Cooling the Planet With a Bubble Bath

cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"

Comments

wheres the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?

[Spy Handler]

some1 forgot

What an idiot

[holophrastic]

Dimming the sun is a crazy and interesting idea, that has a great benefit -- you can stop.

Water covers most of the earth, so why would you want to introduce something that you can't ever clean up.

1 part per million is enough to do real damage when there are that many millions. I don't care how many simulations you do, you'll kill something and you'll ruin osmething else. To be clear, that's all fine. I'm ok with killing a few million fish if that what you want to do. But when you want to stop, you've got to be able to do so. And there's just no way to remove 1 part per million.

Easy-to-do, difficult-to-undo is stupid. Difficult-to-do, easy-to-undo is the proper goal.

Re:Armed Revolt? Really?

[timmarhy]

actually it's not shell, Exon or Mobile that are the CO2 emmiters, it's people like you driving their car to work and using electricity. so feel free to revolt against modern convienence anytime. i cringe when ever i hear about hair brained schemes to cool the planet. If people are honest, we don't even have a handle on what the current temperature trends mean or how they will play out or whats REALLY causing them. they have a hypothesis that it's CO2.

Re:Tiny Bubbles

[CorporateSuit]

There's a reduntard mod on the loose today. I got marked "Redundant" when I answered a question someone asked about my post.