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."

Comments

That's what?

[matt4077]

Two days of war?

Re:That's what?

[stranger_to_himself]

Two days of war?

Or more to the point less than the cost of cleaning up after one hurricane.

Re:That's what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"a bit" is a bit of an understatement. Billions would die without fossil fuels.

Re:That's what?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Why don't you set the right example ? I'm sure there's a bridge near you. There's only one way to make sure you don't further contribute to the "CO2 problem" ...

Re:That's what?

[jcwayne]

We need to do enough research to make sure it won't cause a hurricane / tsunami first

You don't actually know what a tsunami is, do you?

Re:That's what?

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

We need to do enough research to make sure it won't cause a hurricane / tsunami first

You don't actually know what a tsunami is, do you?

Hey, it could happen. Those clouds can get pretty big! If one of them were to fall....

;-)

Re:That's what?

[mi]

Two days of war?

I'd prefer to look at it as every able-bodied living person obtaining a $0.99 rubber chicken and shaking it at the sky... Costs the same, involves the entire world community, and is just as useful.

Futurama

[asills]

And here I thought dropping an ice cube into the ocean was a really far fetched idea and nobody would take it seriously.

Re:Futurama

[ypctx]

Don't forget to add Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem for greater effect:)

Re:Futurama

[pak9rabid]

Fortunately our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last minute way to combat global warming.

Re:Headline

[Shakrai]

One question for any Chaos Theory fans: what are the long-term effects of creating large, man-made clouds over the ocean?

In Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine and a whole lot of people get eaten by prehistoric animals?

A Bad Doctor

[Adreno]

A bad doctor treats symptoms without addressing the underlying ailment. With China and India (1/3 of the world's population), and other parts of the world booming, the release of greenhouse gasses is only going to accelerate. If we took this money and invested it into researching and implementing green alternatives to our current fossil-fuel infrastructure instead, more progress would be made in the long run.

Re:A Bad Doctor

[belmolis]

But it is also a bad doctor who treats the underlying cause without treating the symptoms if it will take a long time for the disease to go away and the symptoms are bothersome. Techniques like this should probably be used in conjunction with attempts to eliminate the causes of global warming.

It isn't as if this is so expensive that no money would be available for other approaches. Sure, $5 billion sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.5% of the what the US has spent on the Iraq War so far.

Re:A Bad Doctor

[Anonymous Coward]

A good doctor treats the symptoms as well as the ailment - more so when the ailment itself can't be cured. Quality of life is important.

This is a plan that could in theory be put into practice tomorrow, partially relieving those symptoms while longer term cures are being put into place.

While the relatively rich first world has the money to build new infrastructure - to work towards that cure - development takes time, and current alternatives don't have the capacity to meet current energy demands. That *WILL* change, but not for some time. Here in the UK, there's a lot of emphasis on making this change at the moment, but even if we start replacing everything today it will be decades before we can completely phase out our existing coal plants. In the US, it's even worse as your grid needs to be redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to accomadate wind farms and their ilk. No small task.

The only countries for which this will be 'easy' are those able to tap geothermal reserves.

For the second and third world these green alternatives are currently too expensive, and will likely remain so until the technology is being produces in such quantities as to be considered a commodity. Even then, the third world will likely be unable to afford anything except used hand-me-downs from the first and second.

So, what do you do?
A) Treat the symptoms and buy the time for all of this to happen - affirmative action

B) Treat the symptoms and forget to treat the ailment - what you think will happen

Or

C) Treat the ailment and ignore the symptoms - your suggestion

For the record, taking action C would also be more expensive financially, as treating those symptoms also reduces the amount of damage inflicted.

I admire the idealism, but you need to consider the reality of the situation at the same time or you end up making popular, but ultimately bad decisions.

Re:A Bad Doctor

[GayBliss]

You're now talking about higher frequency of ocean collisions;

Do you realize how big the oceans are? The chances of any ship even seeing one of 1500 ships scattered around the globe is practically zero unless they are placed near a port or on shipping lanes. Ships go from one port to another on very specific routes, they don't wander around the oceans. Keep them out of the shipping lanes and nobody will ever see them.

increased wreckage after damaging storms (and thereby increased maintenance costs all around);

Negligible

the energy expenditure (and CO2 release) required to produce such ships in the first place;

Negligible

what's to stop someone from going out to salvage an unmanned ship in international waters if it is constructed of materials desired?

I think ships are made primarily of steel and not copper. It would be a whole lot cheaper and easier to just raid the local junkyard.

Our Coast Guard can't even track many drug-runners in the Caribbean, and you want to place 1500 ships on the ocean and cross your fingers that no one touches them?

They could track them very easily if they knew where they were in the first place. I seriously doubt they are just going to let these ships wander around aimlessly through the oceans with no way to find them and identify them except by searching for them. If such a plan were implemented, I'm sure they would know exactly where they are at all times.

There are many other, more direct paths to solving this global problem,

Really? This seems like a very cheap and direct solution if it indeed works.

than the construction of a huge fleet of water-spraying ships that *may* increase sunlight reflectivity by a significant amount while likely instigating numerous practical issues in its implementation.

If the best experts agree that it might work, it's worth testing on a small scale and see what happens in terms of cloud reflectivity and any adverse effects. It could probably even be tested to some extent without building a single ship.

Re:Being as WATER VAPOR is the #1 greenhouse gas..

[Samantha Wright]

Sometimes, only RTFA can help you.

Re:For every action...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh? They're talking about enhancing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds above the oceans, not moving CO2 into the oceans.

And Newton's Third Law's reaction to spraying salt water into the air is to push your ship a little deeper into the ocean.

She will.

[BitterOldGUy]

What if mother nature takes care about the CO2 emissions without us interfering?

One way or another, she will. But the kick in the balls is, we may not like how she takes care of it.

Re:She will.

[RedWizzard]

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.

That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5. The carbon stored in oil was locked up in plants and animals before it became oil - it wasn't ever all in the atmosphere at the same time. And it didn't suddenly all become oil at the same time either.

It would be perfectly liveable, and probably even more comfortable, for humans.

Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like. It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point. The question is not whether increased global temperatures would be liveable or comfortable. The question is whether the economic costs of adapting to the new conditions outweigh the costs of try to reduce or prevent the change.

Re:She will.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong about the fish and algae.

Read here, about algae blooms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom

As water heats up, the amount of oxygen it can contain decreases (which is why trout prefer cold/mountain water.) If it gets too warm, then the water may not hold enough oxygen to support life (e.g. fish)
http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/solutions/faq/predicting-DO.shtml

If a lake gets too warm/shallow during summer, it can kill all of the fish in it.

Note that really large game fish, e.g. tuna, prefer cold, deeper, water than warm water. If you're thinking that "look at all the pretty fish" in warm tropical water means fish do well in warm water, you probably need to rethink your strategy because if the water becomes too warm, they'll die as the reefs do:
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/25/nation/na-coral25

Given that your comments about water are completely wrong (and I'm afraid my comments will never be seen since they're anonymous), I'm very afraid for the accuracy of the rest of your comments.

Re:She will.

[Tumbleweed]

That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen modded to +5.

*pft* Hell, I can beat *that*! Just check out some of my comments. I expect an apology.

Re:She will.

[Aglassis]

How did this comment get modded +5? It didn't once talk about actual timescales or carrying capacity. Do Slashdot moderators really know this little about how the planet will respond to global warming?

Yes, as the CO2 concentrations increase, plant respiration will become more efficient and some locations will see denser plant growth. But at the same time, some of the most efficient places on Earth for plant life will become converted to grasslands or deserts, releasing their stored carbon by plant decay. And the rapid rise in CO2 will also cause acidification in the oceans which will counteract much of the positive gains in biomass due to temperature rises. But in any case, these numbers are really insignificant. There is about 600 Gt of carbon in all of the biomass on the planet. There is about 760 Gt in the atmosphere. There is about 37,000 Gt dissolved in the oceans. There is about 10,000,000 Gt stored in sediments on the ocean floor. And there is about 40,000,000 Gt stored in limestone.

Any description of changes in CO2 needs to take into account all three carbon cycles: the organic carbon cycle, the inorganic carbon cycle, and the geochemical carbon cycle. To the climate scientists who have actually done the calculations with knowledge of all three cycles, there is virtually no support that plants and algae are going to have any significant effect. The consensus is that the method that CO2 will eventually be removed is by slow sedimentation. The efficiency of this will be slightly reduced by increased weathering of carbonates and will be almost completely unaffected by the organic carbon cycle. The timescale for optimists is several thousands of years.

Re:She will.

[MacDork]

Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like.

There have been many times that amount of C in the atmosphere. About 500 million years ago, Earth went through an ice age with CO2 levels 8 to 20 time higher than they are presently.

The largest sink of carbon on the planet is not organic. It is limestone and dolomite. Those two absolutely dwarf the C locked in fossil fuels. All the fossil fuels on Earth sum up to about 9x10^15 grams. Total mass of C in limestone on the other hand is around 3x10^22grams. Soooo, about 3 million times as much C in limestone as in fossil fuels. Most of that was in the atmosphere. Most of that is now in the ground as a result of plankton and ocean sedimentation.

It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point.

It isn't beside the point... it is one of the stupidest thing you could possibly say. Who fed you that? Just saying something like that damages any credibility you might have. The atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% CO2. The atmosphere of Earth is roughly 380 parts per million (0.038%). In a hundred years of burning fossil fuels non stop, we've witnessed a rise in atmospheric CO2 of about 100ppm (0.01%). In the link above, you'll see that if you burned all the known fossil fuel reserves today, it would add roughly 77% more CO2 to the atmosphere for a total of what.... 0.07%? That's not even close to the Ordovician atmosphere, much less the Venusian.

Umm... No. Different ship, different tech.

[denzacar]

You are thinking of Alcyone. A turbosail ship.

Flettner's rotor ship was quite similar to that.

Only thing is... neither ship was powered by these "tube sails" alone.
Both Alcyone's and Buckau (renamed later to Baden Baden) used some other engine to POWER THE SAIL.
So, it does not go on windpower alone.

Alcyone was supposedly using about 30% less fuel then conventionally propelled ship of that size... but that is it.
And Flettner's Buckau was reported as having "less efficient than conventional engines".

My guess is that whoever is planing on building this "cloud seeder" fleet is probably thinking of combining rotor sails with solar and gasoline/diesel powered engines.
Which would probably run on gas/diesel most of the time (how much sun are you getting when you are in business of making cloud cover?) - except when the crew is giving interviews to the press.