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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.'"
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.
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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.