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$200 Million Dollars a Year Could Reverse Climate Change, Says Wave Energy Pioneer (bbc.com)
dryriver writes: BBC Future reports on a geoengineering technique called "marine cloud brightening" that makes marine Stratocumulus clouds -- which currently reflect almost 30% of total Solar radiation back into space -- whiter, causing them to reflect more sunlight away from earth. Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, a well-known 1970s wave and tidal power pioneer, has designed an unmanned hydro-foil ship, computer-controlled and wind-powered, which pumps an ultra-fine mist of sea salt toward the cloud layer, causing it to turn white: "'Spraying about 10 cubic meters per second could undo all the [global warming] damage we've done to the world up until now,' Salter claims. And, he says, the annual cost would be less than the cost to host the annual UN Climate Conference -- between $100-$200 million each year. Salter calculates that a fleet of 300 of his autonomous ships could reduce global temperatures by 1.5C. He also believes that smaller fleets could be deployed to counter-act regional extreme weather events.
Hurricane seasons and El Nino, exacerbated by high sea temperatures, could be tamed by targeted cooling via marine cloud brightening. Salter boasts that 160 of his ships could 'moderate an El Nino event, and a few hundred [would] stop hurricanes.' The same could be done, he says, to protect large coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, and even cool the polar regions to allow sea ice to return. So, what's the catch? Well, there's a very big catch indeed. The potential side-effects of solar geoengineering on the scale needed to slow hurricanes or cool global temperatures are not well understood. According to various theories, it could prompt droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures. Another major concern is that geoengineering could be used as an excuse to slow down emissions reduction, meaning CO2 levels continue to rise and oceans continue to acidify -- which, of course, brings its own serious problems."
Hurricane seasons and El Nino, exacerbated by high sea temperatures, could be tamed by targeted cooling via marine cloud brightening. Salter boasts that 160 of his ships could 'moderate an El Nino event, and a few hundred [would] stop hurricanes.' The same could be done, he says, to protect large coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, and even cool the polar regions to allow sea ice to return. So, what's the catch? Well, there's a very big catch indeed. The potential side-effects of solar geoengineering on the scale needed to slow hurricanes or cool global temperatures are not well understood. According to various theories, it could prompt droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures. Another major concern is that geoengineering could be used as an excuse to slow down emissions reduction, meaning CO2 levels continue to rise and oceans continue to acidify -- which, of course, brings its own serious problems."
The last thing I'm interested in is trying to figure out a way to make it even worse.
Thoughts and prayers are all that is needed.
paint creimer's chins white
But it wouldn't reverse all the effects of climate change, such as ocean acidification. You'd also continue to have increased solar forcing in places with fewer clouds, and a different amount of sunlight of all wavelengths in other places.
I would make sense to try something like this if we were demonstrably on the brink of some kind of runaway thermal effect, but it wouldn't maintain the status quo or return the status quo ante. You'd still see major and widespread ecological disruption.
An approach like this could keep the *average* temperature increase around the globe down, but in fact that average temperature increase is not that dramatic -- its only about 2 degrees. But that represents a vast amount of total energy, and the changes that energy will bring to air and moisture circulation is what is going to be dramatic. Doing something like this will introduce different, perhaps nearly as dramatic changes in global weather patterns.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Where's all the salt going to come from?
Of course a guy named "Salter" is going to have a vested interest in spraying salt.
Send me the money and I'll buy illegal drugs and abuse them. Then, I'll be as high and stupid as these losers.
10 cubic meters of sea salt per second to the cloud layer height (2km). You would be moving 21700 kilograms of sea salt to the cloud layer every second... thats 1.3 million tons per minute. 31 million tons per hour. 937 million tons per month.... This does not even sound remotely feasible for 200 million dollars. For an aircraft like a 747, your best odds are moving 200lbs of cargo (human) at 18 cents per mile... that's 1.80 per 2000 pounds, 18 dollars per 10 tons. Basic estimate by our most efficient means would mean putting 10 cubic meter of sea salt in the air per second at 16 billion dollars a month, or 200 billion dollars a year... but I almost forgot, the mid level cloud layer starts at 2 miles to six miles, or 400 billion to 1.2 trillion dollars per year... and if we want to be really specific, those airline costs are to move 200lbs hundreds of miles.... you would need to add takeoff costs because they would just fly up and drop it.
We're working off of computer models of climate. Those get validated by taking past data and running them into the models which are built on past data. The idea of messing with the weather on a planetary level scares the bejezzus out of me. See "Law of Unintended Consequences."
...says it will take $92 trillion of social programs to reverse climate change. Oh, and we have get rid of farting cows.
such as ocean acidification
Ocean water does not become "acidic", it simply is less alkaline (huge, huge distinction).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They tried this in the movie "Snowpiercer."
I see a lot of unanswered questions and potential limitations, but I like that someone is thinking about dealing with climate change in terms of solutions that are feasible technologically, economically, and politically.
My guess is that this would be at best part of the solution, but it's better than believing the only possibilities are to deny the existence of the problem or to naively hope people will casually give up their standard of living.
Salted rain ? What could possibly go wrong with that ?
Did he mention cloud desalination plants in his project, or does he sees it as a pro ("No need to salt roads anymore, heck, it won't even snow anymore anyway") ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
...says his item is the thing to buy. Film at 11.
Scots Wha Hae.
Yeah, changing the climate can cause unusual weather. *That's the point!*
We already had extreme drought in Europe last year. We already have more hurricanes than ever, ruining the US. ... If we can at least save Earth from THE BIGGEST EXTINCTION EVENT IN GLOBAL HISTORY ... then it is worth it. Period.
Let's try it! $200 million is less than a single war plane. It's less than the loose change at the bottom of every big budget thrown away for war or pure greed.
This should not even be up for discussion!
Actually, SCIENCE says cows are a massive problem, and people like Bill Gates agree. Your opine doesn't matter. Also, $92 Trillion of social programs probably isn't enough of a tax cut for super-rich Trumptard faggots, that's not realistic.
I guess we'll just lock him up for life instead, a traitor's due.
I think most dystopian movies start with the same tag line.....
We've seen how this ends. Oh wait a second... maybe not. The movie bombed.
Why is everybody nowadays so insanely scared of literally everything?
We ARA already messing with the climate on a global level. We literally got extreme droughts, huricanes killing people, huge fire storms, the US freezing right now, and island nations having to move because their islands become flooded!
We already have the *biggest extinction event in earth's history* on our hands!
We're long past what scares you so much; and you didn't even blink.
Let's at least mess with it for something good.
Every day we wait, another *entire species* is just *gone*... *extinct*. Never... ever coming back.
That is orders of magnitude worse that literal genocide.
It is so horrific that our brains just error out.
Let's fix it. Because we can. For a fist full of loose change! Pretty please, dear planetary pathogens?
Like grow seaweed which is a valuable crop for food, fertilizer, and biofuels.
https://www.climatecouncil.org...
We could fertilize sections of the oceans with iron which would increase fish yields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So instead of listening to the Lex Luthor types and blocking out the sun like crazy people, why don't we help nature which will help us by giving us more food and absorbing CO2.
If we really want to go crazy... we could still dump a bunch of lime (calcium) into the ocean.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
~Kevin Matthews aka matthekc
Quite a lot of detail here. He also includes calculations for required levels of spray to achieve the desired albedo increase, methods for assigning vessels to the areas with the highest effect, etc.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
$200 million is not enough to create a Socialist Revolution so this person's ideas are not valid.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Soo... what does this mean to all the projections of "OMG we have to tax EvErry1one into financial OBLIVION and I mean like RIGHT now, or the world will end in exactly 12 years!! omg omg"?
...that I'd like to slide into your mom!
"...the annual cost would be less than the cost to host the annual UN Climate Conference -- between $100-$200 million each year"
Holy Fuck! That must be one helluva conference! Must be grade AAA hookers and kilos of coke for every participant. I'm in the wrong business.
for the thing that needs to be done - which is actually reducing the CO2 output.
Why? Because it will not address the issue, and will add further stress to the biosphere, the thing that we're allegedly worried about.
We only recently had that story about another space cadet and their rig that was supposed to "clean" the oceans of plastic garbage, which proceeded to become plastic garbage instead.
So, nope, how about we address the real issue, and have the solution paid for by the people who have profited most from it.
Whether this or something else ... it's going to be technological solutions. It's not going to be solved by everyone going stone age,
Fly commercial instead of chartered
Paint all artificial sky facing surfaces a reflective color (white).
Build fission plants
And your technological utopianism is the problem. Energy is not free. Reversing entropy is very expensive. "Technological solutions" are what got us here in the first place.
What is the -correct- temperature?
Your entire post is what we oldsters used to call FUD.
Now we just call it what it is: bullshit. You have no citations, facts, evidence, not even fake facts. Go hide behind your mammas skirts; the men are talking.
Jeff Bezos give 1 billion dollars a year for climate change, even if you live a 100 more years you will never go broke! Problem solved!
When the clouds move inland then what, See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb
Keep this idiot away from any environmental processes.
Oh funny captcha. "ruined"
"Another major concern is that geoengineering could be used as an excuse to slow down emissions reduction"
This is the Same. Damned. Argument. that the right uses against the life-saving human papillomavirus vaccine. "If you take away the fear that they'll die as a result of sex, they'll have more sex, with all the resulting problems!"
Intelligent human beings roundly and justly denounced this thinking: saving lives is OBVIOUSLY much more important than preventing sex. It's so obvious, in fact, that it suggests sex-hatred is the real motivation behind the argument.
But here we are with the shoe on the other foot: stopping global warming is OBVIOUSLY much more important than preventing carbon emissions. It's so obvious, in fact, that it suggests business-hatred is the real motivation behind the argument.
Now, don't quibble with me about how the HPV vaccine is proven while this is not. If this scheme doesn't actually work--and it sounds dodgy to me--then it doesn't work as a justification of continuing emissions, either.
So climate alarmists now mostly recognise climate does change and has changed over the geological ages, sustaining even plenty of life at higher temperatures or CO2 levels.
Here I thought they were attempting to make the issue into not of warming (or is it cooling now?) but at the unquatifiable so far acceleration of that change provoked by AGW.
And now this guy says hold on we need to cold down the planet? In other words, lets screw around with Earth cycles just because we don't like them?
"marine cloud brightening" is probably a misunderstanding of radiative energy transfer particularly when we are talking on a planetary scale.
The nearby planet Venus has deep cloud cover and the surface temperature is 864 degrees Fahrenheit.
The apologists for mass jet plane passenger air travel over the Arctic have said the effect of high altitude clouds created by stratospheric jet planes flying over the arctic has considerable uncertainty on whether the effect of the created clouds warms or cools the arctic.
Here is where I suspect the problem is located: The education of American and British scientists is mostly defective in understanding planetary radiative transfer of energy. The engineers see a radiative energy transfer between the 1 Arc degree ball of the Sun. The Arctic needs a completely cool and dry airmass to do radiative transfer to the 179 arc degree black cold space.
If you have a non-contact infrared cooking thermometer walk outside and point it up toward the sky. It seems to me if there are clouds, my thermometer sometimes shows 46 degrees F. If no clouds, my thermometer shows ERR. Go try it!
No Kendall, it's not a huge distinction that something slightly alkaline getting more acidic is acidifying. You're a huge, huge semantic idiot. It's a scientific fact that it's acidifying. You're a moron, not a science-anything.
You aren't a man, you aren't talking, you also have no citations, facts, evidence, not even good quips. Go ahead and put on a diaper, you are literally a baby being sodomized by a Trumptarded evangelical because Jesus told him so.
Here it is also big business getting government grants for going green, windmills and whatever.
Pity it is only a short term facade to get the nails on government money.
But hey, easy money and guaranteed money coming in, in a kosher capitalist way. Long live cronyism.
A victim of the Murrican "ejucashon", this idiot is.
I have read this book, or seen the story, a drying earth and a loan pilot attempts to seed a cloud with salt to get it to rain, but pirates attack our hero in an aero battle to keep control of the scare water resources.
something slightly alkaline getting more acidic is acidifying
Hey genius, describe for the class why the appropriate term is "more acidic" when any amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere would NEVER turn the ocean acidic, at most almost neutral?
The only possible alternative phrasing is "more neutral" since that is the worst possible state you can achieve. An actually acidic ocean is not a possible state to enter, so there is no grounds for anyone to claim that term makes any sense - certainly not anyone that actually understands literally basic chemistry...
Since your task is impossible, I'll leave the last response to you while you twist to avoid this very basic (ha!) and unavoidable fact that makes you wrong.
Too bad we don't have more actual scientists and chemists moderating, instead of you religious wingnuts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see no one is taking global warming seriously... Yet.
I will believe that global warming is a serious problem when people start talking about building nuclear power plants again.
I hear them scream from rooftops on how we must have an "all the above" energy policy. Then when nuclear power comes up then it's everything except that. Okay then. If nuclear power is somehow a greater hazard to the world than nuclear power then I'll just wait until someone takes this problem seriously. Either global warming is in fact a real threat and we get nuclear power later, potentially after it's too late to stop it's worst effects, or global warming turns out to be a nothingburger and we all go on happily burning oil and coal.
I can wait. Until then I'll leave some reading material.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
https://www.withouthotair.com/
This spraying water in the air is a nice plan but the guy proposing it even explains that we will still need a plan to stop burning coal. I've not seen any working plans yet that do not include nuclear power. Some people claim future technology will save us but that's not a plan, that's wishful thinking. That's waiting at the port for a ship that might never come.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The verb "to make something more acidic" is to "acidify" it. You're a fucking moron lol. No wonder you drive a mini lol.
So it can be done in a pretty safe and stoppable way if some unforeseen consequence emerged.
I am really, really doubtful you can lower the entire Earth's temperature by 1.5C in short order (as promised) without massive unforeseen consequences, including a possible cooling feedback loop that could send us into the next ice age... if nothing else that cooling is way too fast for plant and animal life to be comfortable with.
Quick thought experiment for all you out there, would you prefer 2C more of warming, or a new ice age under which most cops across the globe would fail?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
no further text
Because they don't actually believe it.
They all own beach front property, refuse to consider nuclear, and want to give your wealth to literally uneducated morons who can't figure out how to escape the ghetto.
A lot more people die from cold than heat and CO2 is plant food, it's great for life on earth, climate alarmism is bullshit.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
He has been proposing this for quite a while.
The Scientific American article (published on October 21, 2009) has more details in a popularized format. Anyone who is actually interested in the techinical details, Salter et al. published their ideas here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2008.0136 (DOI 10.1098/rsta.2008.0136).
Back then he thought 1500 ships would be needed. Now it is down to 300. Now, if this was based on extensive real-world testing, that would be impressive. As it is, it looks more like the pattern of increasingly wild claims made by "alternative med" purveyors.
I do not by any means think Salter is disingenuous! I think he is just very frustrated at the lack of support & trying to modify his plan until someone, anyone, is willing to finance a test ship.
Now these climate clowns want to make climate NOT change, which is impossible.
No, $200 Million Dollars a Year Would Not Reverse Climate Change
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Chicken Little provided no facts or evidence. None are required to refute his shit post.
Still waiting for one of you religious nutters to tell me the correct temperature of the planet.
Wouldnt spraying enough salt into the clouds result in rain and salting of good land ?
I will believe that global warming is a serious problem when people start talking about building nuclear power plants again.
Well if we look at greenhouse gas emissions, a major aspect of it is transportation:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
It's also a sector which is projected to grow substantially.
And I don't know anybody who can fit a nuclear reactor onto a car yet.
In that case, it usually is. But we may have to look at options like these to find the one that actually pans out, because otherwise we are ultimately screwed as a race.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'd rather have sunny days at the expence of a slightly higher temperature rather than cloudy days and lower temperatures. Depending on where you live you might even rephrase the above statement to: I'd rather have sunny days with the added benefit of a slightly higher temperature.
...it could reverse climate change.
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which is why they renamed it 'climate change'.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
i don't feel like spending the rest of my life riding around the planet on a train, we've all seen snowpiercer.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That was polar air you had. Now do you think that polar air that is 20degrees warmer than normal would appear warm or freezing at your latitude? So the polar air was WARMER but instead of being over the pole was able to move over you.
Also ask what sort of winter the south pole had this time of year you inbred retard.
How can you change to less acid by adding an acid (carbonic acid) to an alkaline (seawater)? You retarded little shiteater.
Why else would god have given us a belly button if not to hold the jizz? Just like he gave us a wing-wang that not only fitted our grip perfectly (with enough extra to give a good reciprocal motion) but also makes it bend upward to match the motion of the arm as you wank?
Morpheous: We dont know who struck first, but we do know we were the ones to blacken the sky.
Aside from the issue of wanting to harness solar power, dont clouds also trap heat? The clearest winter skies are usually the coldest.
At one point city planners brought in a bunch of hawks to deal with a pigeon problem. Apparently this has created a new problem of attacks on small pets. Not enough influence and you do not get the desired effect. Too much influence and your likely to overshoot and create new unforseen problems. Its a delicate balance that we as a species do not seem particularly good at. It reminds me of all the other calls to action that made things worse; like margarine, or many drugs that eventually get pulled off the shelf because side effects are so much worse than what they treat. We overreach because we are not patient enough to wait the amount of time for our changes to fully reach true equilibrium. So we up the changes for faster perceived results. An ecosystem is not a simple linear relationship.
For a start, nobody says back to the stone age other than moron deniers wanting to be alarmist (and also ironic since they're the ones screaming at anyone saying there's a problem with AGW being "alarmist", despite that being a real thing). Secondly if we did go back to the stone age, it would solve AGW.
It's just that we don't have to, and the only ones claiming we do are deniers, the actual alarmists.
He claims to be a multi billionaire and you morons insist he is.
Jesus was just one of a succession of nuts, with one of the latest one being Marx.
The Antifa mafia wants the white man to commit suicide so that the exponential growth of brownies can be extended on for an additional three years.
He would behave if he had a proper Soviet or Chicom education.
Hail to our Antifa Stormtrooper overlords !
Is that because the pH scale was created in 1909 and Arrhenius published calculations of global warming from CO2 emissions in 1896, and therefore we had first estimates of climate change before we had any metric to describe the phenomena ?
Cuz I bet that's what you're referring to.
Hansen's 1988 paper was spot on (near enough: 3.4 rather than what happened which was 3.2C per doubling climate sensitivity). How accurate does it have to be for you retards?
better worship the little red book of Mao and kill 80 millions.
Apocalyptic Trump-made climate genocide.
We should start pointing your fellow deniers to you as the cause of the alarmism, then.
This solution would utterly fail to meet the purposes of the climate change advocates, which is to funnel trillions of dollars into the hands of leftist bureaucrats who want to control our lives. Who cares if this would lower temperatures. That isn't their goal anyway.
Wasn't this a central plot theme from one of the old Highlander films. We covered the sky, to save us all...
You can change climate change. Climate change happens all the time and has been since the dawn of time. Nothing we can do can prevent it.
Oh yeah. How about Ice Ages from hell. (Hmmm. that didn't work out so well ... ice and ... hell)
Ok. Redo - how about Ice Ages from Niflheim. (If you're into Norse Mythology and all that. )
And yeah. I had to look it up. I can't remember things I can't pronounce.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So you didn't even take high school chemistry or something?
We need that money for the wall and more tax cuts for the wealthy! Not one dollar for liberal fake news!
That term does sound very disingenuous for what you're using it for.
It's almost like it was chosen on purpose to whip stupid people up into a panic. Hence you're insistence on using it.
Raising the PH level would suffice, without resorting to fear mongering, which is why reactionary leftist armchair activists don't use it.
Is this the geo-engineering experiment that triggered an ice age in the movie "Snowpiercer"?
Hasn't this guy heard? Climate change is BIG BUSINESS! We can't go and solve it for pennies. We need more conferences, more modelling, more money for pet projects, more talking points for politicians to scare us with.
Regardless of what you think about climate change, one thing is certain: the last thing politicians (and activists) want is for it to be solved quickly and cheaply. It's way too good of a tool for them to take your money and look like they're relevant.
Imagine if the fear of climate change went away over night. What would they all do?
I do not see how his "solution" would give the government greater power over people's lives, so how is it actually a solution to the problem which they are trying to address?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
200 million dollars dollars? Great job, dipshit editor
That's a very long article. It's a wonder Mr. Clyde Spencer, a "graduate geologist", isn't taken more seriously by the oceanographers he is criticizing.
And I don't know anybody who can fit a nuclear reactor onto a car yet.
I don't know anyone making a practical wind or solar powered car either. There certainly aren't any practical airplanes that run on wind and solar power. We saw ships that were powered by wind but they lost out to those powered by coal, diesel, and nuclear.
We can make electric cars that run off the electricity produced from nuclear power. Large ships can be nuclear powered. For everything in between we can synthesize fuels from nuclear power. We've had the technology to synthesize hydrocarbon based fuels for a century now. This process has been shown to be economically feasible in a time and place where petroleum is difficult to obtain. Improve that process and we could make petroleum no longer profitable.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
There is actually an Alphabet/google patent describing the above method and ship contraption to do the exact same thing. There has been experiments running already in 2011. Just so you know, these self propelled ships are already in use in large numbers..
With smaller dust particle size, the surface area to mass ratio goes up. So does the lifetime in the upper atmosphere. The U-2 is a mature aircraft with reasonable maintenance cost.
How about no.
You get nothing.
Zero dollars per year to fix the Climate.
Let's be done with this ridiculous crock of leftist propaganda once and for all.
I am happy for solutions like this. However, my usual warning (which is often downmodded because it sounds sinister, I guess.)
Be careful you don't overdo it. Moving in from the seas over 100-300 years is "inconvenient". Accidentally trigger another ice age (which can happen in as few as a couple of years -- you just need a summer where the snow doesn't melt) will literally kill billions quickly.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How does that work? Muller showed there was a hockey stick. That's what he said he was looking to debunk, so he has changed his mind on AGW science.
Capitalism kills over 20 million a year.
This is the kind of idea we should take with a grain of salt.