Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve written before about the “no-regrets” option when one is faced with uncertainty. It relates to one of my favorite rules of thumb. I often live my life by my “rules of thumb”, general guidelines for when things aren’t clear. One that I’ve used for decades goes like this:
“Do what you know, and let the rest go.”
I use it when say I’m stuck on a building project, maybe I’m not sure how to install a particular window. It’s easy to get paralyzed by the decision, or to force the decision, or to make the wrong decision. But what I do instead is, I know there’s always things I can do that I know will move the project forwards. So I do what I know will be of use, what I know the project needs, and I let the unknowns take care of themselves for a while. More things are always revealed in the fullness of time, and meanwhile, the workshop still needs sweeping and a hundred important tasks await. I do what I know, and I let the rest go.
These days this same concept is called the “no-regrets option”, a much clearer term but not a rule of thumb. Applied to the vexing CO2 madness, a “no-regrets option” is an action we won’t regret, whether or not CO2 is the secret knob controlling global temperature. I’m convinced CO2 is not, but others disagree. A no-regrets option is one that is of value no matter which side is right.
So I was pleased to see the following in Science Magazine (paywalled here )
I live in the redwood forest. The redwood trees harvest the ocean fog very efficiently. Often in the morning the open ground will be bone dry, while the ground under the redwoods is quite wet, with a slow, steady rain falling underneath the majestic trees. Having watched that for decades, it was no surprise that people have started utilizing the same phenomenon … we’re just not that good at it yet, but that’s changing. I wrote about harvesting fog using nets in my piece called Climate, Caution, and Precaution. Water shortages (along with floods, curiously) are supposed to be one of the Seven Horsemen of Thermal Apocalypse, all the alarmists agree. But we already face this problem today, so how about we attack the problem and not the CO2, duh? That way more people have more water, no matter what CO2 does or doesn’t do.
So I was fascinated to see the possibility of using biomimicry to improve fog harvesting techniques. Since Nature Communications is also paywalled, I did an end run and found the paper from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, available here.
In that paper they elucidate the secrets of the ancients. Here’s how the cactus fog harvesting system works:
How sweet is that? It illustrates a principle I call “NWA”, for “Nature Wins Again”, life always comes up with some ingenious solution.
So what are my conclusions from all of this?
1. Any problems that might result from a few degrees of temperature rise are ongoing problems today, and have been for millennia. Humans have always and ever been plagued by droughts and floods and heat waves and rising sea levels and cold spells and storms and the like.
2. Attacking the problems is the no-regrets solution, duh. Since all of these problems exist today, if we work to alleviate them, we’re better off no matter if it warms or not, or whether CO2 is the culprit or not.
3. Nature itself, that first and best of scientists, has run literally millions and millions of experiments in how to most effectively harvest water from the air. We’d be fools not to learn from and build on that previous scientific work, in this and all aspects of science, and in fact biomimicry is being used in more and more arenas.
4. “Imagination is free,” as my beloved father used to say. Seeing this kind of work reminds me that the only limits to, say, how much water we have are the limits of our imagination.
So what I’m doing is throwing open this thread to a discussion of actual examples of viable no-regrets solutions, whether they involve biomimicry or not. The requirements are that they have to solve problems caused by the weather, and they have to be dirt-cheap for widespread adoption. Here’s one:
Bargain Technology Allows Chile To Harvest Fog For Thirsty Village
July 18, 1993|By Gary Marx, Tribune Staff Writer.
CHUNGUNGO, Chile — The landscape around this poor fishing village is rocky and bone dry. But Daisy Sasmayo’s garden is in full bloom, with flowers, vegetables and a young apple tree.
This once-parched community now has its first fresh water in decades, thanks to an ingenious system of plastic nets fixed on a nearby mountain to capture fog as it rolls in from the ocean.
“When the water first started flowing last year, we went crazy,” Sasmayo said as she gently watered her garden. “We had a huge party and were dousing each other with water. It has changed our lives 100 percent.”
Regards to everyone,
w.
[UPDATE] Secret source WS sends me the paper, my thanks to him, from which I extract this:
Astounding. The barbs act as a one way valve for the coalescing of the drops, pumping the water horizontally without one single moving part … as a man with a portion of a patent for a kind of pump, I can only dip my head in awe.
… what an astounding force life is, exploring and constantly perfecting survival in the harshest conditions.
w.
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Willis: Your throwing open this discussion to our collective ingenuity and experience is like the cactus and the redwood harvesting fog. It is also like your rule of thumb, “do what you know, let the rest go,” because while you do what you know, other knowledge coheres and adheres from further experience and observation, more discussion and reflection, sleeping on it and serendipity, all like dew from the air. Fortune favors the prepared mind; and, boy, is your mind prepared. Thanks!
Fog is a highly effective atmospheric cleansing agent when it comes to CO2 and N2O – and much better at it than rain. This is where acid fog comes from. H2O +CO2 give H2CO3 which is carbonic acid. The cactus are dealing with these acids as the atmosphere is cleaned. I wouldn’t call it fresh distilled water . Maybe it should go through a limestone filter first. Down wind of a big city would be the last place to collect this “water”.
Laurie Bowen says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Depends. Where I live there’s lots of houses, and it’s pretty much quiche-eaters wall to wall, so it takes an act of Parliament to cut down a redwood tree here. Which is crazy, because in addition to the fire danger you can’t get rid of them easily because they sprout from the stumps when you cut them … a habit that makes any claim that they are “X” years old very suspect. All that means is that the old tree from whose stump this one sprouted died X years ago. But the stump never died at all, so that living organism may in fact have been alive for thens of thousands of years.
Probably.
All the redwood forests I know of are natural. They don’t grow well from seed, although it can be done.
However, people plant redwoods around their houses … and the ones that do almost invariably regret it. The limbs fall off of them in windstorms, and each limb can weigh a couple hundred pounds (100kg) or more … not good for the cars, the house, or the neighbors. And when a 200′ tree falls …
Gosh, it’s too tough, so your advice is to throw up your hands?
We have no such “God’s-eye view” to “ascertain realities”, but you are foolish if you let that stop you … because I know that if, say, farmers in Africa are re-introduced to their ancient water-saving techniques and use them to be more insulated from drought, there’s no way I’m gonna regret that.
Am I sure of that, is it “reality”, am I “seeing historically”?
No, one is never sure of anything. All we can do is the best we can, pick what today looks like a no-regrets option. What we don’t want to do, though, is to follow your myopic advice and declare the no-regrets option an imaginary being. It’s not, it’s very real.
w.
Something tells me this kind of adaptation is not unique among plants. This cactus is probably just the best studied of those.
Also, I remember reading about a microscopic study of water transport on the surface of some (Australian?) desert frog’s skin. Or maybe it was a lizard, I can’t recall. I couldn’t google it up without a lot of effort; it could have been a poster I saw on a wall at one of the places where I worked. All I recall is that the mechanism described was very similar to how these cactus spines work. The claim was that those animals’ skin can conduct water up form the moist sand to where they can consume it. If somebody here knows what it is about, I’ll appreciate a refresher.
All I could find was this report about green tree frogs using the temperature gradient to fog up:
http://www.livescience.com/16325-desert-frogs-collect-water.html
And then there is water-holding frog, also in Australia. Literally, a leaping cactus. But not quite the thing I remember reading about. It was not about storing water when it is available, but rather condensing and transporting whatever little water there was on the ground.
Curt says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:40 pm
You are correct, Curt, and the devil is always in the details … do them right on a “no-regrets” project and you’ll have no regrets, but if you get the details wrong on any project you’ll likely regret it …
w.
… Been There, Regretted That …
There is a technology from Japan used in Namibia that takes water out of the air by a refrigeration cycle.
The Giant Redwoods were recognised to have a local microclimate created by their own numbers in the 1920’s. Dr St Barbe Baker, founder of Men of the Trees, made it his personal mission to have the US gov’t protect a large enough area to preserve the ability of the trees to harvest the water. They do this harvesting not by condensation only as described above, but by each tree pushing into the local air about 500 gallons of water early in the daylight hours. This creates a fog in the grove that would otherwise not exist and which is absent when there are not enough trees close together.
The super-saturated air then condenses on the tree branches and trunks with the net effect of harvesting moisture from the incoming sea air. The air on its own would not condense nearly as much. Once disturbed (by cutting or thinning) the effect is lost permanently.
He told me he originally tried to get 9000 acres set aside and was successful, then it was successfully increased to 20,000 acres. I do not know the current protected area but is is large enough so that the fog-enhancing effect can still be seen today.
Another fascinating post, Willis – thanks!
Regarding unforseen consequences, there would almost certainly be some. I can’t think of a single human innovation for the increase of human comfort & convenience which hasn’t. We deal with them as the arise; the alternative is to live as nature intended – copy your genes to another container, nurture and protect that container until it’s viable, and then roll over and die. In 2.5 words, brutish & short. For humans, at least, it’s been a net-positive; you only have to look at a chart of average life expectancy for the last several hundred years to confirm that.
A good example is one raised somewhere above. Human building and development does create large, sometimes vast, impermeable surfaces, which inevitably increases runoff, and we have mostly dealt with it. Only the poorest and remotest American villages now lack building and zoning codes which require detention ponds, controlled outflow, etc, as well as setting minima for permiable surfaces.
My big idea: The fine ciliae of those cacti seem to act as nucleation points to form droplets. How about nano-technology, such as carbon nano-tubes? Great mats of the stuff strategically placed. Might San Francisco meet all its water needs with a few square kilometers?
JFD says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:49 pm
Curiously, in parts of Oregon (I think it is) it’s illegal to take rainwater off your own roof for your own use … it’s considered a public resource, so you can’t personally claim it. Or so I’m told … Oregonians, what say ye?
Indeed, good examples all.
The best news about our global water resource is that most of it goes to agriculture, and most agriculture is horrifically wasteful of water … which means that we have a large resource that we can (and no doubt eventually will) divert from agriculture for other purposes with no loss of production, because it’s just being wasted at present.
w.
JFD reminded me of global water. I’ve read that something like 40% of the water used in Israel is desalinated, because prices are below a buck per cubic meter (less than half a US cent per gallon).
However, cheaper is always better, so I’d say pursuing desalination technology is certainly a no-regrets option.
w.
Stephen Brown says:
February 21, 2013 at 2:11 pm
Amazing, interesting, and very well written. There’s so much we have to learn …
Nice.
w.
clipe says:
February 21, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Terraforming arid or otherwise inhospitable environments? Qualifies for me …
Thanks,
w.
Snake Oil Baron says:
February 21, 2013 at 2:59 pm
I have long described that as “If you cut down the trees, you cut down the clouds”. The harvesting, storage, and transpiration of water by forests form a huge part of both the water and weather cycles in forested areas.
There are instances (no cites to hand, sorry) where the clearcutting of a forest caused the springs to dry up. Makes perfect sense to me …
w.
Curt says:
February 21, 2013 at 3:11 pm
I lived for a year or so just up the hill from there, in Waimea, and have visited there. They did the first project in “OTEC”, ocean thermal energy conversion. The idea is seductive—use the temperature difference between the hot surface water and the cold deepwater to generate power. And you can do it … but the various losses make it just marginally productive. You’d have to go huge to get city-scale power.
Where this same temperature differential is being used, however, is in tropical resorts to cool the rooms. Plastic pipe, fans, a few pumps, circulate the cold water past the fan, cool the room. Other places have used plastic pipe in the concrete slab, downside is you can’t do that as a retrofit …
Since air conditioning is a huge cost for a tropical resort, this represents a no-regrets option. Note that it still is driven by fossil fuels … it’s just much more efficient at converting carbon to coolth …
Note, by the way, that this is what we usually call “technology”, which means getting more for less.
w.
… dang, sometimes my wordsmithing even surprises me … converting carbon to coolth, indeed.
JFD says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:49 pm
In the 1920s to the 1960s, farmers and ranchers in remote areas used cisterns to store rainwater trapped and transported by roof gutters. This is still done in dry islands such as Bermuda. Today, Master Gardners are teaching and encouraging the concept of “water harvesting”, which in principle is the same as cisterns but the rainwater is stored in aboveground galvanized tanks and used for plants.
This is actively encourage and subsidized here in Perth. Someone calculated the payback on the cost of the tank compared to scheme water is in excess of 500 years. I.e. it’s a ludicrous waste of money and resources when water from dams is available.
I’ve added an update with comments to the head post, along with this graphic.
w.
Philip Bradley says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:32 pm
One other point about wire shade frames is that with the right wire they could be shipped flat and bent to the required shape…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Philip, you might do what I am doing. I have goats and sheep and live in North Carolina where it gets hot in the summer. I am using 16 ft cattle panels to make a ‘Green house’ I am using cement blocks (3 stacked) to lift the “roof’ panels off the ground and give me raised beds and a higher head height. A friend used T-posts and one panel as sides and another panel as a hooped roof to give a very nice big ‘building’ link 1 and another idea link 2
The panels will allow a sun screen fabric in the summer and clear plastic in the winter and hopefully keep out the goats, sheep and my neighbor’s llama who now seems to be living with us.
Mike Hebb says:
February 21, 2013 at 3:14 pm
Mmmm … not sure I’m buying that, at least without citations. I think what’s meant is that fog has greater surface area than rain, and thus absorbs more things out of the air. I can believe that. It also tends to form closer to the ground than clouds, where atmospheric aerosols natural and man-made are most prevalent.
Part B of the story, however, is that rain falls to the ground, along with its nucleus (the particle it originally formed around) plus whatever it contains, while fog often just dissipates and evaporates back into the air, along with the nucleating particle plus what it contains. Unless it’s collected by cactus of course … I’m sure you can see the difficulty with describing fog as an “atmospheric cleansing agent”. Things are flushed from the atmosphere by rain, it is a cleansing agent, but they are often just stored in the fog and returned to the atmosphere, with no cleansing.
I do take your point, however, that fog water will be chemically different than rainwater.
Neither rainwater nor cactuswater is remotely like distilled water. Both are slightly acidic, carbonic acid from dissolved CO2. Both formed around a nucleus, which could be a dust particle, a crystal of sea salt, or one of a host of tiny life-forms. Limestone or indeed any kind of filtering is always a plus.
Downwind of a city? Depends on the city, but it doesn’t sound like the greatest of plans … hard to say. It may be a difference that makes no difference.
If you live in say San Francisco you breathe the full concentration of whatever air pollution is in the air, soot, smog, unburned hydrocarbons goes in your lungs right there on the spot, 24/7 …
I’m not entirely convinced that if I catch my drinking water as fogwater each day somewhere outside the city, it will have more pollution than living in the city …
Finally, I’ve been in that area around Peru and Chile, it’ll be sea fog there, coming off the ocean.
Interesting points,
w.
Philip Bradley says:
February 21, 2013 at 4:06 pm
“Someone calculated the payback on the cost of the tank compared to scheme water is in excess of 500 years. I.e. it’s a ludicrous waste of money and resources when water from dams is available.”
I live in a hilly section of Los Angeles. My house and yard have a well-engineered system of underground drainage pipes to take excess rainwater straight to the street, in order to minimize the chance of the hillisides giving way in a giant mudslide when the ground gets saturated.
When I bought the house, I thought that since I was already halfway there with this piping system, it would be easy to install a large cistern at the low end of my property to collect this water for later use in the dry season. Even with my “head start”, a few back-of-the-envelope calculations led me to payback times similar to what you quote. There are incredible economies of scale in water storage. There is no way individual water storage makes sense when there is any kind of decent central water system.
Gail, that’s the kind of thing I want, but scaled down to 30 cm high. I considered trying to use chicken wire, but decided it was too malleable and you can’t push it into the ground the way you can a fairly rigid wire, and I needed something that would keep a hoop shape.
One other thought occured to me, is that lengths of wire of the type they make coat hangers out of would be ideal, but where to get them?
Beautiful picture. Makes me think of the sundew, dewing it’s thing:
“Applied to the vexing CO2 madness, a “no-regrets option” is an action we won’t regret, whether or not CO2 is the secret knob controlling global temperature.”
I sometimes promote the carbon gobbling of moso bamboo, even though I don’t give a bugger. (I’m told it’s some kind of world champ at that.) But talk about a no-regrets option… and one that’s edible!
The right bamboo is one of the best insulators, because you can cut down on wind, parching and chill without turbulence, air stagnation, branch breakage etc. (This is where I bore everyone about my moso.) My home twenty years ago was a wreck after every big southerly gale. Now, with a forest of moso protecting to the south, I have to check the tops of gum trees in the distance to know if there is a gale. I can’t wait to lead the grove round the other side of the house to reduce those nagging westerlies to pleasant zephyrs.
I enjoy reading Willis because he reminds me that the only commodity in short supply is ideas. Today I ran low on something, we’re flooding so I can’t get more of it from town, so I’ve been forced to try something else. I think it’s going to work better than the thing I ran out of…the thing that “peaked”, as it were.
Ideas!
When I took up farming to help raise my six children plus two nieces that sorely needed raising, I found it took about 3 years to become a reasonably knowledgeable mixed farmer – planting crops, raising sheep, ducks, geeese, chickens, dairy cow and a horse. Mastering administering a long hypodermic to a holstein with mastitis was my PhD.
But along the way you learn some things by being a careful observer. I remember trying to keep my large truck garden alive in during a drought by digging a well in a ravine grown over with ash and rigging up a pump. Starting just before sunrise, I went out to start digging and I noticed that the outside leaves of the cabbage had fallen almost to the ground and each bowl made by the leaves had gathered a tiny pond of water in it by capturing the dew. To my surprise as the sun rose, the leaves lifted up back up to the cabbage head and the water ran down to the roots. Each cabbage head sported a dark ring of wet soil around the roots. These clever plants already new about climate’s changeability.
A man-made water collector of elegant simplicity can be made by stretching plastic over a hole dug down a foot or two into which a cup has been placed at the bottom of the hole. A small stone is placed in the middle of the plastic creating a shallow inverted cone. At night, the water evaporating from the soil in and below the bottom of the hole condenses on the plastic, runs to the apex of the cone and drips into the cup. I’m told this works even in fairly dry regions.
Next we will be hearing about acid fog created by CO2 + H2O. Good grief.
About 0.2-1% of CO2 absorbed into fresh water is turned into carbonic acid. The rest is just absorbed. The rate of absorbtion is somewhat limited by the surface to volume ratio but for fog and rain water is the same: 1.28 g per kg of H2O. The tiny carbonic acid portion explains why rainwater has a lower pH than water which has reacted with the ground (like, in a lake).
+++++++
Any water-soluble gas becomes more soluble as the temperature decreases, due to the thermodynamics of the reaction: GAS (l) GAS (g). The entropy change, S, of this reaction is positive because the gas molecules are less constrained than the gas molecules in solution. The change in Free energy of reaction with an increase in temperature is -S. This effect is particularly large for gases like CO2 that undergo specific reactions with water.
Equilibrium is established between the dissolved CO2 and H2CO3, carbonic acid.
(2) CO2 (l) + H2O (l) H2CO3 (l)
This reaction is kinetically slow. At equilibrium, only a small fraction (ca. 0.2 – 1%) of the dissolved CO2 is actually converted to H2CO3. Most of the CO2 remains as solvated molecular CO2
http://www.thuisexperimenteren.nl/infopages/Carbondioxide%20in%20water%20equilibrium.doc
++++++++
So let’s not get all excited about living downwind from a city and collecting ‘acid rainwater’.
Experiments dealing with CO2 in water are easy to perform:
Collect come rainwater – taste it.
Boil it and let it cool. Taste it again (No CO2)
Let it stand overnight in an open glass. Taste it again (CO2 absorbs, changing the flavour)
Freeze it (loses CO2)
Melt it again in a covered glass and taste it (water without CO2)
Let it stand overnight in an open glass. Taste it again (Co2 absorbs again)
Carbonic acid will not leave so easily so the tests are not identical, but you will soon get the message: Water absorbs CO2, and always did. There is no CO2 in ice or boiled water.
++++++++
Carbonic acid is a weak acid that dissociates in two steps[2].
(3) H2CO3 + H2O H3O+ + HCO3- pKa1 (25 °C) = 6.37
(4) HCO3- + H2O H3O+ + CO32- pKa2 (25 °C) = 10.25
– ibid
++++++++
Fog is a highly effective atmospheric cleansing agent when it comes to CO2 and N2O – and much better at it than rain.
Only if it forms in the local area from water vapour. As it achieves a liquid droplet state, it immediately absorbs CO2. CO2 is constantly entering and leaving the hydrosphere because water has three states only one of which (liquid) absorbs CO2.
+++++++++
…the pKa most reported for carbonic acid (pKa1 = 6.37) is not really the true pKa of carbonic acid. Rather, it is the pKa of the equilibrium mixture of CO2 (l) and carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is actually a much stronger acid than this, with a true pKa1 value of 3.58. However these values are also temperature dependent.
– ibid
Great read Willis!
How might his thing impact fog?
Interesting rate of development and construction.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/fastgrowing-sunspot.html
Curt wrote;
“*Note to skydragon slayers: The metal foil layer in home insulation acts as a radiative barrier to heat transfer. (The spun fiberglass acts as a conductive/convective barrier.) In winter, even though this foil is colder than the inside of the house, it helps “keep the house warm”. In reality, of course, it’s the furnace that heats the house, and the foil helps reduce radiative heat loss by reflection and absorption/re-radiation.”
Thanks for the gratuitous poke, although it seems unrelated to the topic at hand. I for one fully understand the difference between a radiative barrier and a conductive/convective barrier. Please note that the foil does NOT reduce heat loss, it merely SLOWS the velocity at which heat flows through the system. Talk of “reducing heat loss” is SILLY and shows only a superficial knowledge about how thermal systems work.
Cheers, Kevin.