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.
Reminds me of The Rainmaker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainmaker_%281956_film%29
We used to have something similar in the past. They were called steam trains. You could see the sky fill up with smoke and steam when they were a few miles away.
For those of you worried about the ship’s stability – ignore the “artist’s conception”. These “ships would not need to move significantly. Put them on the upwind side of where you want the clouds, and tether them in place. They would really be more like buoys. So the keel could easily be longer and heavier than the masts. Stability is a red herring, we have been designing various forms of seagoing structures for thousands of years, and this would not be that difficult. It’s still a silly idea as geo-engineering, for many other reasons mentioned. Creating a few for experimental purposes to actually get some DATA might be worthwhile, however.
Mockery from ignorance is deplorable, regardless of the source. Assuming you have knowledge without even a rudimentary search of available sources should be a cause of embarrassment for those who participate. Unfortunately I’m seeing more and more of it here on WUWT. How are we different from the alarmists if we fire up the comments without even checking our own preconceptions and prejudices. The artists conception tickled my memory and < 5 minutes digging brought up the answer.
Whether or not the concept of shooting sea water into the air has merit, the ship, as pictured, would not be inherently unstable unless the climatology crowd were allowed to design the hull. It is essentially shown as being in the lineage of the old Flettner rotor sailing ships. As such it could indeed be moved by wind power, though it still would require some enormous power source to shoot seawater 1 KM into the air.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buckau_Flettner_Rotor_Ship_LOC_37764u.jpg for more information.
Let's give a little more thought and digging prior to commenting, especially commenting outside your corner of knowledge or expertise. Otherwise were just making up our minds ahead of the facts like the rest of the common hoard.
Isn’t the chlorine in salt a threat to the ozone layer?
Brian H and Mike M, you are giving me morning inspiration. But Peter Miller said it straight away:
“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.”
Um, er……………..but this is the exact opposite of the cornerstone of CAGW theory – more clouds mean more heat is retained, at least so sayeth the high priests of the global warming industry. Big feedbacks etc.
++++++
There are two issues: one is that this proposal turns the H2O feedback idea on its head and undermines all that the IPCC saith. The second is the idea that throwing sea water into the air is somehow similar to evaporation of fresh water from the sea to create water vapour and then clouds. Mist made from sprayed sea water is not much like ‘clouds’. Good grief.
Can you imagine the law suits that will result from the contamination of land when this salt-laden mist comes ashore to sterilise farms the way the Romans did in Carthage? We are going to drown in the Sea of Stupid.
Brian H writes “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.”
Makes the assumption that aerosols are the limiting factor for cloud creation whereas cloud creation is a balance between the amount of water vapour available and the amount of aerosols available to seed the cloud. Increasing either should increase cloud cover and furthermore in the cases where there are already sufficient aerosols available, adding more wont have much effect.
Want to stop global warming? Why don’t we just nuke the sun? No need for ships spraying seawater.
Complete stupidity. These should only be deployed to avert an actual disaster as a last resort. Otherwise, nobody has a right to control the climate. If our eco-warriors decide it’s too warm, what’s to stop, say, Russia from deciding the present climate is too cold and placing reflective mirrors in outer space to divert additional radiation from the sun to earth?
Dear God !!!! Who leaked the design for the Halliburton Hurricane Machine!?!?!
Julian Flood says:
August 20, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Yes, let’s drop lots of Chlorine into the atmosphere to increase the size of the ozone hole… Chlorine being a significant constituent of salt. Where else do you think naturally occurring Chlorine comes from in the atmosphere?
“””””…..Julian Flood says:
August 20, 2012 at 4:02 pm
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……”””””
Well Julian, I suspect that the point being made by many spoofers of this idea; including me for sure, is not whether any such cloud making steam engine, would actually function as described, or would be so designed as to not tip over, or any of the other suggested road blocks being made fun of.
These researchers; armed with their taxpayer forcibly extracted funding grants, might very well prove that a connection between man made clouds, and at least local cooling or warming is sound Physics; or maybe not.
The whole point is that whether the thesis is correct or not, implementing such solutions on a scale that could do any global effect at all, is totally impractical. You can’t cover open ground area or sea with non-functional Saran wrap at a low enough cost , let alone with expensive PV arrays, or fields of fans, to affordably collect free clean green renewable solar energy, to make a significant NET contribution to the world’s total energy needs. The thought of covering tens of thousands of square miles of so -called useless land for such ideas is rather bizarre.
So how likely is it that environmental concerns, would for a minute, tolerate the notion of having millions of tethered steam engine cloud making ships all over the world’s oceans, cluttering up the place, and altering marine habitats willy nilly; on the off chance that the net livability of planet earth for the totality of humanity would improve; and all for a supposed cause of a yet to be demonstrated catastrophe, that earth must have experienced thousands of times already.
I don’t care whether the physics behind this notion is more solid than quantum chromodynamics. It would be a complete waste of earth resources, to even think of building such contraptions, no matter how ingeniously engineered they could be.
This idea belongs with other crackpot ideas such as geo-engineering Mars or Jupiter to make them as desirable places to live as a tropical island paradise.
A single hurricane in an hour can play with more energy than all the nuke energy humans have stockpiled. This idea ranks with picking locust swarms out of the air one by one with chopsticks.
If someone else like gods were paying the freight for these experiments then I’d have no qualms about them. You cannot run away from the fact that there remains no empirical basis to justify soaking taxpayers for an endless stream of ‘pie in the sky’ (or salt in the sky) science projects to ‘combat climate change’ which is now costing US taxpayers, (a FINITE and currently dwindling resource), over $2 billion per year. Just imagine if only 1/1000 of that budgeted amount (indexed) had been spent every year for the last ~120 years to assure unbiased trustworthy NCDC data that would have revealed a temperature record showing only natural variability, (what most rural stations show)? The rest of the money could be spent on preparing for climate/weather related disasters like droughts and floods rather than on planting idiotic notions in the mind of the public that we can somehow ~prevent~ them from happening, (let alone the even more idiotic notion that the UN would have our best interest at ‘heart’). That and Anthony Watts would likely have put his efforts into some profitable endeavor and been a billionaire by now and I wouldn’t be here writing this.
have not read all comments but I would think the intakes underside would provide stability.
not positive but I think this type of stuff may be violating some laws though, cannot place finger on it but in back of my mind it seems there were laws passed against taking of seawater.
no matter, just a stupid idea anyway.
The picture is of a trimaran. Both catamarans and trimarans depend on speed to get out of the way of winds.
Depending on how the ‘towers’ are made it could be made a ‘non-problem’. They look like hoops with a flexible material over them. IFF they can be lowered and stowed (like a sail) then it’s just the classical art of management of sail area vs winds vs location faced by all trimarans and catamarans.
FWIW, the trimaran and catamaran were the dominant design of classical Pacific ocean sailing due to the fact that their faster speed let you outrun major cyclones AND the Pacific cyclones were simply not survivable by wooden displacement hulls, no matter how sturdy to make them. (Heck, Halsey found they would bend the flight deck of aircraft carriers in W.W.II ) while on the Atlantic, you could make a slow dumpy but VERY sturdy ship and ride out the storm. The fast Polynesian grand boats with outriggers vs the Spanish Galleon…
If the “towers” rotate, they could be used as Magnus Effect sails. Dropping the ‘ripply’ coating would be ‘reefing’ the sail. Then kick on some big Diesels if you really need to book it out of somewhere fast… Ought to be able to do 30 knots. (A military cat does 50 knots…)
Just don’t stay too long if a storm is building, reef early, and watch out for “rogue waves”…
Per the idea: Solution to a non-problem, so what’s the point?
I’m sure all the folks putting solar cells up on Pacific Islands will be happy to know they will be under artificial clouds more often…
Without a solid understanding of the climate system, geoengineering is complete folly.
The morons will make a flood and have to stand up in court to settle the matter. Guess who will have to pick up the tab.
They can’t be allowed to hack the climate until they can prove they understand the climate system.
There where many crazy contraptions designed to fly – look in the old magazines, you won’t believe what you see. Yet in the end our airplanes where developed, our satellites and what have you.
The saltwater-pump-in-the-air ships look like one more crazy contraption going towards the heap of failures. But it seems we humans are destined to have these crazy ideas anyhow, it is in our genes. I don’t think this creativity makes us superior creatures, it’s just plain luck in the end what contraption will work.
Even if you follow all the rules of proper science success is not guaranteed. So you might as well go wacko from time to time, it may give surprises, and some fun. Isn’t that the human spirit?
We could be covered in cloud! Yay! Just like Venus! Yay! Oh…erm…
And what, pray tell, do you think is the source of particulates for cloud formation in the deep Pacific? Your panic over “salt rain” is as equally foolish as earlier panics over “acid rain”.
Not unless the ozone layer dropped down to the 1-3km elevation and no one noticed.
Jim P. says: August 21, 2012 at 9:08 am
quote
Julian Flood says: August 20, 2012 at 4:02 pm
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.
This is the typical smug response of a warmist, Julian. So maybe those in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones?
unquote
Thanks for that, it’s always nice to finish the day with a chuckle. If your research into the paper we’re discussing is as thorough as your understanding of my take on the AGW scare then you are either a troll or lazy. Let’s be kind and assume the latter. Now go and look at the paper and Google “NASA shiptracks”. That’s what a few aerosols can do. The albedo of the stratocumulus sheet over the ocean has to be changed by 1% to equal all of the CO2 ‘greenhouse signal’. I’d like to know if that modelled result is real: if it is, and a deployed cloud ship should give us that information, then all bets are off and the UK can save itself £18 billion per year for the next forty years. A few million spent on research is good value when considered in those terms.
george e smith says: August 21, 2012 at 10:28 am
quote
These researchers; armed with their taxpayer forcibly extracted funding grants, might very well prove that a connection between man made clouds, and at least local cooling or warming is sound Physics; or maybe not.
unquote
If it shows that the aerosol models are wrong then all the climate models are wrong. If it shows the aerosol physics are correct then it means that small changes in aerosols can alter the heat balance by large amounts,. I want to know in either case because I think we have disrupted the aerosol production system of the oceans by smoothing them with spilled oil and surfactant. In that case CO2 is a red herring and all the efforts on trading and storage are misguided. If we clean up our rivers then the homeostatic mechanisms can begin to work once more — if the physics is right.
quote
The whole point is that whether the thesis is correct or not, implementing such solutions on a scale that could do any global effect at all, is totally impractical. [] …millions of tethered steam engine cloud making ships all over the world’s oceans, cluttering up the place, and altering marine habitats willy nilly; []
unquote
You are making the same error that Willis made in his piece earlier: the effort required to increase low level cloud albedo over the oceans is tiny. Small effort, large effect — read Salter and Latham’s original paper and see the figures. It’s a couple of thousand wind-powered ships deployed at critical locations. The opposite is also true: the production of natural cooling aerosols may be disrupted by a small error on our part: Have a look at the Gulf oil spill and examine the NASA images. there is one perfect illustration of my idea with a large area of lower albedo fringed by cloud, the sky above the spilled oil starved of aerosols, swept clean. Or not, of course, not if I’m wrong about how easy it is to disrupt aerosol production. The cloud ship demonstrator may well test that.
quote
I don’t care whether the physics behind this notion is more solid than quantum chromodynamics. It would be a complete waste of earth resources, to even think of building such contraptions, no matter how ingeniously engineered they could be.
unquote
The waste of resources is going on as you write: trillions of dollars thrown away, landscapes ruined, industry wrecked, unemployment, high food prices, starvation in the third world while food is used to power cars. If this proposal leads to a better understanding of the Earth’s cooling system then it would be cheap at a thousand times the price.
quote
A single hurricane in an hour can play with more energy than all the nuke energy humans have stockpiled. This idea ranks with picking locust swarms out of the air one by one with chopsticks.
unquote
Here’s a better metaphor: this idea ranks with disrupting the mating rituals of a desert-full of locusts with a few grams of pheromone, preventing their mating and meaning the swarm never forms.
The science is not settled, no matter what you say. It needs to be done. This proposal means we will know more about the climate and its regulation by natural processes. I applaud it, I welcome it and I’m appalled that anyone can be so wedded to their hostility to science, real, measured and unmodelled science, that they cannot see its value. Up to now I thought that ‘the science is settled’ meme was exclusively the province of the warmists. I am disappointed that this turns out not to be the case.
JF
Mike M: ignorance costs more than research. The proposal is to build a demonstrator, not carpet the Pacific with the things. UK wastes £18 billion per year on CO2 mitigation and a few billions spent on research which proves that unnecessary is money well spent.
On a related topic, see the following: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/03/30/3177693.htm#artBookmarks
The first paragraph says:
“A new study has found clouds left behind by aeroplanes are causing more global warming than the carbon dioxide they release.”
“rtist’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?”
Would it? Not that it’s relevant to the topic, of course, but there’s no particular reason that vessel need be unstable. Of course, if the stacks are spraying water fast enough, they’d function much like a reverse keel – as the wind made the ship heel, the force from the stacks would tend to push the ship back upright.
A similar idea was put forth by Lockheed many years go, but it’s purpose was to wash smog out of Los Angeles air. Since the smog cycle there consists of 1) air (and smog) flowing out to sea at night, followed by 2) air flowing back onshore in the morning (to pick up more smog), followed by 1) again, Lockheed reasoned that spraying a lot of water into the air offshore at night would remove the previous day’s pickup.
They proposed using an F-1 rocket engine propellant turbo pump, which could pump more than 40,000 gallons of water a minute into a jet reaching 2,700 feet altitude. California wasn’t willing to try it, which is a pity. Pumping large quantities of water places is the most highly energy-leveraged thing humanity can do ( without nuclear reactions). One thing I wondered about was the ozone effect of all the halogens in seawater. I doubt it would have been much, but this was on a measurable scale.