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1,500-Ship Fleet Proposed To Fight Climate Change
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to UK and US researchers, it should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air. This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 unmanned ships to cool the Earth even if the level of carbon dioxide doubled. These 300-tonne ships 'would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US$2.65 to 5.3 billion total cost for the ships only."
Old news - saw this on a Discovery Channel special along with all sorts of other wacko ideas. And that's where it will remain - as a wacko idea. And as such, very much worthy of notice from /.
Hmmm, Flettner also has horrible tacking performance and downwind performance - it will very quickly be ruled out as an option for certain. You know, if it was a serious project, they'd use something that was tried and true rather than some short-lived gimmick from the middle part of last century.
Meanwhile, legitimate solutions continue to be ignored as more wacko and out-on-a-limb ideas are thrown into the pot to dilute it and render it completely ineffective. Me? I eagerly await being able to don a grass skirt and dancing under a coconut palm in the middle of December in Northern Texas, thoroughly scaring my nosy neighbors. So ya'll just keep up with the crack-pot ideas that will never go anywhere.
Before I could be convinced to vote for a project like that, it would be necessary to show me that carbon dioxide is, in fact, responsible for global warming.
Read the news, folks! Not only is it far from proven, there are other theories that are a lot more likely. And if THEY have any truth, then this would be a vast waste of money.
Not that the war isn't.
What about if it started raining SALT!?! Something like that would be very very very problematic! Typical western science solving problems with problems...instead of lessen dependency on oil, why not invade oil producing countries and important pipeline countries?
Cause the sun is still in the 'off' position, putting us into a little ice age. One of those 'inconvenient facts' that the 'carbon trading' profiteers don't want you to know about. And if you don't get outside much, you probably aren't aware of the cooling.
We know perfectly well how "she" (that cold piece of rock) will take care of it. High CO2 levels and "high" temperatures are not exactly new and will cause 2 effects : ... more plants. Less permafrost will allow forests to expand in several very, very large areas that they are now blocked from entering. Both permafrost regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia in the North and Antarctica in the south (Antarctica was once lush forest, and so was Greenland, in fact, greenland was lush forest not too long ago), and also regions where water can't reach at these temperatures. Likewise the top layer of the ocean will heat up, leading to more algae (and *slightly* more storms), more fish, and more O2 production to countermand CO2 production
-> increase in plant mass due to higher efficiency photosynthesis and expansion of plants into regions previously inacessible due to higher humidity in the air. So overall
-> those plants will convert CO2 into new plants + O2, thereby providing counterpressure to the changes, which will end in a "new" (or old, depending on what timescale you look) balance. Right now there is, compared to the time when plants conquered the planet, very little CO2 in the air (and I mean VERY little).
The reality is that all co2 that is stored in oil comes from the athmosphere. Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs, a time when animals roamed over more regions of the earth than they do today. It would be perfectly liveable, and probably even more comfortable, for humans.
And yes, waters would move, weather would change, coastlines would move. But they are moving anyway. It would go *slightly* (sorry but we're talking centimeters per decade, at that speed even a 2000% increase is still beaten comfortably by a handicapped toad being poisoned by the KGB, running microsoft software)
Havn't we been doing that for hundreds of years, and that's why we are in this mess... might have to take lots of wacky ideas before we come up with a safe agreeable solution that may help.
Human generated greenhouse gas emissions account for 3% of the total. The other 97% is from natural sources, such as forest fires and decomposing animals.
To spell it out for you: 'no we haven't', but 'yes, we've been had' :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Dear tree huggers:
Science has determined that the Earth hasn't warmed even the slightest since 1998, despite Al Gore's insistence, and they actually think we're starting a cooling trend. Now, I want to know a couple of things:
First, what makes you think that in the grand scheme of nature, that we humans add up to anything significant? I mean the Earth is self repairing. I know you are convinced that we're killing this Earth, but it just isn't so.
Second, how come your solutions only seem to be half-witted and the consequences far outweigh the positive results? Take for instance E-85... Now, we're paying dearly because every farmer in the US is now switching to produce corn and that has our grocery bills soaring. Not only that, the cost of making fuel from it outstrips any possible benefit because, despite the high price of oil, E85 is about just as expensive. Also, all that rotting vegetation for the corn growth puts off far more CO2 than all the factories on Earth put into the atmosphere. Hmmmm... Then there's the "hydrogen economy". Since CO2 is just a fraction of the greenhouse, and water vapor is something like 90% of it, what's going to happen when 100's of millions of vehicles are emitting water vapor as an exhaust? You guessed it...global warming...
Lastly, do you people even stop to think about the consequences of messing with natural balance? Everytime you tree huggers do something stupid trying to stop the effects of this, or reverse the effects of that, you upset the natural balance and there is un-thought-of consequences. In Australia, they brought in foreign frogs to fight off a pest, but then the frogs overpopulated and became a pest. It's these types of lame brain attempts that screw the eco-system up.
You're not fixing it, you're hurting it with your attempts to "save the world". Do us a favor, and please just stop. The sky is not falling, Chicken Little!
Send AlGore into space. That'al solve it!
Global warming is a hoax. For the past few months, we even have Global Cooling. The Solar Cycle Theory ain't exactly wrong either. The coincidence are quite strong. The solar minimum started on January and the number of sunspots until now is still very low, which coincides very well with the drop of temperature since the beginning of the year. Even the previous warming coincides with high activity in the Sun.
An increase of 0.01% in CO2 is never a problem. Even if we have 0.1% C02, temperatures won't change much. The green house theory only work if only we have significant amount of C02, which is something like 10% or more. Temperature of the Earth had always been chaotic and will continue to be so regardless of CO2. The experiment can be done by any lay person with enough initiative.
Renewable energy isn't doing much either. We have been hearing people and government pouring money into the research for at least a decade and we seen very little improvements (it took less than a decade to develop nuclear).
The economic aspects doesn't even end there, the solar rooftops for example took more energy (in terms of electricity) to manufacture (equates in CO2) compared with the energy (electricity) it could potentially saved given in an ideal situation. The installation cost would only redeem its value after 200 years of electricity saving.
The ships idea is equally stupid too... Using wave energy to pump water and windmill to spray it in the air, makes it a suspect for violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Dreams will always be a dream like always.
We haven't even start to calculate the amount of energy (equals CO2) it would require to produce that armada of ships and the amount of CO2 it would trap....
To cut the amount of CO2 effectively with the rising world population, dissolving all means of transportation just wouldn't cut it anymore. We have to massacre all farm animals, stop eating meat, destroy all rice+wheat fields and even impose a quota on the amount of breath you can take per minute. Otherwise sending some nukes to India or China will also achieve similar result although temporary warming is expected.
To summarise it, i would like to inform the general populace that global warming is a hoax created by advertising company to rip off money from your wallet. Just observe how money is cycled in eco-organizations, most will actually be used for "educational" purpose, which is another term for advertisement. The few left are used by club members activity (or recreation), organizing protest and hiring lawyers. Sometime they will spend it in some pet research that never produce anything and even if it does, it will have no significant impact. Most major research still came from the government that rips the general taxpayers. Greenpeace is a good start for those who would like to investigate the practices of this organizations.
Or at least it would be, if you were a subscriber. My "assumption" was that you were a /. subscriber. But since you claim that you looked and could not find my entry, my assumption was probably wrong.
Still, you should have no problems finding refutations of CO2-based global warming on Google or some other search engine. I had no trouble at all.
Well sure. It CAN be as you describe.
BUT
We have NO IDEA
It can ALSO be as, say, Stephen Hawking describes: a chain reaction that turns the earth into Venus.
Then the life and adaptation argument cuts both ways: i dont think you and I will discuss this point: the human species is aggresive towards its environment and life arround this species tends to change and adapt to it.
This sometimes means species die, but it also sometimes means species become poisonous and aggressive towards us through evolution and the human species has been in the brink of extintion due to the adaptability OF NATURE (think superbugs, cockroaches, rats, ticks, lice... all vermin... forever since the beggining of this thing we call "society" and even before that: its a treat of life and nature, away from our control).
So i just want to establish: it CAN get ugly.
And then again, global danger is also a good reason to put aside petty differences and move towards a global civilization or, at the very fucking, least towards a globalized occidental civilization: one where occidental countries treat each other as natural partners instead of as either bussiness oportunities or risks.
I know, i know, this is a whole other topic, but its the one i wanted to open with my closing line up there: the problem itself is worth solving together.
I don't know if we will "adapt" or can "adapt" to whichever conditions come. I just would like the solution to go through the elimination of borders and the unification of occident under a single, democratic flag with no national or chauvinistic connotation save for the defense of occident and its values in front of China and whomever the fuck else threatens occidental values and freedoms.
NO SIG