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.
Spraying water in the air sounds like science fiction?
I did that as a kid with a garden hose. I had no idea it was THAT advanced.
Bill Illis says:
August 20, 2012 at 6:49 pm
How do you keep your ship afloat when the each action provides an equal and opposite reaction force sinks the ship in about 2 seconds. Hopefully no person will be on board when they turn on the pumps shooting water 1 km into the air because the ship will be driven downwards by the same 1 km.
That all depends on the masses involved. Suppose a 100 kg man were to shoot up 1 kg of water 1 km into the air over a period of 2 seconds. And let us assume this man was lying on a flotation device in the water while shooting the water up. How far would the man sink into the water?
Of course the validity of any assumptions made determine how far off our number are. But if we assume no air resistance, the speed of the water at ground level to reach 1 km would be 140 m/s. This is found using vf2 = vi2 + 2ad. The force up equals the force down, so since the times are the same at 2 seconds, we can say that m(change in v) = m(change in v). So if 1 kg of water goes at 140 m/s, the 100 kg man goes down at 1.4 m/s. In order to go 1.4 m/s, using vf2 = vi2 + 2ad, this would be the same as if the man were to be dropped 0.1 m or 10 cm. So in this scenario, the man would not sink far at all in the flotation device. So even if we doubled things to allow for air resistance, the man would not sink far.
[i]Wood said there is very little chance of long-term effects from such an experiment. [/i]
Yeah, that’s what they said in the Highlander movie too, just before their world went dark.
I jest, but this is even more looney than a science fiction movie theory. Well, but, this is exactly what this is.
They want to combat the theory of fossil-fueled caused global warming by using massive amounts of fossil-fuels to try and pump … sorry.. SPRITZ .. salt-water droplets up to the upper cloud layer.
Isn’t the upper cloud layer several miles in the atmosphere? How much fuel and pump power would it take to do that on such a massive scale to cover the entire globe?
Good lord, please save us from the imbeciles.
“What we’re trying to do is make the case that this is a beneficial experiment to do,”
But if clouds are a negative feedback, then it would be a bad experiment to do.
I am not an engineer, nor am I an “environmentalist” by any stretch of the imagination. What I am is an artist with a talent for working with computers.
Even so, being someone whose art depends upon maintaining a semblance of “balance” for a piece to look natural or even semi-realistic, even I can see that the base of this ship and the pontoons sticking out the sides are woefully inadequate to support the towers jutting straight up. Others have commented that it would capsize in the first storm to hit it. I think it would capsize when the first decent-sized wave hits it, storm or no storm. It’s preposterous.
I don’t know where my mind went to I meant to say “But if clouds are a POSITIVE feedback, then it would be a bad experiment to do.”
Cant we just increase evaporation by say pumping water over the land where we otherwise wouldn’t normally get any evaporation? We may as well pump that water over crops for maximum benefit. Actually no, what was I thinking, bring on the pump boat!
From the post:
“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.
Then there is this in comments:
“Matt says:
August 20, 2012 at 5:48 pm
“If we were to build more nuclear power stations, we would get the cloud making for free from the cooling towers 😉”
As usual, I think I have missed an important component of this issue, but do, nonetheless, have a favorable opinion regarding nuclear power.
The point of the paper — is to screw more money out of gullible politicians.
Well it seems that this whole climatechangemanmadeglobalwarmingarthropodgeniccatastrophictippingpoint business, as well as the green energy revolution; excuse me, that’s insurrection, are simply modern make work projects to keep busy the otherwise 70% unemployable PhD Physicists who tragically learned more and more about less and less, until all of those jobs were filled.
I seem to recall that Neuschwannstein was just a 19th century make work project that crazy King Ludwig came up with to keep all the artisans of Bavaria busy. Well come to think of it, didn’t Franz Kafka write a yarn about a scheme that kept everybody in two cities on opposite sides of a river busy for ever, basically working to undo the “damage” that the other city did. I think the modern word for it it is “featherbedding or something close to that.
So what we need now is some gummint agency to put up some borrowed or stolen or printed money, for some of the unemployed to build a flock of these steam engines, to try out. You need a flock of them, because the math schools also turn out a bunch of PhD statisticians, who also have to be kept busy, and you can’t do statistics on a one trick pony !
The idea that small droplets create more reflective clouds is yet another part of the climate science fraud. It works for thin clouds but look out of the window and you’ll eventually see that rain clouds reflect most light, and it’s the large droplets that create the effect.
This scam was put out by NASA in 2004 to justify AR4’s claim of -0.7 W/m^2 net AIE. In reality the effect is the reverse sign and the real AGW,. plus it causes the end of ice ages [there can be no CO2-AGW from fundamental IR physics].
The physical explanation is that there are two optical effects: Sagan only considered one.
No, it’s that you just fail to appreciate that global warming makes the climate warmer and colder with more wetness and dryness. So it only makes sense that more water vapor can selectively, (see Murphy’s law of selective scientific explanations), create more and less positive negative feedback thereby driving climate change to extremes – just like they’ve always asserted.
Cloudbusting anyone?
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRHA9W-zExQ ]
So they are going to seed clouds with SALT WATER. What happens when those clouds drift over land and drop their salt water as rain?
This is what happens naturally.
Interestingly, it seems biomass burning is the most widespread form of anthropogenic cloud seeding. So encouraging forest fires would seem to be the most effective method of global scale cloud seeding.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JD008269.shtml
TomT says:
August 20, 2012 at 9:20 pm
““What we’re trying to do is make the case that this is a beneficial experiment to do,”
But if clouds are a negative feedback, then it would be a bad experiment to do.”
If clouds are a negative feedback, then more clouds lead to less clouds until an equilibrium is reached. Artificially produced clouds would lead to less natural clouds but the sum of the clouds would stay the same, all else being equal. So, it would be a “bad” experiment insofar as it would be a waste of money, but otherwise harmless.
Having read none of the comments to this posting it makes it easier for me to say WTF.
AGW has us believe that a three fold increase of temperature from the CO2 feed back is caused by increased water vapour ? Now they believe that more water vapour cools the Earth, sorry they can not have their cake and it too. So now increased water vapour is a negative feed back, that means CO2 is a crock.
“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.
————————————————
Geez, did they have to do an experiment to find that out? Why did they not just ask a pilot what the brightest and thus most reflective clouds are?
So these salt laden clouds drift ashore and destroy agricultural land? Result- mass famine.
What a load of c–p.
What goes up must come down!
I remember a large campaign to get rid of Acid rain -it was killing trees and doing all sorts of damage. Now they propose to have alkali rain?
I would not concerned about the stability of the ship, it is the stability of these scientists that concerns me….
captainfish says: August 20, 2012 at 9:16 pm
quote
[i]Wood said there is very little chance of long-term effects from such an experiment. [/i]
Yeah, that’s what they said in the Highlander* movie too, just before their world went dark.
I jest, but this is even more looney than a science fiction movie theory. Well, but, this is exactly what this is.
unquote
You say that as if it’s a bad thing. If more people applied an SF mindset to the guff they’re fed by the MSM then we’d all be a lot more able to pick sensible holes in suggestions like these ships*. The trouble is, people are just looking at the picture and sounding off. It’s a serious engineering proposal (Salter is a great engineer — some civil servant decided his Salter Duck generating system wouldn’t produce much power by calculating that it would produce only a tenth of what Salter had worked out — later the civil servant was found to have got his numbers wrong, but what the hell, that’s civil servants for you.) The proposal is to do some science on aerosol effects over the ocean, increasing our understanding of clouds. Look at the IPCC level of scientific understanding of clouds. At the moment they can get away with gross hand-waving where oceanic albedo is concerned, using it as a fudge factor to make the models work. Remove the uncertainty and we can show up the models for what they are, computer dreamlands with no connection to the real world. Or not, depending on the results of the experiment. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather like to firm up the science: ignorance is getting to be rather expensive.
quote
They want to combat the theory of fossil-fueled caused global warming by using massive amounts of fossil-fuels to try and pump … sorry.. SPRITZ .. salt-water droplets up to the upper cloud layer.
unquote
No they don’t. The ships are wind-powered. The big bellows (‘bellows’, ye gods, does anyone read anything before venting?) are actually Flettner rotors which are much easier to manage than conventional sails and so reduce the manning requirements for the global cooling fleet should it ever be required.
quote
Isn’t the upper cloud layer several miles in the atmosphere?
unquote
Yes. I’ve been through the anvil of tropical thunderstorms at 45,000 ft and cirrus at the same sort of level. Those clouds are not affected by what these ships are designed to do. The cloud that matters here is low level stuff, the stuff that forms when the aerosols generated by waves hit a cooler layer and cause water vapour to condense. The albedo of smooth water is effectively zero, that of the cloud formed at the boundary layer is about 70. In the latter case, 70% of the incident sun energy is bounced straight back into space, ignoring any CO2 molecules which only retard re-radiated long wave radiation. So, these low level clouds are the major cooling influence over the oceans and our understanding of them, according to the really really top experts in the IPCC is either low or very low. And people are objecting to an experiment designed to study them? Ye. Gods.
quote
How much fuel and pump power would it take to do that on such a massive scale to cover the entire globe?
unquote
We had, briefly, Dr Salter responding on a WUWT thread but he went away in disgust, probably because of the wilful ignoring of what he actually wrote. Let me give my understanding of the proposal, briefly, so people can reject the proposal with some knowledge of what it actually is. Please note, I’ve not studied it in any depth, but I have read the paper.
A wind-powered vessel, almost fully automated, is deployed in areas of the ocean known to be deficient in the aerosols essential for cloud formation. Its Flettner rotors provide motive power and drive spinning discs onto which a stream of water flows. The water atomises into very small droplets which are ejected with a low upward velocity into the atmosphere. The relative humidity is such that the droplets dry into minute particles and float around in the boundary layer, that area of turbulence just above the surface. Many fall but billions, trillions, lofted by the natural turbulence, reach the higher relative humidity zone and attract water vapour. Typically that’s 2000 ft but it can be much lower. Droplets form, reflective droplets which bounce back IR radiation and cool the ocean surface. At each stage of the process we are using natural energy apart from the initial aerosol production, so the whole thing is a great free ride. The tiny initial investment in producing a minute droplet is repaid a million-fold by the formation of a much bigger cloud droplet at exactly the right place later in the process.
You can see aerosol and salt particle production on any beach. Watch as wave-produced bubbles sizzle on the pebbles and see the tiny droplets waft away on the breeze. This is no Frankenstein experiment destined to go wrong and freeze us all, it’s an examination of a natural process which is going on all over the ocean every time oceanic wind speeds get above Force 4 and whitecaps form. The white is bubbles, bursting bubbles, tiny factories for aerosols.
Part of the problem with the way people address this proposal is the mismatch between what they think is needed in power terms and what is really required. I find it helpful to think of the stratocumulus layer as being like the control grid of a triode valve, where small modulations produce enormous effects, amplification by millions. Try thinking of it in those terms and it might help. It will certainly help those who expect millions of tons of water to be shot skywards at such speed that the ships would be driven under water.
quote
Good lord, please save us from the imbeciles.
unquote.
Here we can agree.
JF
*If you think Highlander is SF then you’ve been misled. Highlander is fantasy. SF is where at the limit you can’t even use warp drives: it makes for an interesting writing exercise and you end up with collections of SF short stories and novels like Children of a Greater God, all available now on Amazo….
First;
Watts are power flows. One gigawatt for one nanosec is one (1) watt-second. What you need to track is gigawatt-hours.
Second;
Trivial. You’re orders of magnitude short of warming the atmosphere. Get up to terawatt-hours or higher, and you’re on the lower fringes. (Trillions of watt-hours).
Aim your guns better. The water isn’t the point; it’s the sea-salt, which would come out of solution as the droplets dried as minute aerosol particles, which then would begin to re-create mist and clouds at higher altitude.
What goes up will come down. Some places might get rain where it is required (good), but other places will get more rain than required (floods, devastation). The world population is higher where the rain fall is in general good. They would change the eco-system and it would create mass migration.
.
I just look at Ireland that has this year for the last 4 month and counting more than average rain fall and more than average cloud cover. The farmers can’t use in some places the heavy machinery and the crop harvest is low.
There is always a catch 22. Any action has a reaction and if you don’t understand it than the reaction might me worse compared to what you want to solve.
Just look up Predator-Prey models and you will find that controlling this is not easy.
Do they know how the weather will react? No!!!