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Bill Gates Funds Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines
lucidkoan writes "Environmentalists have long argued about whether geoengineering (using technology to alter the climate) is a good way to tackle climate change. But the tactic has some heavy hitters on its side, including Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder recently announced plans to invest $300,000 into research for machines that suck up seawater and spray it into the air, seeding white clouds that reflect rays of sunlight away from Earth. The machines, developed by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining, turn seawater into tiny particles that can be shot up over 3,000 feet in the air. The particles increase the density of clouds by increasing the amount of nuclei contained within."
I understand that Dr Horrible is supplying the wonderflonium required for the machines to operate.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
The article says that 3 ships is nothing. We need $7 billion worth of ships to stop the temperature from increasing.
WHAT? We can stop warming in its tracks for just $7 billion? That's very little money.
Here in the west USA, we have long droughts. We count on reservoirs having enough water. The problem is that we have also been depending for far too long on aquifers. So, we regularly talk about pipelines. Well, there is ZERO chance that an economical large pipeline can be developed. HOWEVER, this has the ability to put a lot more moisture in the air. When it is known that a cold front is going to hit an area, then we simply bump up the amount of moisture in the air. It will mean LARGE snow dumps, but that is needed. It will allow us to fill the aquifers as well as reservoirs.
Generally, I think that Gates is causing more issues than solving (trying to stop hurricanes is a HORRIBLE mistake; it brings up nutrients from deep down; likewise, killing mosquitoes may actually stop evolution), but this one will help bring fresh water throughout the world as well as temporaly help with the global warming issues until we switch off of fossil fuels. Interestingly, if China, the worlds largest polluter of nearly everything, was to clean up their h2so4, then it would raise global temps quickly. With the clouds, it allows us to not worry about temps, while we go back to encouraging all nations to clean up their act.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Water vapor isn't considered to have much radiative warming potential mainly because the Earth's emission spectrum is already saturated at the wavelengths at which water absorbs (See Houghton's Global Physical Climatology text for a detailed discussion). -- from a student in meteorology & climatology at Cornell
Water vapor concentration depends directly on the temperature of the air, and has a life cycle of about 2 weeks. In other words, it is not part of a positive feedback loop. If you pump too much into the air, it just rains out. Once the sun goes down, water vapor condensates out.
You can make Global Warming worse by adding water vapor to the air, but if enough sunlight gets reflected back out through cloud formation, it's a good deal. The cost of putting enough water into the air though.... is a different matter. Not sure if that's a cost-effective way of going about it.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I actually had a similar idea a while back, which would be more eco-friendly as you're suggesting. It would involve buoys and black plastic sheets. The sheets would sit maybe 1" under the water, to encourage evaporation. If the sheets were spread out, they wouldn't cause damage to the ecosystem below. So, maybe 1% coverage over 100 square miles is 1 square mile of increased evaporation and therefore more clouds and rain.
It takes a lot for evaporation to become a cloud though. It may be that all that would be created is just raised humidity in the area.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Heh, the best part is that we might be trapping more heat than we're reflecting...
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today! As I posted above, we're on the ride, while we're still building the track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air. However, it's hotter, with climate like we humans have never seen since we invented writing.
Our last chance to keep our climate like the last 10-15k yrs is to geo-engineer. Our only chance to get off this ride in the next 40 years is to put all our chips on 00 and spin the wheel. They aren't good odds, for sure....
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
First, the fun thing this and nearly all of the serious geoengineer proposals that I have seen is that they are easily turned off. If there is some horrible consequence to making the ocean a little more cloudy? Ok... turn them off. We are already geoengineering through industrial pollutants. We might as well geoengineer some more to try and fix the problems. The path to using this techs is pretty clear. Start small, work up to the effect you want, turn it off if you don't like where it is going.
As far as "masking" the problem, what is wrong with that? So we need to run a bunch of sprinklers in the ocean. Is it cheaper than the substantial costs of reducing CO2 output now? If it is, then we should seriously think about doing it. That isn't to say that we shouldn't work on removing CO2 in a more permanent way or work on emitting less, but it could be a hell of a lot cheaper and political far more feasible than the alternative. Do you have to maintain these and replace them? Sure, but that goes with almost any technology. It isn't like the fact that power plants wear out stop us from building an electrical grid. You just include replacement in the cost. It is hardly an insurmountable problem.
If you really believe that climageddon is upon us, geoengineering really is shaping up to be the only way to level off the warming. The cost to reduce CO2 emissions now at levels high enough to stop global warming are through the roof. The political cost is even higher (if not utterly unpayable). We are going to fail at reducing CO2 emissions in the short term. Why not deploy technology to counteract our unintentional geoengineering at a fraction of the cost of "fixing" the problem. Don't stop working on the problem, just give the world some breathing room. Transitioning over to clean and renewable energy is the direction we want to go regardless, making it so that we need to make the transition in a few generations rather than a few years results in a drastically reduced cost.
Frankly, I think that geoengineering makes hardcore environmentalist pissy because it snatches away the best issue that environmentalist movement has had in decades. When it comes down to it, reducing CO2 emission with today's technology boils down to reduced consumption and energy usage. You can tie those two things to pretty much anything in the environmentalist cause. Global warming makes an good proxy in any fight over the environmental. Arguing that coal is bad because it pumps out toxic crap in the PPM range is a very hard argument to make to your average uneducated dolt. Simply declaring coal is a going to cause climageddon on the other hand is much much easier to understand and get worked up over.
We're sure that CO2 produces warming for a couple of reasons:
1)All laboratory experiments show this.
2) All paleoclimate records show this. (To be fair, there are a ton of feedbacks in the system, but historical warm periods are very closely correlated with very high levels of CO2.)
3) All current observations show a very close correlation between CO2 and global temperature. In fact, there is nothing else that comes anywhere close to that correlation.
4) With reasonable parameters in models, previous CO2 data very closely predicts current temperatures and temperature distributions.
From a climate science standpoint, there is absolutely no doubt that increased CO2 leads to increased temperatures. Hell, even from a physics standpoint there's no question about it. In fact, the basic physics and chemistry aren't overly hard. Where the questions lie is in how the earth system as a whole responds to increased temperatures.
Clouds are perhaps the #1 area of uncertainty at the moment. Venus is scorching hot because of cloud cover and a strong greenhouse effect. Hotter on average than Mercury, which is a lot closer to the sun. Yet Mars is a frozen wasteland with no appreciable greenhouse effect or clouds. From ground and satellite observations we can see that, on average, low, thick clouds reflect more sun than they trap heat, and cause a net cooling. High, thin clouds trap more heat than they reflect, causing net warming.
But we lack data on "paleoclouds" - nobody really knows if a warmer planet leads to more low clouds or more high clouds. Most of the physics seems to indicate more clouds, (ala Venus) and paleoclimate records show wet periods corresponded with warm periods, and dry periods with cool periods.
I take a fair bit of issue with your last statement. You don't seem to know much about computational climate models. The entire point is to parametrize physical processes that are too computationally demanding to actually model. We can't model every raindrop, so we model net amounts based on parametrizations which agree with what we see. For instance, many model parametrizations are based on NCEP reanalysis data. It's freely available data, collected from a vast array of measurement devices. Pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, evaporation, precipitation, incoming solar, albedo, etc. The parametrizations we make are an aggreate of real data and pretty well known physical properties.
The big issues are the things we have no data for. "Paleoclouds", eg. Nobody knows what clouds were like 1 million years ago. We can estimate, based on what we know, but it's just a guess. Even something as simple as albedo is tricky. When we lose permafrost, the albedo of the poles changes. But what does it change to? Obviously it lowers, but the actual value depends on the types and distribution of plants that grow there. We've just got to guess at that. Do these uncertainties mean that global warming isn't happening? Not at all. It just means that the spread of predictions is that much larger.
One key thing we do know: The deep ocean has about a 1000 year circulation. We can trace the age of the ocean by testing for things like man-made nuclear particles and CFCs, among other things. When we examine 50 year old and newer water vs hundreds of years old water, the CO2 content of the new water is enormously higher. In fact, it looks like the ocean has taken up almost 50% of the CO2 we produced so far. As any chemist, physicist, or anyone who's opened a warm soda can tell you, warm liquids hold less gas. This potential slowdown of our major carbon sink, combined with our increasing emissions will likely have profound effects on future climate, above and beyond what's currently being modeled.
P.S. The IPCC models are a decade old. They only are using very well established, well reviewed models that have stood the test of time. The newer, more complete, less parametrized, and significantly more complicated models show a spread around the IPCC models. However, the bulk are above IPCC predictions for temperature. It doesn't help that we're following the worst-case IPCC emission scenario.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor