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

Re:wheres the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?

[Spy Handler]

wtf who modded this redundant?! There was no whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag on this when I wrote this.

Obviously someone saw my post, realised the insightfullness of it, and added the tag afterwards. _|_

Re:Crazy

[epine]

Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.

What's great about cognition by amygdala is that it's never wrong.

History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they wish to get paid for.

Arguing from a universal is another time-proven technique. If we negatively condition on human overreaching we'll become so lax we'll all die of unscrubbed bathtub ring.

Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content.

By the powerful cereals lobby, back in an era where people were less clued in about whitecoats for sale. Thankfully the tobacco interests ran a public education campaign on that score for several decades, and finally the message sunk in to a fairly broad swath of the general public.

You know what? Things change. Furthermore and health industries are a lousy case study, mired as they are in proof by dilution, one of my many pet terms for population studies. Science that works forward from a known mechanism tends to have a better track record. With the genetic revolution now taking place, even health and nutrition can one day aspire to status as science by mechanism.

The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well.

Wow, you brought all your friends today. The importance of this rule of thumb aphorism is greatly inflated by fire and forget political activism.

There are principled ways to wade into the unknown, if you have the social conviction to use them. Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging. Maybe with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, we'll collectively decide to bring our A game. Or maybe not. Whichever, I think it's a mistake to enter into this debate with the premise that humanity is too stupid to live, and that the first move is to execute anyone who thinks otherwise.

Now for another perspective on heat.

Download

The problem with CO2 is that it makes planet earth less like an ideal black body in the infrared spectrum associated with the 300K temperature regime. If we're going to have a high information intensity civilization, we're going to want to optimize the planet's dissipation of waste heat.

In the short term, the small amount of reflectivity of incoming energy required to restore our historical thermal equilibrium point will hardly be missed.

Unlike the SO2 approach, this approach has a vastly superior "under our thumb" profile for adaptation as we learn about how it works. If it works at all.

Re:Armed Revolt? Really?

[Red Flayer]

Dude there hasn't been significant global warming for the last 15 years, and depending on how you measure the temperature it been getting cooler.

Are you denying that there is increased energy within the atmosphere and surface as result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifteen years?

Even if you do want to decrease atmospheric CO2 what better way than to put it into the seawater where the algae will turn it into fishfood?

I see. You have no understanding of what acidification actually does. Are you claiming that increased CO2 dissolution in our oceans leads to greater biomass and has a net positive effect?

Re:Armed Revolt? Really?

[Red Flayer]

your words are wasted because their nothing more then an emotional rant.

If that's the convenient excuse you give to not actually consider them...

your points about oil companys being apposed to alternative power is complete bullshit btw. BP are one of the biggest manufactures of solar panels, chevron are heavily invested in geothermal. energy companys don't care where their profits come from, ...

You don't think the energy companies are working to ensure that they can extract maximum profit from the trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves (a sunk cost, in some cases) they've accumulated?

You don't think that the largest energy companies are not actively trying to ensure that *they* are the only ones able to compete in the energy market?

they aren't emotionally invested in one outcome like you.

They don't need to be emotionally invested... they have a financial incentive to downplay alternative energy sources while they still have huge amounts of production capacity for fossil fuels. I'm sorry to see that you buy into the greenwashing that goes on.

Re:Armed Revolt? Really?

[Red Flayer]

No, sorry, I don't waste my time reading propaganda from the likes of Ferguson. He relies on Monckton (firmly in the pocket of corporate interests), and his funding is also questionable -- he spent time before founding SPPI working for groups directly funded by large corporations to write policy papers on their behalf.