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

Tiny Bubbles?

[gyrogeerloose]

Has he cleared that with Don Ho?

Re:Tiny Bubbles?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

This has nothing to do with soap.

Tiny Bubbles

[billstewart]

Too bad Don Ho's gone...

Re:Tiny Bubbles

[QRDeNameland]

Difference between Funny and Redundant 1 minute. Duly noted.

Cue Don Ho song...

[Locke2005]

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
In the sea (in the sea)
Make me happy (make me happy)
Make me feel free (make me feel free)

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
Make me warm all over
With a feeling that I'm gonna
Love you till the end of time

So here's to the golden moon
And here's to the silver sea
And mostly here's a toast
To you and me

So here's to the ginger lei
I give to you today
And here's a kiss
That will not fade away

Poor guy, Don Ho... I haven't the heart to tell him, but all the women in his family are Hos!

Re:Cue Don Ho song...

[Red Flayer]

Don Ho:

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
Make me warm all over

FTS:

'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect.

Either this physicist is full of shit, or Don Ho was.

Re:Cue Don Ho song...

[PopeRatzo]

Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)

I never realized what a hip song this is until I started playing the tenor ukulele.

Seriously, if any of you would love to play music but don't want to spend 20 years becoming a virtuoso, pick up a halfway decent ukulele (spend about $100). There are dozens of excellent sites and organizations you can find on the web that will teach you how to play. You can start playing songs the first day. And it's better than prozac for chasing away the blues. And the ukulele is a cool instrument, played by musicians as diverse as Kurt Cobain, George Harrison, Elvis Costello, virtuoso guitarist Eric Johnson and many more.

Plus, chicks dig musicians. Go to a party, pull out your uke and do just about any tune, from some old Ink Spots to Nine Inch Nails. I guarantee you'll get laid.

Regarding the topic at hand, whenever I hear someone propose some mechanical method for reversing the warming of the planet, it makes me really nervous. Whether by putting gigantic mirrors into orbit or kicking up more dust than Mt St Helens, I always feel like they're not really thinking through all the possible ramifications. Bubbles in the Sea? It might be worth thinking about what that would do to ocean life. It might be perfectly harmless, I don't know. But please, let's get someone besides physicists involved in the discussion, too. I know some physicists and while they may be great people, they're not known for thinking through all the ramifications of their theories on living creatures.

Re:Cue Don Ho song...

[mswhippingboy]

I can't believe you left out the late great Tiny Tim!
Tiptoeing beneath the tulips now I suppose.

Crazy

[WrongSizeGlass]

What about the sea life that relies on that heat?

Re:Crazy

[FlyingBishop]

Ocean acidification and overfishing will have killed it all off long before we finish building 1000 windmills to power this.

Re:Crazy

[glavenoid]

Not only heat but the specific spectra of light that reach below the water surface. Seems to me that affecting the surface reflectivity would by necessity change the light that reaches into the sea, and who knows what effect that would have on photosynthetic aquatic plant life.

Re:Crazy

[maxwell demon]

Actually you would not need to go to the spectrum. Since the bubbling water reflects more sunlight (which is what the cooling effect is based on), less sunlight enters the water. Less sunlight = less photosynthesis.

Less photosynthesis means less production of biomass, which I'd guess has a negative effect on the ecosystem. But less photosynthesis also has the effect of less consumption of CO2, so at the end this idea may actually have the opposite effect from what was intended.

Re:Crazy

[aurispector]

Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it. History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they think they do. Just look at the eggs: back in the day they were considered good, nutritious food. Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content. Oops! Guess again! They're a good source of omega fatty acids and really are good for you!

The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well. They guy is using a mathematical model. What's the model missing? "Garbage in, garbage out" is not a principle we want to apply to altering the global environment.

Any efforts to reverse "Anthropogenic global warming" should be confined to reducing the supposed causes. What's our incentive to stop polluting if we can "fix" it by blowing bubbles in the ocean?

Re:Crazy

[cheekyboy]

I heard that the actual planet was going into an ice age, and that the recent global warming by man saved us all from 1000 years of frozen hell.

Seriously though, more heat is better than less heat, a run away cooling/frozen world is real bad, nothing grows at sub zero temps.

But a hotter planet with more co2, well plants grow faster, and who knows cows could grow to the size of dinasours :)

Re:Crazy

[blackraven14250]

I'd be more worried about the sea life that gets injured by air bubbles outright. Fish die in saltwater tanks if their gills get exposed to too much air. I had a "bubble outbreak" in my tank yesterday due to some epoxy changing the surface tension of the water with a byproduct of the reaction, and all of my corals shriveled up until the bubbles were gone for a good 2 hours.

I still say we just move the Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't be that hard... Just put some giant rockets on one side, and boom! What could go wrong?

Re:I still say we just move the Earth

[maxwell demon]

Don't move the earth. Instead reduce energy production of the sun. Besides countering global warming, it also has the effect of increasing the sun's lifetime, because it uses up its fuel more slowly.

We just have to find the knob where to change the setting.

No mention of

[Rik Sweeney]

a rubber duck. It's not a proper bubble bath without a rubber duck.

Re:No mention of

[rkit]

There is no lack of rubber ducks in the ocean.

Same problems

[Bozzio]

Don't all these crazy "reflect back light somewhere in the ocean" have the same problem?
Whether you're covering the ocean with a white tarp, stretching tin-foil over a large number of floaters, or creating loads of tiny bubbles you're still depriving the ecosystem of light it is most likely dependent on.

No light, no plankton, no life.

Am I wrong?

Re:Same problems

[maxwell demon]

It makes a lot of sense. If there's no life on the planet, no one cares about the temperature. Problem solved.

Re:Same problems

[girlintraining]

It makes a lot of sense. If there's no life on the planet, no one cares about the temperature. Problem solved.

Yeah. Well, life will repopulate after we've fucked up the planet. And millions of years from now, that life will wonder what happened during this brief 20,000 year segment of history on this rock, chalk it up as a mass-extinction event like all the others, and the universe will have forgotten all our hopes and dreams.

That's "problem solved".... It makes you wonder if it hasn't happened before.

Re:Same problems

[osu-neko]

Well, bubbles might also mean no oxygen exchange. So we'll wind up killing 80% of the planet's ecosystem off when the oceans die, to stop global warming. Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah... this is why people put bubble-making aerators in fish-tanks: to starve the fish of oxygen.

/sarcasm

Re:Same problems

[roman_mir]

It did not happen before the way that you are implying.

For a civilization to start creating a change in the global climate, the civilization has to be numerous and it has to possess various technologies.

We would have noticed the following:

1. Previous excavations of various Earth minerals starting with metals: iron, nickel, copper, uranium, gold, cadmium.

2. Previous energy production attempts: the oil would have been much smaller if they were pumped before, we know of the exact mass extinctions and time periods where coal, oil and gas were created. So during those times it would not be possible for such a civilization to exist, because it's nearly impossible to coexist with giant lizards and the lizards wouldn't dominate the planet to deposit all those carcasses that formed the oil, gas and coal stores.

3. Our excavations at various rocky mountain sites would have shown this age and we would have found similar excavations from those past civilizations.

4. Certainly some structures would have been found preserved, some machinery, roads, after all, we find skeletons of dinosaurs, so why not tools of the long gone civilizations?

5. Uranium probably would have been gone as well as some other heavy metals, converted to other forms by those energy users, who would have had to use various types of energy to achieve climate level shifts.

Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all we have to do is build huge industrial complexes and ships to spend huge amounts of energy pumping tiny bubbles into the entire world ocean.

Well, I guess we've solved global warming. That was easy.

Yesbut...

[bmo]

It would also increase evaporation and thusly the amount of water vapor in the air. Water vapor is more effective than CO2 at increasing global warming.

Have you thought of that? No? Didn't *think* so!

He also says that energy is not a limiting factor. He's a kook.

--
BMO

Re:Yesbut...

[phantomfive]

What is more likely, that a climate scientist at Harvard has overlooked a simple yet obvious factor in his experiment, or you are too lazy to read the article?

As a matter of fact the article mentions evaporation, suggesting that bubbles actually reduce the evaporation. If anyone is a kook in this situation, I would put odds on you (but it's more likely you're just lazy).

Re:Yesbut...

[bunratty]

Excess water vapor in the atmosphere quickly precipitates out as rain or snow. Consequently, you can't increase global warming significantly only by attempting to add water vapor to the atmosphere. If the temperature increases, that can cause humidity to increase, and that can cause additional warming. In climatology, you say that water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing.

Yes, I know, I'm ruining everybody's fun by mentioning facts again. What a party pooper!

Re:Yesbut...

[bmo]

I read the article.

He says the bubbles would slow down evaporation in lakes and streams (i.e., where he's not using the system). This is only because he's increased overall humidity from the evaporation of the ocean with his bubble toy.

Ever see bubbles burst with fast film? They create droplets which increases surface area. Evaporation is dependent upon surface area, temperature, vapor pressure, and barometric pressure. Increase any of these and you increase the amount of water vapor in the air. Doing this over a large area increases the surface area for evaporation to happen by a large amount

It's like you people have forgotten the most basic physics.

And yes, he's a kook. Only a nutjob would come up with something as ridiculous as this.

--
BMO

Bermuda Ocean

[engineer_uhg]

Tiny bubbles are also good for sinking ships. Decrease the density of the water, decrease the buoyant force on the boats. Source

Re:Didn't he hear the new problem?

[ebuck]

Neither problem is new, nor has either problem gone away. It's just that the public mind can only contain one global issue at a time. I would try to prove it, but you've proved my point better than I could.

Before you muck about .....

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Before you start mucking about with geo-engineering the temperature, you'd better make damn sure you can UN-muck it or we're all seriously mucked!

What this means is:

1) Thousands of gyroscopically positionable mirrors in space allowing you to control sunlight = Good!

2) Planting oodles of trees everywhere we can do distribute the heat that we do have = "Well, OK, it'll work for most of the planet as long as you don't plant trees that are disease vectors for other organisms."

3) Throwing thousands of tons of [Insert favorite substance here] into the atmosphere/Ocean/Volcanoes and hoping it works and not having a clue as to the knock-on effects down the road = BAD, BAD, BAD.

Cheers!

Re:Before you muck about .....

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Don't you remember? You DID give me the time machine to warn everyone by posting on Slashdot. Remember what you said in the bunker?

"...everyone takes warnings posted on Slashdot seriously, so we put you in the time machine and...."

Re:Before you muck about .....

[budgenator]

Actually all of North America has more trees the before Europeans came. Most Industrial Forresters plant 2.5 trees for everyone cut, they make money cutting mature lumber not running out of trees to cut. Even the American Indians would cut and burn old stagnate unproductive growth to allow productive vigorous new forrests to replace them.

Re:Didn't he hear the new problem?

[twitcher101]

Acidfication caused by too much carbon, which is also causing the warming, which means the same solution is required, not an adaptation.

Re:Didn't he hear the new problem?

[oldspewey]

the public mind can only contain one global issue at a time

And that's on a good day.

What if the planet is already getting Colder?

[Ron Bennett]

What if the planet is already (or on the near verge of) getting colder?

Personally, I'm far more concerned about global cooling than global warming.

Global warming, on the whole, is more favorable to growing food / living things. Anyone doubting that need only read up on the effects of the various ice ages in the relatively extremely recent geological past. Even a very minor cooling period, such as the "little ice age" in the mid 1600s, while very minimal, had horrendous, adverse effects for humans...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

The "climate change" folks seeking to cool the earth should be wary - nature may respond with far more cooling than they'd bargained for!

Ron

Re:Didn't he hear the new problem?

[Red Flayer]

Never mind the fact that ocean acidification is caused by warming oceans, not just an ancillary effect of increased atmospheric CO2.

When you increase water temp, you decrease the dissolution rate of CO2 in the ocean, but you increase the amount of CO2 that is converted to H2CO3. The second impact is larger than the first.

How about solving the CAUSE??

[Hurricane78]

Sounds like someone banging his head against the wall all the time, and coming up with the “solution” of taking painkillers... while continuing to run against the wall.

I am baffled by the amount of elaborate ignorant high-level idiocy it takes, to come up with such thoughts.

Cue Aesop's fable

[LandruBek]

A MAN (apparently Don Ho) and a Satyr once drank together in token of a bond of alliance being formed between them. One very cold wintry day, as they talked, Don Ho put his fingers to his mouth and blew tiny bubbles. When the Satyr asked the reason for this, he told him that he did it to make himself feel warm all over, because it was so cold. Later on in the day the Satyr went to the beach, and but the ocean was sat too warm at the surface. Some other man blew tiny bubbles into it. When the Satyr again inquired the reason, he said that he did it to cool the planet, which was too hot. "I can no longer consider you as a friend," said the Satyr, "a fellow who with the same breath bubbles hot and cold."

tee hee hee

Obligatory Futurama Reference

[fyoder]

Narrator: [in movie] Fortunately, our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last-minute way to combat global warming. Ever since 2063 we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.

[The movie cuts to a shot of a aircraft dropping a large ice cube into the ocean and then cuts back to the classroom.]

Suzie: [in movie] Just like Daddy puts in his drink every morning. And then he gets mad.

Narrator: [in movie] Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time. [There are shots of bigger ice cubes being dropped into the ocean.] Thus solving the problem once and for all.

Suzie: [in movie] But--

Narrator: [angry; in movie.] Once and for all!