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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Cute. Plus many interesting comments.
Spider webs, Namib beetles have long been known. What’s new here is the detailed analysis of how one of the plants works. The Imperial Valley is gradually changing over from spray irrigation to drip irrigation, financed in part by San Diegan purchases of water, because the drip irrigation wastes less water, making more available for drinking. In my yard I replaced all the sprayers with a drip system. My wife and I have experimented with collecting rain water, but it is very expensive; we collect grey water, but it makes a tiny contribution.
One weekend I went mountain biking in Idylewild (SoCal above Palm Springs) with a friend. We came whipping around a turn and ran into a grove of Sequoia. It’s on Forestry Service land, so I suspect that only FS knows they exist, well maybe some other mountain bikers and the occasional hiker. The astonishing part was that I’d been told by a supposedly knowledgeable individual that tall Sequoias could only live in NoCal. Life is way more adaptable than we think.
The use of fog collectors has been encouraged in Nepal where: “The Large Fog Collectors (LFC) are constructed using 4 x 8 meter sheets of polypropylene mesh, which when suspended on a ridgeline resembles a large volleyball net. Warm air from the Bay of Bengal moves inland during the monsoon, where it intercepts the varied topology of the Himalayan foothills. As the air moves up into valleys at higher altitudes, it mixes with cooler air and condenses, forming fog. As fog passes through the fog collectors, water droplets cling to the weave of the mesh, and filter down into a discharge system that stores the water in 20,000 liter ferro-cement tanks. Water quality testing found that all parameters meet WHO guidelines. . . . . . . . Here six large fog collectors produce an average of 1700 liters of water per day for the villages 75 inhabitants.”
I wrote about this back in 2009 ( at Bit Tooth Energy ) but a quick check shows that the references that I used have since been taken down or moved.
Portland chopping down giant sequoia
But don’t weep for the impressive representative of Nature that will be destroyed so people can enjoy Nature when outdoors as well as when watching PBS, for a temporary monument to Nature shall be built from the carcass:
Much like how the federal government mitigates the permanent loss of a full-time private sector career with several little no-benefit part time jobs. It all adds up the same, right?
How high does a bridge over a railroad have to be? Why is it a “bridge” and not just called an elevated walkway, like so many already built over roads and highways?
Heck, why do they have to go over the tracks? Have the engineers forgotten how to make underpasses? Of course, an underpass might attract unwanted animals seeking shelter from the elements, wild savage creatures like bears and homeless people.
Hoser says:
February 21, 2013 at 10:46 pm
“”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.””
Now, let’s assume you are an anarobic life form. How would this perspective go? . . . all this air is killing me . . . .
johanna says:
February 22, 2013 at 2:34 am
“The trouble with so-called ‘no regrets’ options is that they are usually subsidised or legislated interventions – i.e. they have costs.”
I think you have hit it here. As soon as there are subsidies or similar legislative incentives, there will be distortions that impose ‘regrets’. There is widespread thinking in the field that consumers demand a shorter payback time on an investment such as added insulation or efficient lighting than is rational in a calculated-ROI world, and because of this, governmental market interventions are justified for people’s own good. Many of these people never go one step further in their thinking to figure out what the secondary effects of these interventions are.
KevinK says:
February 21, 2013 at 6:49 pm
“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.”
You can’t be serious! Any resistance to thermal transfer – conductive, convective, or radiative – reduces heat loss in a system where you are trying to maintain a temperature differential (such as a house in winter). One of the first equations you encounter in an engineering heat transfer textbook is:
q = (T1^n -T2^n) / R
where q is the heat flow in Watts, T1 is the temperature of the first body, T2 is the temperature of the second body, and R is the thermal resistance. “n” is usually taken as 1 for conductive transfer, around 1 for convective, and 4 for radiative. In any case, increasing the resistance decreases the heat flow.
If there is no other energy input to either of the two bodies, increased resistance just means that the two bodies will equilibrate to a common intermediate temperature more slowly. However, if there is a steady energy input to one of the bodies, such as a furnace inside the house, that maintains its temperature, increased thermal resistance to the other body (the outside environment) provides an ongoing reduction in the rate of heat loss. That is the whole point of insulation, to reduce the requirement for heat input from the furnace. By your logic, insulation of any kind does nothing to reduce heating bills.
Your example of aluminum versus vinyl siding on the outside of a house is not appropriate. Metals, while providing a good radiative barrier, are excellent thermal conductors (very low conductive thermal resistance). To use them as an effective radiative barrier, you must utilize them so they cannot provide a good thermal conductive path. That is why multiple layers of metal foil separated by non-conductive plastic sheets are effective in the vacuum barrier of high-end vacuum flasks — they provide high resistance to radiative transfer while minimizing the reduction in conductive resistance. Similarly, a thin layer of foil inside the walls surrounded by conductively insulating materials is effective, while metal siding exposed to the outside air is not.
I would go into more detail, but I must review the design of a metal heat sink the engineers who work for me are designing to conduct heat out of our power electronics modules as effectively as possible. I do this stuff for a living.
Jakehig says:
February 22, 2013 at 2:50 am
Capture the combustion water, interesting thought. I’ll have to look it up.
Thanks, Jake,
w.
Scott says:
February 22, 2013 at 5:09 am
Interesting. In the SW US, where the air is dry, they used to freeze water that way by putting it into shallow black-colored metal trays on the flat roofs of the adobe houses. They’d set them on blocks so they could cool from both sides, and in the morning they’d have ice, even though it didn’t freeze anywhere else.
w.
Interesting indeed.
My house is sitting in the fork of a railway junction and I can tell when the contact wires get frozen by the funny sounds the trains’ pantographs emit due to excessive arcing. The onset of freezing on the contact wires usually occurs when the ambient temperature is about +2C, while nothing else in the vicinity is even close to freezing. I’ve been wondering what is it about the wires that makes them lose energy faster than everything else. Surely not the fact that they are in a strong E/M field, but I can’t think of anything else.
Around 2007 I became disgusted with the climate alarmists and so wrote my own tongue in cheek sci-fi epic ‘Gigadeath.’
Instead of warming I invented a new ice age, and of course it was caused by climate meddling. Doom and panic swept the world, but no one died. As glaciers built sea levels fell and whatever was lost in the north was more than made up by new land surfacing in the tropics. With bumper crops the population doubled, then doubled again, in sixty years with still no Gigadeath event in sight.
And then disaster (can’t have a book called Gigadeath without one) the ice age was ending! Oh noes! Doom and panic. The population was dependent upon the ice age or 40 billion people would die.
Then, of course, the day is saved by grassroots action. The people take to the fringes of low elevation glaciers and erect lattice work sunshades woven from local vegetation. Soon corporations take notice of this and start making vast logos and slogans of shades big enough to be read on the weather satellites. These sunshades collected blowing snow and then shaded it through the summer, stabilizing the sea level, extending the ice age indefinitely.
Then politics raises its ugly head so the UN gets into the act by mandating the sea level be kept where it is. China, naturally, has other ideas. They mobilize the Peoples Army, a billion strong, to cover all of Asia with white plastic mesh on aluminum poles with the intent of driving the sea even lower and laying claim to the last of the new land.
War seems certain and now the Giga-death event threatens to become Terra-death. (Now there’s a term the CAGW bunch can use to frighten small children and gullible adults alike.)
Of course the book solves all this without conflict but with a coup in China.
Even so the sunshade idea seemed like a good one especially for low elevation snow packs. If Greenpeace is so damn interested in saving the planet why aren’t they out there weaving sticks together? If they are short handed there will be the soon to be unemployed ‘Climatologists’ from the IPCC to help them out.
From Willis Eschenbach on February 22, 2013 at 10:42 am:
Just did that, as something was curious about the idea. The company involved, DNV KEMA (Netherlands) gave it its own site:
http://www.watercapture.eu/
I suppose there’s a perfectly reasonable reason why the only alternate language for this EU site by a Netherlands company highlighting technology of potentially worldwide benefit from South America to Africa to the Middle East, is Mandarin Chinese.
The test results give the interesting tale. The temperatures are well below boiling, the water wants to condense. The “technology” is tubes of water-permeable membrane under vacuum, placed in the exhaust stream, so the condensing water is drawn into the tubes then collected.
As people who’ve had an old coal furnace have found out after changing over to a “modern” furnace burning oil or gas, “high efficiency” heating exhaust is cooler, the water will condense out. Which will then mix with the sulfurous residue to make acid and eat out the old masonry chimney pretty quick. Which is why I had to put up a new stainless chimney on this house.
“Combustion capture” would really take nothing more than a long enough run of exhaust pipe to allow for cooling and condensation, with a water catching setup at the bottom (drain type P-trap perhaps). Add some crushed limestone to kill the acid, and the water will have lots of uses. And it will already be cleaner than what a lot of the world considers drinking water.
For the same reason FROST can cover an entire windscreen (make that a windshield for US readership) when the air temp is above freezing – (quite literally:) Radiative Cooling!
The EM field (ostensibly from the current through/voltage on the wires) you are considering has nada to do with it.
If you notice, is is more noticeable on still nights rather than those nights where the wind is blowing, as the blowing-wind ‘air’ will pick up (be in contact with) ‘warmth’ from the surrounding earth, pavement, et al and this in turn when coming in contact with the windshield (or wire) will _not_ allow the radiative cooling effect to lower the windshield’s (or wire’s) temperature as low as without the wind, and perhaps even keeping the windshield (or wire) _above_ the local dew point (termperature) such that no dew (or frost) forms.
.
_Jim: my car’s is parked right next to those wires (less than ten metres away), and it occasionally gets frosted just as you describe — more where it faces open space and less or not at all on the side nearest to the house. But the rail line’s wires are always the first to become glazed with ice, and sometimes there is ice on the wires but not on my car or on nearby trees. It can be because the wires are further away from radiant sources, or they have a different emissivity, but the difference is so remarkable that I am tempted to take a piece of contact wire and reproduce in a controlled experiment.
And even though I don’t believe the E/M field has anything to do with it, the ionisation of the surrounding air might.
James Bull says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:48 am
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.
Thanks for the advice.
One other requirement I should mention, although I alluded to it, is that I want shade that is easy to put in place and remove. Hence the fairly rigid wires which can be pushed into the ground and pulled out again.
Plants grow all year round here (no frosts) and the sun’s intensity is really only a problem from late November to around the end of February. I also move plants around, and where I want shade changes from year to year.
Gene, most of the voltages used on electric train lines appear to be in the same category as those on distribution lines (DC 1.3 to 3 KV, AC 7 to 25 KV with some limited use of 50 KV) which is quite a bit below transmission line voltages (with voltages upwards of 100 KV and more nominally 200KV and above) per:
http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr16/pdf/f48_technology.pdf
One can hear the higher voltage Transmission lines ‘singing’ in humid air environs, but I have never heard distribution lines doing the same except for in the vicinity of bad hardware! Troubleshooting line crews typically use ultrasonic sound ‘receivers’ to detect bad pole hardware as well, where the lines themselves don’t create corona discharge (literally: breakdown current-flow into the local air).
There might be some ‘fields’ that could influence ice formation in and about the insulators, but, on those sections of lines hanging free I can’t see it. I can’t recall anything in the literature about a phenom like this either …
I think you nailed re: earlier freeze-up what with the lines being further-up and away from terrestrial ‘radiant’ sources (and possible warmer wind/convective air currents nearer the earth).
.
johanna says (February 22, 2013 at 2:34 am): “The trouble with so-called “no regrets” options is that they are usually subsidised or legislated interventions”
Bingo.
indegar says: February 21, 2013 at 10:58 pm
“…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…”
indegar, I agree. This is one of the simplest things to do, and there are many good reasons to do it. There is quite a lot of tree planting going on in China (Olympics, clean air and all that) though they tend to take a mono-culture approach .. everywhere I go in the east of China, it’s wall to wall poplars along the roadsides… but there are an impressive number of them.
People assume this is a long term approach, but it is amazing how quickly nature takes over and erase the traces of man, given the chance. In Indonesia I have been involved in projects involving clearing of jungle (Sorry!) only to find traces of old rubber plantations underfoot. Dating only back to the 1940s … vanished.
And there are some remarkably fast growing trees out there too if you look. In my front yard is a fast growing tropical tree (name escapes me for the moment) which is only 5 years old and is half a meter across the base, ten meters high and ten meters across the crown.
Some what on topic for this thread, the world’s largest manmade forests are in Nebraska and the High Veld of South Africa. Places where man has recently killed off the mega grazers. Its interesting how grasses and mega grazers co-evolved and at the same time manipulated the climate to limit the spread of trees.
And I concur with the comment above about bamboo, the most amazing grass of all.
I suggest someone consider manufacturing an off-the-shelf version of a “rocket stove” for home heating. Rocket heaters are very efficient and produce no visible smoke. (And hence few unhealthy micro-particles.) At present, all that’s available are YouTube videos and online design plans on how to make one oneself, which requires non-trivial welding skills. (A good design plan is here: http://www.iwilltry.org/b/build-a-rocket-stove-for-home-heating/ .) Home-made stoves don’t get a UL tag and won’t be approved by inspectors or insurance companies.
This manufacturing could have the additional benefit of diverting old water heaters, tubing, and oil drums from the trash.
The heaters I have in mind should be distinguished from rocket stove cookers, which use a simpler design, and rocket stove mass heaters, which employ a more complicated one.
The Kona siphons mentioned earlier work without mechanical devices – they use the thermal gradient to provide a lifting force to bring cold deep sea water to the surface. One downside is it also brings to the surface things that have no business being there and which have to be dealt with, and some of those things may be viable on the surface where they have no natural enemies. The head these siphons develop is surprising, but what to do with all that cold water and deep sea denizens? You can’t put it back easily or cheaply. It is possible but impractical to create reservoirs with this sea water and allow the temperature to come up before releasing it back into the sea by streaming through penstocks which turn electrical generating turbines. What could possibly go wrong? Then again, Hawaii has a long history of regrettable introduced species.
Curt wrote;
“I would go into more detail, but I must review the design of a metal heat sink the engineers who work for me are designing to conduct heat out of our power electronics modules as effectively as
possible. I do this stuff for a living.”
With all due respect, if you “do this for a living” why must you review the work of engineers who work for you first to see if they are correct? WUWT ?
I have also done “thermal management” for a living, yes it’s a real engineering discipline.
Please ask those engineers that work for you why they sometimes recommend a copper heat sink instead of the cheaper aluminum heat sink, or maybe they recommend the really costly heat pipe (with toxic ammonia inside).
So again I ask if a “reflective barrier” solves all of the world’s heat management issues (ie ACGW) why don’t we just wrap our houses with “tin foil” ??????
Cheers, Kevin.
dp says:
February 22, 2013 at 8:33 pm
Not true as far as I know, that’s one of the downsides of OTEC. Cold water is denser than warm water. If you have a vertical pipe filled with cold water, it weighs more than the surrounding water. So no thermo-syphoning is possible.
It’s one reason they never caught on. You need huge pumps to move the water, complexity plus cost plus most important energy loss, so you get little net energy out of the system.
w.
Also, someone proposed above using tidal action to move the water. It runs into the same problem—you have to overcome the not insignificant extra weight due the greater density of the cold water. In a long deep pipe of say one square meter cross-sectional area, it adds up to thousands of kilos of extra weight on the cold side.
w.
Oh, yeah, regarding the pumping seawater for the OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion). I always figured they should use an airlift. You run a compressed air hose down with the pipe bringing up the water, and release the air into the pipe in a venturi down at the bottom of the pipe.
Of course, the compression of the air is wastefully inefficient, but it wouldn’t matter. You’d just capture the heat and use it to raise the temperature of the hot side of the system. Also, if you strip the heat from the compressed air before sending it into the ocean and down to the bottom of the pipe, when it comes out it will cool as it expands and rises, and cool the uprising water. This would again recapture some of the otherwise wasted energy in the compression/expansion of the air.
Other advantages are that the turbulence would likely cut the fouling, although the additional oxygen might reverse that … aquariums like bubblers.
Also, you’re pumping clean air, not highly corrosive seawater, a huge plus.
But they never asked me … must’a got lost in the mail.
w.
Willis,
Like you, I enjoy discovering things myself no matter if I’m the first or not. About three years ago we finished a complete rebuild of our home atop a rocky knob overlooking the Salish Sea. We have a wonderful old Doug Fir by the entry that I built an elaborate walkway around. The lowest branchs on it are about 30 feet up. On the few days a year that we have fog, I noticed how wet it was on the walkway. All around it, the ground is dry. The effect is not at all obvious under the other trees with natural ground cover.
KevinK says:
February 22, 2013 at 9:06 pm
“With all due respect, if you “do this for a living” why must you review the work of engineers who work for you first to see if they are correct? WUWT ?”
Once again, you can’t be serious. Are you really unfamiliar with the concept of a design review? I’ve got good people working for me, but no one is omniscient – two heads are better than one, etc.
“I have also done “thermal management” for a living, yes it’s a real engineering discipline.”
And in real engineering disciplines, designs are reviewed. Multiple times.
“Please ask those engineers that work for you why they sometimes recommend a copper heat sink instead of the cheaper aluminum heat sink, or maybe they recommend the really costly heat pipe (with toxic ammonia inside).”
I don’t see how that’s relevant here, but I am well aware of the higher thermal conductivity of copper compared to aluminum, and the effectiveness of evaporating/condensing heat pipes. I have told people on other threads to open up a modern notebook computer to see the heat pipe that removes heat from the processor – but it usually uses water, not ammonia. At any rate, in a real engineering discipline, these types of choices are typically made at the outset of a project, before the detailed design.
“So again I ask if a “reflective barrier” solves all of the world’s heat management issues (ie ACGW) why don’t we just wrap our houses with “tin foil” ??????”
I never said that it solves all the world’s heat management issues, but it is one tool. And many people are essentially wrapping their houses with tin foil – this was the subject of my original post. It’s just that it’s got to be inside the walls where you can’t see it in order to be useful (as I explained in my last post). Otherwise the enhanced conductive transfer counteracts the reduced radiative transfer.
Cheers back at you.
Curt
Laurie Bowen, I’m chuckling at your note that planting a redwood tree in your neighbourhood would introduce a non-native species. Victoria BC has quite a few sequoias that were planted at least 75 years ago.
A temperate climate, wet winters and dry summers.
(An example of hypocrisy is the Saanich BC parks department and its consultants. They want to eliminate “invasive species” from parks. Oh! but they want to accept the Himalayan Blackberry because it provides shelter for small birds and animals. It may be the worst invasive species in the area, an aggressive spreader that is awkward to remove due to its thorns. Duh?)
Myron Mesecke:
A more likely theory for the reduction of the ice cap on Mount Kilmanjaro in eastern Africa is changes in Atlantic ocean conditions (being upwind, evaporation from it will precipitate somewhere to the east). Note that the ice cap is now growing.
As for harvesting fog, I doubt the nets remove much of the moisture.
As for “terraforming”, that’s a plot element in the space western movie “Serenity”. A good theme, but beware it is at least as bad as “Die Hard” for pain and gore.
More realistically, before the religious revolution in Iran people were successfully planting pine trees in the desert. IIRC they started at the edge of vegetated area and kept expanding the area.