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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Curt, as a follow up you might want to consider two houses;
1) Walls filled with fiberglass and wrapped with vinyl siding
2) Walls filled with fiberglass and wrapped with aluminum siding (a reflective barrier to heat loss)
What is the appreciable difference between the energy efficiency between these two houses (assuming everything else is equal, wall thickness, window area, exposure, local climate, etc.) ?
You might be surprised to learn that the difference is zero. Since the velocity of heat through the fiberglass is MUCH slower than the velocity of heat through either the vinyl or aluminum IT (the fiberglass) becomes the rate limiting step and the aluminum or vinyl is just along for the ride and doesn’t become a barrier to heat flow when considered within a total system.
Back at ya, Kevin.
The reverse property, termed the “Lotus-leaf effect, is the principle for novel designs of super-hydrophobic and “self cleaning” functional-materials.
Named, strangely enough, after the Lotus-leaf, this is more subtle than just the molecular chemical composition of the material. In this case, the ‘nano-structure” really is an appropriate use of the much abused “nano” word.
Some reviews:
http://www.fisica.unige.it/~boragno/CorsoNano/Lezione%208/Marmur2004.pdf
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar040224c (paywalled)
And a CGI simulation followed by the real thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHcSrNRU5E&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Willis,
My ‘rule of thumb’ is “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow”.
My ‘logic’ is that if it doesn’t need to be done today then maybe you don’t need to do it at all!
Anyways, your readers may be interested in this article,
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/water-from-thin-air-aussie-eds-airdrop-an-international-hit-20111110-1n8ks.html
A very interesting contribution, indeed~!
A very nice paper. There is likely some interesting chemistry involved in this as well, in the types of coatings/waxes and the molecular makeup of those spines.
If you take inspiration from a flock of starlings or a swarm of bees then:
Laurie Bowen says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:36 pm
Just curious as you say you live in the redwood forest, ” . . . . “the trees may live 2000 years (compared to 3000 for the sequoia), a more typical life span for the giants is 500-700 years.”
When these trees get [too] old to live . . . do we harvest them or do ‘we’ let them just go back to nature or do we rail that the ‘deaths’ are man made?
And being from “not the redwood forest area” wouldn’t trying to plant a redwood forest of my own be considered introducing and a non-native species as there are none here now.
Do you reckon that the ones that planted the redwood forest regret it? They never got to harvest one tree.
Until we can ascertain realities, see “historically”, and circumspect there is no such a critter as The No-Regrets Option.
Redwoods are Sequoia – contra Willis. The botanical designation is Sequoia sempervirens. It’s also called the coastal redwood and grows from the central California coast north into southernmost coastal Oregon. The “Big Trees” of the Sierra Nevada are related – both fall in the Taxodium family – but they are not Sequoia and their botanical designation is Sequoiadendron gigantuem. Though they are often referred to as “Giant Sequoia,” they aren’t, and their leaves look very little like a redwood’s, rather more like an incense cedar’s in fact. Loggers tried harvesting Big Trees and ended referring to them as “grape stake trees.” They are prone to shatter when they fall and the wood is very brittle. They were also so big that a crew would fall one and then realize, “uh, that’s really big! How are we going to move it?” It never became economically viable to harvest the trees. The redwood and big tree are respectively that tallest and most massive trees on the planet.
Sempervirens in contrast is a tree with very useful wood (old growth wood) and was harvested madly in the later 19th and 20th centuries. More fortunes were made harvesting redwood than mining gold in California.
The redwood being harvested now is mostly second, third and probably fourth and even fifth growth trees – they grow pretty (very) rapidly in open conditions. What makes “old growth” wood valuable isn’t the species so much but the fact it grew under dense forest cover, very slowly. Annual rings are narrow. The timber is also very straight and stable. The same is true for Douglas fir and is why so much available lumber these days is crap. You need slow-grown trees for the best wood. There are very few stands of old growth redwood left, but some is still harvested. The best redwood and d.f are generally exported and the second and third quality material goes to Home Depot and Loewes. The best wood is so expensive that only the likes of Bill Gates can afford it. I worked for the forest service long ago and even then a single “over mature” tree could pay for much of the preparation for a timber sale.
Both redwoods and big trees trees are pretty resistant to fire and in fact need [fire] to reproduce efficiently.
Willis, you are a fascinating science-based naturalist, if I can call you so. In my limited experience I can compare you only to Helmut Tributch, professor emeritus at Freie Universitaet Berlin and one of my good friends. Many years ago he had publishied this book:
http://www.amazon.de/Leben-leben-lernte-Physikalische-Technik/dp/B003WUILLK/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361510866&sr=1-10
which I translated into Japanese a few years thereafter.
Low energy tidal pump to pull up cold ocean water.
The upfront is a bit expensive, but done once should be low on maintenance. Enclose a small bay (a couple of hundred yards across or smaller). trench and bury one or several large pipes (2-3′ diameter) that reach down into the deep ocean. Let them enter the enclosed bay at the bottom. The next step I leave up to you to solve. Put one-way valves on the pipes, so that when the tide goes out, water doesn’t push down into the deep ocean. Do the same at the bay entrance, but in the opposite. Open outwards when the tide goes out. Now you have a tide based pump that brings in cold water when the tide is rising, and discards warm water when the tide is on the way out.
Now you will have ice-cold deep ocean water pulled up every day into the bay. Use as you see fit.
A similar thing is done by some trees in Gran Canaria’s mountains, in the Canary Islands, Spain. We call what they do “ordeñar las nubes”, which translates as “to milk the clouds”,
Myron Mesecke says:
February 21, 2013 at 1:15 pm
A problem for one is an advantage for another. So don’t worry about it. The way life works is you do what’s best for you and help those who help you.
In civilization, we recognize indirect help. Hence, we help people we don’t know, including those who don’t directly do anything for us. Some in this civilized world now take advantage of that principle. Consequently, we now have a giant parasite pretending to help us.
The answer is, don’t forget you must take care of yourself FIRST. Only then can you help others. That means you have to be able to set limits. Tell the parasite no.
Oops, the parasite has guns, and it turns out to be a predator. The good news is, all I have to do is run faster than you.
Sometimes a “No Regrets” option is so big, mundane and obvious that it gets overlooked. Here’s the one I have been working on for a few decades (in the Pacific NW):
Geo-engineering with Trees in the Fog Belt
Sample Location: Coastal Marin/Sonoma County CA
Primary Objective: Mitigate effects of floods and drought
Goals:
Maximize landscape’s water retention capacity.
Maximize biological carbon above, on and below the ground.
Minimize wildfire risk and severity.
Increase height and lateral spread of live tree vegetation.
Actions and Results:
1: Thin existing forests, variable by species, density and site; assume 50% reduction of live stems overall.
Harvest of accessible logs produces income to offset expenses.
Inaccessible logs and dead snags are left for forest/soil health and wildlife.
Trees freed of competition increase in height and width, capture more sunshine.
Above: Increased biomass (live crown) harvests more fog, buffers more rain above ground.
On: Forest floor biomass shields the ground, absorbs and retains water, slows evaporation.
Below: Increased biomass and voids (live & dead roots) absorb more water, mitigate runoff.
Higher trees and wider crowns project fog drip outside the forest footprint.
2: Expand forest footprint by transplanting young trees into grassy, open spaces.
The naturally regenerated seedlings at forest edge/fog drip line are thinned for maximum vigor.
The best culled seedlings are transplanted densely just outside the fog drip line.
New trees are thinned over time to maintain canopy closure, shielding the soil.
Iterative planting/thinning cycle continuously expands forest surface area and biomass volume.
Conclusion:
By assisting the largest plant species on the planet with their natural tendency to bind carbon and water in the widest possible band above and below ground, we achieve an exceptionally high benefit to cost ratio.
Flood and drought mitigation, water quality, timber volume and quality, biological and structural diversity, wildlife habitat and aesthetic value of forests can be simultaneously optimized with occasional, surgical human intervention with common, inexpensive technology. Cultivate the ever-expanding and lingering pocket of vapor, mist and clouds in and around the trees, and visions of the Pacific Northwest rainforest begin to emerge. Long-forgotten springs re-appear and streams run longer into the dry season.
Achieving a persistent and self-replicating hydrological and carbon sequestering mechanism on the largest possible scale in arid climates is arguably the lowest hanging climate change mitigation fruit available. In this case we are intentionally changing the local micro-climate to moderate the effects of inevitable extreme weather. Our tree friends want nothing more than to harvest atmospheric CO2 to erect carbon towers for their solar panels/fog collectors, while their roots carve out massive underground water storage tanks, holding back some of the winter floods so they can take long sips during the summer drought. We ought to help them out wherever and whenever we can. They do more than 99.99% of the work, anyways.
Plastic netting to gather fog? So who woke up and looked at a spider’s web?
I’m giving up on cat litter. With 7 cats, every week or so I’m buying a large plastic jug of “scoopable, clumping” clay-ish litter. It says it’s “septic safe”, can be flushed, presumably that means it dissolves away until it will harmlessly leave the septic tank to be dissipated in the leach field.
After being used, it’s collected into a bucket, gets dumped outdoors, adding to a large growing clay-ish mound that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, no matter how much precipitation falls.
This last time, I re-noticed there are a few pots of dirt on the porch with remains of former houseplants, doing nothing… And the cats are now happily using the old potting soil.
Offhand, I think I can get plain (non-fertilizing) soil by the large bag cheaper than “premium” cat litter. Disposal’s easy enough.
And strangely enough, cats don’t have any problem with doing their business on dirt. Truly amazing.
I wonder if I can keep the used stuff in a bin or something, maybe turn it over every so often, perhaps use it for growing some plants some day…
Meanwhile, I have 50+ identical rectangular plastic jugs, that are demonstrated to be UV resistant and can survive the great outdoors, with a few oddball others. Not quite enough to glue together for a uniquely recycled garden tool shed. But they could be filled with water and used for a greenhouse passive heating back wall. If I would build a small greenhouse. It’ll take awhile to gather enough pre-fertilized potting soil. But, still sounds like a worthwhile project.
I agree, harvesting fog one place deprives moisture another place?
Willis the thing that I like that was “discovered” in nature was hollow fibre which is a copy of “soft and cuddly” polar bear fur, as we all know there are so few polar bears left that they cannot be hunted. Man can still have nice warm clothes when he goes to have a cuddle with the few that are left. HA HA.
Philip Bradley says:
February 21, 2013 at 5:13 pm
What my dad and I do in the UK to make large tunnel cloche is use plastic water/gas main pipe 20 mm OD you cut it into lengths (depending on how big you want the tunnel) and into the ends insert a short ( 300-400 mm) length of metal pipe by about 100 mm, flatten the exposed end and drill a 2-3 mm hole through the twin pipe section into this hole push a nail. The ends of the pipe are then pushed into the ground at 2-3 m spacings plastic sheet, shading or netting is then pulled over and anchored at both ends and tied onto the hoops with string on the nails. The ones we made have lasted 10-20 years so far with only the odd nail needing replacing.
James Bull
I cannot believe this fog collection is ”new science”.
I am sure the Victorian men of science noticed this natural phenomena.
And you are correct, CO2 has no effect on climate though there is a correlation between ice ages and high atmospheric CO2 content but correlation does not prove causation.
The trouble with so-called “no regrets” options is that they are usually subsidised or legislated interventions – i.e. they have costs. In economics, these are known an “opportunity costs”. What that means is that if you use resources for one thing, it is at the expense of an alternative use.
I am not having a go at Willis here, as he was careful to say in his head post that such options should be very cheap or free. But “no regrets” policies are usually either statements of the bleeding obvious (e.g. proper water management to cope with droughts and floods) or thinly veiled Trojan Horses for people to get the government (and taxpayers) to support their pet projects.
Things like mandated/subsidised water tanks (useless in drought) and subsidised or mandated home insulation come into this category. With regard to water, as someone pointed out above, the reason we have dams and public water pipes is that the economics, and reliability, of individual water collection suck for most people. If it works for you, by all means put in a water tank. But public policy and dollars (apart from not preventing you) should have nothing to do with it. The same goes for insulation. If it pays its way, people will do it anyway. If it doesn’t, please get your hand out of my wallet and your laws off my house.
We also need to be very wary of double-whammy social engineering dressed up as “no regrets”. A typical example, which we see all over the Western world, is artificially increasing energy costs to make things like insulation or windmills seem cheaper. They are not cheaper, of course; we are just paying through the nose twice, with a concomitant loss of wealth and competitive advantage for everyone.
Sorry for the economics lecture, but I think it’s important to distinguish between genuine advances, which make people better off (such as public water and drainage systems) and eco-loon driven mandates (such as compulsory water tanks and insulation) which do not.
Harvesting fog water certainly has possibilities in dry places, and is well worth investigating. But before so much as a dime of taxpayer money goes towards installing something like that, the alternatives (such a pipelines, desalination or just accepting that there is no cost-effective way of making the place wetter) need to be thoroughly evaluated.
On the theme of water recovery, a group of big companies and various university departments have been working on the capture of water from combustion exhausts using membranes. The project – CapWa – has demonstrated recoveries of about 40% in pilot trials on power plants in Europe. The last I heard they were starting large-scale trials on a plant in the mid-East.
The implications are obvious and very attractive, especially for arid regions. Not only could natural gas supply power, it could provide significant amounts of water – 0.8 tons for each ton of gas burnt (at 40% recovery).
Getting water from the air is a very interesting subject — and one that goes a long way back into history! Here is a link to quite a bit of info on the subject: http://www.rexresearch.com/airwells/airwells.htm
Some of the heat pipes in computer cooling use internal microgrooves to return condensed water vapor to the heated section of the pipe. Probably where nature got the idea.
Sandy Bay, Gibralta was one of the largest water harvesting systems on the planet, before the Government built a Desalination plant that now takes care of all the colony’s water needs. Built cheaply with corrugated galvanised sheets on an existing slope with collection channels built in to guide the water to storage tanks. This kept the colony viable through many years of conflict with thew Spanish. The original construction work, I think , started about 1898, and when finished covered about 10 acres. It was extended several time since then, and finished off at 34 acres.
The Rock on most days has a cloud cap, alone in an otherwise completely blue sky.
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://farm5.staticflickr.co/4016/4356861008_b2de68afba_z.jpg%3Fzz%3D1&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/brighton
/4356861008/&h=423&w=640&sz=137&tbnid=dshkrpFTWXHbRM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=137&zoom=1&usg=__L8cIl8ckEnoBJ-mpOt_70sZ9TA4=&docid=kZ7VDEWNewl7FM&sa=X&ei=y1wnUc-iOeSp0AWUm4DgBw&ved=0CIEBEPUBMAk&dur=7056
From the chinese link: “It also offers a new avenue to relieve the global water crisis and benefits to the development of the global agriculture, industry as well as military.”
How many times have I read tripe from alarmists like “We realize that this study taken by itself may be taken to dispute the existence of CAGW, but we need more money for more research to show that is not the case because CAGW is clearly so dangerous.”
I guess in China, it is more important to show that your work has application to the military in order to get money.
Frost will form on surfaces due to radiative cooling with air temperatures well above 32F. Apparently some ancient people used crude ways to collect this frost and store it in buildings, but this skill has been lost with the advent of modern refrigeration. This natural ice-making has some appeal to me as we have no electricity at our cabin and have to haul ice in on weekends. I’ve seen large amounts radiative ice form on Lake Superior on very clear nights well into May, I could collect a boatload at times if I wanted to. Seem like we could come up with ways to collect a few cubic feet of frost-ice per home to reduce refrigeration costs. Scraping frost off big white metal plates exposed to the night sky and protected from convective effects might be one way to do it.
http://www.sol-ice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Potentials-of-NSRC-in-NM-1.pdf
House cooling technology in Central Australia – the Alice Springs Hospital built in the 1920s had a basement with tunnels in it that were made with rocks that were kept damp. The building was constructed with a raised central roof turret with vents in the centre of the building’s floors so that as the hot air inside the building rose through the central corridor to the roof it drew cooled air in from the tunnels where the damp rocks were from the outside..
Since the Alice area in central Australia also has freezing nights in winter, I am not sure how they kept it warm.
All windows were shaded by steeply slanted shades – again to keep the heat out.
Maybe the hospital used solid shutters to close off the roof turret and the windows in winter.
I have seen the building but am not sure how well it worked for year round occupation.
You know, some of us (well, collectively, here in my state) have made use of this ‘runoff’ by collecting it in reservoirs; As Texas has only one naturally existing lake, all the lakes you may see mention of are (nearly all) Corps or Engineers “lakes” and from which we draw water and subsequently route through filtering / processing plants and onward to domestic and industrial consumption.
Any ‘creeks’ in my area (north central TX) look like miniatures of the Grand Canyon owing to the “gully washers” we have experienced (since the ocean’s retreat) from violent Thunderstorms delivering enough water in a such short period of time that it runs off anyway, and in the process creates those deep, deep recesses into our ‘earth’ until it finally reaches the underlying limestone ‘bed’ which seems to lie anywhere from 5 to 30 feet down (the clay, BTW, which goes for soil in these parts, after wetting becomes as impermeable as any ‘soil’ can get!)
.
My sister lives in a redwood forest south of SF, up on that ridge of hills south of Half Moon Bay. The locals trim all the big branches off that are near homes and what not, and they have very few problems with living with the trees other than the avalanche of tree duff that comes off them and fills the gutters.
That being said it is striking how the micro-climate of the (2nd growth) redwood forest is different from similar places just a mile or two away on the ridge, never mind down in Redwood City, or San Mateo down in the bay. There are days when it’s literally 20-30+ degrees cooler and “raining” while the bay is sunny and warm. Part of that is the trees , some of that rain is tree condensate, and part is that chain of hills holding back the cool pacific air.
The interesting thing about this forest is it was, for all intends, clear cut circa 1900 and regrew on the stumps and the trees are easily range 2-6+ feet in diameter, and hundred++ feet tall. The small shoots in peoples yards/clearings can easily grow 2-3 feet taller in a season.