Willis covered this before on WUWT, with Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud. Its baaaack.
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
From the University of Washington and the Royal Society
Experiment would test cloud geoengineering as way to slow warming
Even though it sounds like science fiction, researchers are taking a second look at a controversial idea that uses futuristic ships to shoot salt water high into the sky over the oceans, creating clouds that reflect sunlight and thus counter global warming.
University of Washington atmospheric physicist Rob Wood describes a possible way to run an experiment to test the concept on a small scale in a comprehensive paper published this month in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The point of the paper — which includes updates on the latest study into what kind of ship would be best to spray the salt water into the sky, how large the water droplets should be and the potential climatological impacts — is to encourage more scientists to consider the idea of marine cloud brightening and even poke holes in it. He and a colleague detail an experiment to test the concept.
“What we’re trying to do is make the case that this is a beneficial experiment to do,” Wood said. With enough interest in cloud brightening from the scientific community, funding for an experiment may become possible, he said.
The theory behind so-called marine cloud brightening is that adding particles, in this case sea salt, to the sky over the ocean would form large, long-lived clouds. Clouds appear when water forms around particles. Since there is a limited amount of water in the air, adding more particles creates more, but smaller, droplets.
“It turns out that a greater number of smaller drops has a greater surface area, so it means the clouds reflect a greater amount of light back into space,” Wood said. That creates a cooling effect on Earth.
Marine cloud brightening is part of a broader concept known as geoengineering which encompasses efforts to use technology to manipulate the environment. Brightening, like other geoengineering proposals, is controversial for its ethical and political ramifications and the uncertainty around its impact. But those aren’t reasons not to study it, Wood said.
“I would rather that responsible scientists test the idea than groups that might have a vested interest in proving its success,” he said. The danger with private organizations experimenting with geoengineering is that “there is an assumption that it’s got to work,” he said.
Wood and his colleagues propose trying a small-scale experiment to test feasibility and begin to study effects. The test should start by deploying sprayers on a ship or barge to ensure that they can inject enough particles of the targeted size to the appropriate elevation, Wood and a colleague wrote in the report. An airplane equipped with sensors would study the physical and chemical characteristics of the particles and how they disperse.
The next step would be to use additional airplanes to study how the cloud develops and how long it remains. The final phase of the experiment would send out five to 10 ships spread out across a 100 kilometer, or 62 mile, stretch. The resulting clouds would be large enough so that scientists could use satellites to examine them and their ability to reflect light.
Wood said there is very little chance of long-term effects from such an experiment. Based on studies of pollutants, which emit particles that cause a similar reaction in clouds, scientists know that the impact of adding particles to clouds lasts only a few days.
Still, such an experiment would be unusual in the world of climate science, where scientists observe rather than actually try to change the atmosphere.
Wood notes that running the experiment would advance knowledge around how particles like pollutants impact the climate, although the main reason to do it would be to test the geoengineering idea.
A phenomenon that inspired marine cloud brightening is ship trails: clouds that form behind the paths of ships crossing the ocean, similar to the trails that airplanes leave across the sky. Ship trails form around particles released from burning fuel.
But in some cases ship trails make clouds darker. “We don’t really know why that is,” Wood said.
Despite increasing interest from scientists like Wood, there is still strong resistance to cloud brightening.
“It’s a quick-fix idea when really what we need to do is move toward a low-carbon emission economy, which is turning out to be a long process,” Wood said. “I think we ought to know about the possibilities, just in case.”
The authors of the paper are treading cautiously.
“We stress that there would be no justification for deployment of [marine cloud brightening] unless it was clearly established that no significant adverse consequences would result. There would also need to be an international agreement firmly in favor of such action,” they wrote in the paper’s summary.
There are 25 authors on the paper, including scientists from University of Leeds, University of Edinburgh and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The lead author is John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Manchester, who pioneered the idea of marine cloud brightening.
Wood’s research was supported by the UW College of the Environment Institute.
And what were the effects of the H-Bomb test at the Bikini Atoll?
Have these boys bothered to study that. It put a lot of salt water in vapor form into the atmosphere.
Umm doesn’t water vapor have a much larger greenhouse effect than about anything else? Wouldn’t this just create lots of water vapor? Are they crazy?
OMG Willis, spelling error in second line of the post!!!! It should read, “Figure 1. Artist’s MISconception…”
as a geotechnical engineer, I respecfully ask, nay I insist, that I am not in anyway associated with these bozos…………on the other hand, that grant money may be handy…..LOL!
You have to love the thinking of prophets of doom. To fix the problems of humans altering the earth’s climate they are going to alter earth’s climate.
gees, Steve in SC..
DON’T give them ideas !!!!!!
And if they kick us prematurely into the next glacial period, do we get to flagellate them publicly?
Justthinkin says:
August 20, 2012 at 2:21 pm
physicist Rob Wood,philosophical transactions??? WTF? Which is he,a physicist or a philospher?
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‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society’ is the name of the society’s journal. From the days when what is now called science was known as Natural Philosophy.
(And when the RS was a scientific organisation)
Not that there is a warming problem to worry about, but by far the cheapest way of getting particulates into stratosphere for a bit of “volcanic” cooling is to fire off really large thermonuclear bombs at or slightly below ground level. Big fusion bombs like the 50Megatonne Tsar Bomba are very clean too and probably only cost a few 10’s of millions.
Uninhabited parts of the Artic in Canada, Alaska and Siberia would be ideal for this purpose. perhaps parts of Antartica, Australia, Gobi and Sahara too.
So these guys accept that water vapor and clouds ARE negative feedback.
“There are 25 authors on the paper” … I think Willis’ rule about the inverse relationship between the number of authors and the quality of the science of the paper applies here.
And to think, somebody received grant money for this idea.
Well, I never thought I’d feel that WUWT was getting as self-absorbed, petty-minded and resistant to science as the warmist blogs, but some of the responses above remind me of Tamino’s Open Mind and Skeptical Science, where anything against the flow meets with howls of rejection from the packs of little jackels who cluster round the big beasts.
For those convinced that the proposal will use enormous amounts of power to push the particles up to the cloud layer (the boundary layer is only around 2000 ft, or it was when I used to fly over the sea), or that it will make the rain salty, or… well, the rest of the stuff which gives denialism a bad name, ask Willis how far out he was with his calculations on just those matters.
Here’s the situation: the ocean makes salt particles, billions, trillions a second. Turbulence takes those particles up to a cooler level where they aid in the condensing of water vapour. No-one has to make the vapour, that comes free courtesy of Nature.
Large areas of the ocean are short of salt particles, so that even though there is a lot of water vapour it exists in a saturated condition, as, if you like, a greenhouse gas. All it needs to condense is a condensation nucleus, and billions of those can be easily and cheaply generated by wind-power from one of Salter and Latham’s cloud ships. It’s cheap in power and money terms, so for a few million dollars courtesy Mr Gates we can make those billions of particles. Then the turbulence will loft them to the cooler cloudbase where they will make droplets. Is there turbulence? Yes, that’s the definition of the boundary layer. Will those droplets cool the area? We don’t know, although commonsense says they will. So how do we find out? We do the science, we _carry out an experiment_,
If my Kriegesmarine Hypothesis is correct we will just be replacing particles that oil and surfactant pollution are now suppressing. We need the numbers, we need the science, we need the experiment. The throwaway remark that ‘all that’s needed is to stop taking the sulphur out of ships’ fuel is facile; no numbers will result and science is about numbers. Then we do the necessary other experiment, we take a tanker full of light oil and deliberately spill it to see what we are doing to the oceans with all the stuff we are pumping down our rivers. A city of 5 million people spills as much oil just from drips on its roads as is dumped by a major tanker disaster. What is that doing to the generation of salt particles*? Experiment, let’s try it.
Someone is trying to do science with the climate, real science, not models and adjusted temperatures. i cannot understand why here, at WUWT of all places, people are so against it. Anthony began this whole huge empire by painting Stevenson screens with whitewash and modern paints and measuring the difference. That is science. So is this proposal. I think we should welcome it.
Embrace the scientific method. It won’t let you down.
JF
Google ‘NASA ship tracks’. Google the new ‘blue marble’ picture of the Earth and zoom in to the mouth of the Mississippi**. Look for the pictures of the Gulf oil spill and see what the pollution is doing to the clouds. Then think about the things you see.
*
**
There are various possible explanations of what’s going on in the blue marble picture of the Mississippi. I’d like someone to do some science on the surface water as it spreads onto the Gulf.
Rather than attempting to spray water into the atmosphere wouldn’t it be more efficient to find a means to raise the sea surface temperature and so transfer moisture to the atmosphere by simple evaporation. Does that process sound familiar to anyone?
Wood and his colleagues propose trying a small-scale experiment to test feasibility and begin to study effects.
The effects of injecting particles into the atmosphere are seen in every city in the world, every week. It’s called the Weekend Effect. More clouds during the week than at weekends.
This is well known, yet there has never been a published study on how this effects minimum, maximum or average temperatures.
Inconvenient truth, anyone?
jim2 says:
quote
They need to be figuring out how to warm the Earth instead.
unquote
If spilt oil really has a warming effect (various reasons, reduction in cloud cover, plankton changes, reduction in albedo and emissivity etc) then just dumping light oil on the oceans should do it. I think we should do the experiment off… ooh, Tahiti would do. Bags I supervise.
JF
Err… jackals….
JF
tom in indy says:
August 20, 2012 at 2:11 pm
I wonder if a billion years ago venus and mars were teeming with intelligent life until some idiot came along and decided that geoengineering was a good idea.
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I will have to “borrow” tom’s quote….
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just feed steroids to whales?
Everyone should visit Charleville in Queensland Australia where they have a display of the cannons used to shoot silver nitrate into clounds in an attempt to break a serious drought in 1902 – yes apparently serious drought occurred long before CO2 started its inexorable upwards march.
It failed.
// Sarcasm //
Why no cover the state of California with aluminum foil ?
The sunlight would be reflected back into space and the California’s Legislature would agree to any stupid idea.
(NOTE: I live in California, so this idea isn’t as bad as some of the other half backed ideas we had.)
In terms of “unintended side effects” of large scale geo-climatic and environmental engineering, we should remember what is claimed to have happened to Mao Tse Tung when he had the Chinese population go on a massive sparrow-killing campaign cuz the scientists said the li’l buggers were eating too much grain that people needed.
They killed off the sparrows and the following two years saw 30 million people die from famine as the bugs, no longer getting gobbled by sparrows, ate all the grain!
I don’t know how solid that tale is, but here’s a news clip on it:
– MJM
“He and a colleague detail an experiment to test the concept.”
Well, testing is at least real science. But my money is on it being falsified – as in BIG failure.
Steve Garcia
So let me explain how I understand this. The AGW folks want to increase the cloud cover to reflect solar energy back into space, thereby lowering the Earth’s temperature. At the same time, they want to abolish traditional energy sources, and force our reliance on ‘Green’ energy, namely solar. So these cloud ships, presumably powered by solar panels, make clouds which block the sun rendering the solar panels useless.
If you want to destroy civilization you’d call it a brilliant plan. The rest of us call it madness.
How about a fleet of cigar boats at racing at full speed raising rooster tails instead. Available technology and more fun.