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."

Comments

Salt the Earth

[KiwiCanuck]

Great idea! Should do wonders for crops.

Re:What could

[rtfa-troll]

when I stuck my tongue out when it rained, I didn't taste any salt at all,

If I was choosing my nick again I would be the RTFT-TROLL (yes; that loud)

Here it is; the article title again, but this time a bit marked up for those of you so bloody stupid you can't see it.

Science: Bill Gates Funds Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines on 2010-05-10 23:35

and a marked up an excerpt from the summary.

[...] 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. [...]

P.S. Typical of Gates, that he's investing into a speculative solution into solving a problem he has a large responsibility for (just like drugs and vaccines for people who've been deprived of them by his IPR policies) still, better than a kick in the teeth. Many of our tycoon overlords don't even bother with this level of "largesse".

P.P.S. In case that wasn't enough of a troll to start a "discussion" I'll just post a link to someone who seems to have done the calculation whether this can help enough and found it can't; maybe we just need to start cutting down on fossil fuel use now??

Re:What could

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

That is the origin of the "Global Warming" myth.

It ain't happenin', Baby!

Re:Is this a joke?

[adolf]

That's 1,231.48305 gigaWatts, or in layman's terms, a little more than 1,000 times as much energy flow as it takes to travel through time.

I, for one, would rather have time travel than any of this cloud-seeding nonsense.

Bill Gates, you're an asshole. Please spend less money developing such useless tech, and more money on coming up with a working flux capacitor.

Thanks.

Re:What could

[bmajik]

Any global warming "solution" that doesn't involve actually lowering the CO2 level of the atmosphere isn't a solution.

I was waiting for someone to come out and say it.

What climate alarmists don't want is to preserve humanity and its only habitable world.

What they want is behavior modification.

I want a nice place for my children just as much as anyone. But for me, a nice place means "Free from oppressive coercion by know-it-all-assholes". In fact, a free place with no vegetation seems better than a serene landscape with a tyrant hiding behind every lovingly protected tree.

I value human freedom more than I value the myth of holding the planetscape constant.

So to turn your pompousness around, any "solution" that involves coercive behavior modification and a reduction in my quality of life -- quality as _I_ define it -- is no solution at all.

I don't particularly care about or buy into AGW alarmism, but I enjoy seeing technological approaches postulated -- because they act like an X-ray machine into the minds of the watermelon climate lobby.

You guys definitely want to fix "the problem". But the problem is that humans have too much freedom -- freedom to live life in a way differently than you'd design for them. So any solution that lets people continue to live their lives as they like doing is a non-solution to you.