to be corrected in typical climate science fashion because the models could not reproduce the data from 1939 to about 1950 — obviously it was the data at fault because the models were, and are, infallible.*
Well, Professor Wigley, here’s a better way than just changing the data — do some experiments with oil spills and find out if there was something going on from 1940 to 1945 which might have spilt a bit of oil. I’m sure you’ll think of something. Have a look at the Gulf spill and see the oil sheen, see the downwind low level clouds being eaten away by the pollution. Then get someone to work out the result for the entire Earth.
Mr Gates, if you want to use a bit of seed money with potentially huge returns, might I suggest that you fund some fundamental science such as that carried out by the VOCALS team — if we are interrupting the production of CCNs then all the CO2 calculations will have to be done again. Flights around spills and over the cleanest water possible should be carried out urgently, before we commit ourselves to huge expenditure for nothing.
Professor Salter, thank you for taking the time to explain the misinterpretations made here — we’re a nice bunch really but a bit volatile after years of snake oil salesmen. When a real doctor comes along we tend to be a bit wary. And thanks for the Black Knight, when I see the one in the Science Museum it makes me want to weep for the wasted opportunities.
Julian Flood
*In case it is not obvious, I am being sarcastic.
Bill Gates is heavily into carbon trading schemes, and likely a supporter of international efforts to suck money from “rich” nations to support, among other things, dubious non-commercial schemes such as this. Could it possibly be that he would stand to profit from “supporting” such enterprises?
How will they be powered – diesel?
What if the increased cloud cover actually increases the temperature?
As an interim measure, before the first ships are ready, I suggest mounting the spray thingies on bridges. It so happens I own a really nice one in San Francisco that’s for sale…cheap.
“Nature does not need huge pressures to boost those particles to 3000 ft”
I would refer you to Newton and Bernoulli – but what would be the point?
Thanks for this Willis…
So the saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted…
But Bill is no fool, and he is funding many such “studies”, some of which, like this one, will never see the light of day in reality. Your “back of the napkin” figuring is the best kind of figuring and is certainly the most effective. Heck, Bill Gates ought to just fund you with a supply of napkins and pens, and let you have the first shot at the feasibility of some of these outrageous proposals.
As a person who is currently only about 75% convinced that AGW is happening, and then fairly neutral on whether or not it will be a problem anyway, I grow very uneasy at all of these geoengineering proposals. First of all, they might be a huge waste of time and resources, but second of all, what gives any company or government the right to tinker with something that can affect the entire planet? I don’t actually think anyone has that right, and if I was going to get “up in arms” about something, it would probably be those who would assume the right to even attempt to tinker with the planet. I oppose such efforts on many ground, legal and ethical, and go back to the old saying, “sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.” Such may very well be the case for geoengineering…
IF they get these things to work, would they affect ocean currents?
Putting a big sun screen in orbit around the planet sounds far more practical than this idea.
I do recall a plan to put big mirrors into space to reflect more light into Leningrad during the winters.
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Gail Combs says:
May 12, 2010 at 6:47 am
Curiousgeorge says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:50 am
“… If it were me, I’d skip the sails and go straight for oars and drummers. It’s a proven green propulsive technology and would provide gainful employment and much needed exercise for progressive pencil necks.”
___________________________________________________________________________
George, you forgot a few very essential parts, the leg shackles, whips and the big enforcers who bring the geeks on board one at a time.
Well, we might need a few sharp HR/Marketing people, but I suspect we’d get a lot of volunteers initially if it were properly marketed: “International Green Rowing Teams Needed to save the planet. Free room and board, and your name on an oar! Career path to management”. 😀
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
win or lose, but still somehow
its life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds, at all….” Joni Mitchell
They try to cloud the issue but fortunately a ray of light strikes through, illuminating the darkness and banishing the shadows from our minds.
I am surporised that they didn’t justify this with a mathematical model result as proof of effect……or maybe they did……
“A true climate model should be able to replicate and make all kinds of climatic predictions beyond temperature. Such as: humidities, pressures, precipitation patterns, wind patterns, diurnal patterns, seasonal patterns, cloudiness, additionally it should not only replicate averages but it should be able to predict distribution and extremes around the the averages. If the models don’t replicate such things ….. it’s a travesty that they don’t.”
HankHenry for the win!
Has anyone calculated what the saving to humanity would be if Microsoft increased the quality of their software?
Let’s see….Windows/Word/ etc. cost 1 billion ‘users’ (=sufferers) 10 minutes per day in irritating crashes, file corruption, and the like. That is 10 billion minutes of wasted time or many, many thousands of wasted work years. (I won’t even mention the fiasco of the ‘ribbon menus’).
Physician heal thyself – you do-gooder busybody!
To be fair though – various pharmaceutical projects Gates gets involved in make more sense and serve to correct (at least partially) the unfair research strategies employed by ‘big pharma’.
Great post. And well done following the trail to get some facts. But who cares about the awkward details, the artistic impression of the ships involved looks suitably Jetsonish.
Actually – I know just the person to choose to build the new water sucking boats. He’s a South African here -http://wp.me/pDjed-l9 – he’s already designed a zero-emission aeroplane.
Meanwhile, scientists claim farming in the North-American Midwest has caused late-summer days to be cooler:
[ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/ct-met-weather-crops-20100511,0,1217706.story ]
Quote: “(…) more densely planted corn and soybean fields scattered across the Midwest are changing the regional climate by releasing more water vapor into the atmosphere. The more water vapor that reaches the atmosphere, the higher the dew point, and the fewer extremely hot summer days.
In other words, while some still question whether people are to blame for changing weather patterns around the globe, farmers around the Midwest are already altering the region’s climate in significant ways (…) ”
So, why worry? I presume Bill Gates’ machines are obsolete, already. Farming is the answer. More farming=more water vapour=more clouds= a cooler planet! No more problems, no more global warming. 🙂 !!
R. Gates says:
May 12, 2010 at 11:01 am
I would be content if Mr. Gates (the one listed here) had the last word. A word to the wise is sufficient. This has been a useful brain teaser, just as the ‘dispensing of soot in the Arctic’ proposal, to warm up the earth in the 1970s cold spell to stop the Ice Age, was back then. Also a non-starter.
Stephen Salter says: “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”
Goodness! 10 tonnes per second sounds like peanuts to me – are you really sure of your figures Dr Slater?
There are thousands of enormous nozzles dotted around the globe, propelling huge quantities of water vapour high into the atmosphere. They’re called cooling towers.
And these will pale into insignificance compared to the plumes of water vapour being propelled high into the atmosphere from the associated burning of fossil fuels.
If it is to be argued that 10 tonnes per second of water being elevated to a height of 1000 m will cool the globe, how much cooling should we attribute to the millions of tonnes being sent aloft from the global power industry?
It would be cheaper to bomb a volcano with a nuke. Then the volcano would send a lot of SO2 high in the atmosphere.
So, again I ask, anyone out there who can at least conjecture as to the answer of the question as to which will win out, the greenhouse gas warming effect of the water vapor (much stronger than co2) or the solar radiation reflection of the supposed clouds to be formed? Would this “idea” warm us or cool us? What about increased rain fall from all of these clouds? Where will that occur? Floods? Hurricanes from the higher moisture unsettled air? Blizzards? Tornados? Are there any weather people on this blog?
I think someone should place some kind of a gadget on these ships that would make them useful, ie, provide some kind of a good or service, or perhaps provide energy, to people.
Then the environmentalists would be in an Almighty Hurry to put a stop to it!
anna v says:
May 12, 2010 at 10:39 am
I too am very disappointed at the lack of critical thought in both the article, which sets up strawman hypotheses and goes on to refute them and ridicule them, and with the readers, who have been provided with serious and rational links by myself and others, as the one by Stephen Salter below, which does describe the ingenious method of increasing albedo non destructively.
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs/Climate%20change/Phil.Trans.%20Seagoing%20hardware.pdf ,
———–
REPLY: Thanks for the link. In part, it says:
“The vessels will drag turbines resembling oversized propellers through the water to provide the means for generating electrical energy. Some will be used for rotor spin, but most will be used to create spray by pumping 30 kg sK1 of carefully filtered water through banks of filters and then to micro-nozzles with piezoelectric excitation to vary drop diameter.”
—
You can’t be serious!! The energy consumption of this plan astounds me….I’m not aware of any source of renewable energy that would enable this, except perhaps nuclear reactors aboard the ships. And, “carefully filtered water through banks of filters…” etc. opens a new can of worms in terms of energy requirements, capital investment, labor etc..
We are undergoing a grand solar minimum, the US carbon dioxide emissions in 2009 dropped by about 7%, and you seriously propose this?
There is something wrong with the math, and I have evidence. LOL
My 2500 psi preassure washer has a problem to deliver mist to the top of
second floor window (from ground level). I hope Bill can spare some change
for me for further research
What if the increased cloud cover actually increases the temperature?
Don’t worry, nobody knows enough about climate forcings to be able to prove that! :^)
wesley bruce says:
May 12, 2010 at 4:56 am
Thanks for the citation, Wesley. Not sure what “not so hard to find folks” means, I didn’t even know of the paper’s existence.
It is another wonderful example of people with no practical experience putting to sea in their dreams. I see that the cloud making ship shown in Fig. 1 is not intended to be a fantasy, it is actually supposed to be a practical vessel. It is to be run by Flettner rotors, which were invented back in the 1920s. Here’s an example, from the reference cited by Wesley:
Figure 3. Vessel “Cloudia”, February 28, powered by Flettner rotors
What could be wrong with that? Well, two things. The first one is that you can’t “reef”, or reduce the area, of the “sails”. Flettner rotors do work … but the wind can work much harder. Ever been in a real, serious storm at sea? Been there, done that, it is terrifying.
First the wind starts to wail. Then it rises, and begins to howl. After a while it is shrieking. Eventually the sound of the wind rises until it is almost above the range of hearing, a piercing, keening scream that drives spray horizontally and knocks ships over and runs up and down your spine and drives men insane. At such a time, the smallest scrap of sail is far too much windage … and a tall Flettner rotor that you can’t get down out of the sky is a ship’s death sentence. Why do you think they were never widely adopted? Because sea folk have this nasty habit, we want to keep on living … and to do that, you have to be able to reef your sails to reduce your windage.
The second problem is that the amount of power developed by Flettner rotors is pretty small. For example, the caption to the photo of the good ship Cloudia above says:
Whoa, 600 watts, enough to light six light bulbs, less than one horsepower, be still my beating heart. My figures indicate that to pump 10 tonnes per second we need about 5,500 kilowatts, not watts but kilowatts. So each rotorship will need to have rotors with an area about ten thousand times as big as the “Cloudia”, that’s four orders of magnitude larger. I suppose that’s why the ship in Figure 1 is so tall, tall enough to be blown over by a medium sized squall …. and even then, there’s no way that the rotors of the ship in Figure 1 are 10,000 times larger than those of the “Cloudia”. To be that much larger, they’d have to be 100 times taller and 100 times wider than the rotors of the “Cloudia”. From the picture, the taller rotor is 27 feet tall and about 5 feet wide, so the rotors on the real pump ship would have to be 500 feet across and 2,700 feet tall, over half a mile, that’s nearly a kilometer tall … riiiight … but wait, wait, hold the presses, they have three rotors instead of two, so the rotors would only have to be 500 feet across and 1,800 feet tall. Phew, I feel much better now, I was worried for a minute there …
Finally, their idea is that they will avoid the problem of having folks on board by running all of this by remote control … yeah, that’s the ticket. You know the old saying, “What goes around, comes around”?
Well, at sea we have a saying, “What goes around … stops.”
The idea that you could do this remotely, without anyone on board to fix the machinery or clean the filters or remove the chunk of abandoned net that has fouled the rudder or scrape the seagull … ummm … guano … out of the self-steering gear or any of the thousands of everyday marine problems is a sick joke. The tropical marine environment is one of the most corrosive, destructive environments for machinery and electronics known. Single-handed sailors (which I have been in my life) do everything we can to automate our boats, and we still spend a lot of time at sea fixing and jury rigging and maintaining the boat’s machinery and parts. Remote control? Give me a break.
Final conclusion?
Never hire a think-tank to design a sailboat. The ocean is a beautiful but cruel mistress. I love her dearly, but she’s a bitch who will destroy your ship without even noticing … and she pays very little attention to the ideas of tanked-thinkers …
Finally we should have concluded that the only way to do it is ask, implore He who is the one who commands the weather and climate on earth, the supreme God of Climate, the incomparable beast from the nether world, he who only appears before us to warn us of all conceivable armageddonian consequences derived from our sinful behaviours, AL the most magnificent bedwetter himself. Be praised His Holyness. Only HIM can change everything, only HE who can pee everything from above could direct us to behave correctly so as not to offend HIS beloved daughter: GAIA.