Geoengineered Climate Cooling With Microbubbles

Rambo Tribble writes: Scientists from the University of Leeds have proposed that brighter ships' wakes, created by reducing their component bubbles' sizes, could moderately increase the reflectivity of our oceans, which would have a cooling effect on the climate. The technology is touted as being available and simple, but there could be side effects, like wetter conditions in some regions. Still, compared to many speculative geoengineering projects, "The one advantage about this technology — of trying to generate these tiny 'micro-bubbles' — is that the technology does already exist," according to Leeds' Prof Piers Forster.

Comments

Re:What percentage...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised what kind of effect ship wake can have on ocean albedo. You should give that study a read! It's really interesting, even if you're not typically into geophysics.

...the biggest polluters *in some compounds*

[Overzeetop]

FTFA,
"these powerplants are some of the most fuel efficient units in the world"

"the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars"

So it's not really the climate-affecting carbon emissions that make these vessels "polluters" but rather that they use a fuel which contains excess sulfur and inefficiently scrub nitrogen-based compounds from the emissions, things that autos don't contend with or do because of regulation. It turns out that instead of 50 million cars, the biggest ship in the world put as much carbon into the atmosphere as about 15000-18000 cars. (109k HP @ super high efficiency vs 100HP in your typical automobile, factored for 280days@24h/dy vs average car at 400h/yr)

sjeee....

[SuperDre]

What could possible go wrong............. We don't even have the computerpower to precisely predict the weather, and they think they can change the climate with this without real consequences?