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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.
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.
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Of course a guy named "Salter" is going to have a vested interest in spraying salt.
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.
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.
In oceanography a reduction of pH is called "acidfication".
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Scots Wha Hae.
Wait, wait, wait, you used the word "math" and then you calculated the cost of moving cargo based on the retail ticket prices of airline travel? What?
Stop there. Stop using numbers. You have to figure out what the different correct parts are before you can calculate things.
I think most dystopian movies start with the same tag line.....
Most of the salt would be falling out in precipitation over the ocean. Sea birds get a little saltier maybe? I'm kidding, and that's about all I can imagine happening from that. It's probably the most natural man-made phenomena possible.
We've seen how this ends. Oh wait a second... maybe not. The movie bombed.
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.
Salt Lake City?
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.
The mind boggles at the idea of creating salty rain on purpose. Wind blows the wrong way unexpectedly and it rains salt water on high value crops, turning them into rotting vegetation, wow, whom ever makes and runs those ships runs the risk of coming under military attack for what would be an ecological attack.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Whether this or something else ... it's going to be technological solutions. It's not going to be solved by everyone going stone age,
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!
Actually, SCIENCE says cows are a massive problem, and people like Bill Gates agree. Your opine doesn't matter.
While you're correct, career criminal and non-biologist Bill Gates' opinion is irrelevant too, unless he funds a GM fix for bovine flatulence.
We should probably get rid of the cows and bring in more goats. They're already the most popular meat in the world, and they can eat practically any plant. And they're plenty tasty if you know how to cook them, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whether this or something else ... it's going to be technological solutions. It's not going to be solved by everyone going stone age,
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.
Both of you are both right and wrong. Reducing CO2 output and energy consumption is best done through technological solutions. But what's needed to make them happen is the will to bend technology away from yacht-buying, towards ass-saving.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Salted rain ? What could possibly go wrong with that ?
Not much. It is 10 m^3/sec of seawater. On a global scale that is an infinitesimal amount of salt, and is harmless.
island nations having to move because their islands become flooded!
Which island nation is that?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Did it tip over like Guam almost did?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
This duck doesn't quack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Salter is, like, the Buzzard of wave power.
I wouldn't take his claims to produce usable power to the letter.
s/Buzzard/Bussard/.
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.
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.
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
Where's all the salt going to come from?
Where is all the salt going to go to ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
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!
Hose technology is cheap and well understood.
Most efficient decryption system known.
Blank until
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.
Salter proved himself to be a nutter back in the 1970's. By now he must be a geriatric nutter. Don't take any notice of him.
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.
The article is lacking in details, but it looks like the idea is to just spray sea-water high enough in a fine mist. So no logistics issues.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
So you object to throwing some salt water into the air which would wash out in days when you stop as a mad scientists plan.
You would prefer streaming iron into ocean surface waters slowly changing the ocean's mineral make up permanently.
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.
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.
Salted rain ? What could possibly go wrong with that ?
Not much. It is 10 m^3/sec of seawater. On a global scale that is an infinitesimal amount of salt, and is harmless.
Which is great, if it were evenly spread out across the globe- but it wouldn't be. It would be concentrated where the machines to produce the salt spray are located. This could result in permement ecological damage to specific areas. We could try putting them where weather conditions USUALLY take the salt away from land- but we know how unpredictable weather systems can be, and we also should know that we can't predict how sending so much salt water up into the atmosphere at localized sites might impact weather conditions. Winds that blow out to sea might alter and blow across a poor country's only fertile stretch.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
THis is another proof the flood of the bible didnt happen. Consider all the salt that would have destroyed the good land after the flood waters disappeared.
I'm not a Christian, and I certainly don't believe in the bible or the flood story. However, surely any being that could create the earth, and flood the earth, could also keep the salt from the oceans from blending with the "water flood" that covered the land.
If you consider how large the earth is- and how high some of the mountains are... that's a crap load of water and would not come from natural sources- that's more than all the water in the atmosphere added to the oceans; so for it to happen it would have to have supernatural origins... as long as we're talking about supernatural origins logic and science is thrown out the window... the floods could have been saltless.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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
The floods which likely form the basis for the worldwide flood myths are probably Outburst Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in particular from the end of the last ice age. Some of the floods that we know about covered some areas of land that were otherwise dry in hundreds of meters of water. Sure this isn't exactly the same as the Noah flood myth where even the mountains were covered, but exaggeration in a story passed down from more than 10,000 years ago is hardly surprising.
such as ocean acidification
Ocean water does not become "acidic", it simply is less alkaline (huge, huge distinction).
Not a distinction at all. Decreasing the pH of a solution makes it more acidic, regardless of whether it's on the alkaline or acid side of the centerpoint of the range. Likewise, increasing its pH makes it more alkaline, regardless of its current position. If you prefer "de-alkalinization" to "acidification", or "de-acification" to "alkalinization" the words are synonyms, so pick whatever you want.
This is just ordinary chemistry terminology that you should have learned in high school.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
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.
thats 1.3 million tons per minute. 31 million tons per hour.
That's some strange math you've got going on there. Last I checked, there were 60 minutes in each hour.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Um? Spray off the east coast of Japan and North America. Spray off the west coast of Africa and South America. You would have slightly salty water falling into salty water. It ain't that hard.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
Um? Spray off the east coast of Japan and North America. Spray off the west coast of Africa and South America. You would have slightly salty water falling into salty water. It ain't that hard.
Yeah, because, that's what people living in those areas want- for salty water to kill all their crops falling from the sky when the wind changes direction and maybe even permanently ruin the agricultural prospects for those regions.
Wind doesn't always blow in one direction all the time.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Of course. That's why they named them the trade winds.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
How is it that you're jumping from a state of a warmed planet right into an Ice Age? I think we'd have some warning before things got out of hand.
Just another day in Paradise
The jump is that will not be able to calibrate this perfectly. Or there may be political / military reasons to do so.
Forget the military reasoning - let's look at the two scenarios:
sea level rising 4 inches (10 cm) or a comparably rapidly advancing ice age?
Which would be worse? Which would be tougher to deal with?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Seems to me that you're making an assumption that there are "two scenarios" instead of an infinite amount of middle ground. It doesn't have to be calibrated perfectly. For the sake of testing, why not try say 10% and validate the results, and adjust as necessary.
Just another day in Paradise
I see your point. The ideal is that we reach one of the infinite points in the middle.
.. (I despise that particular solution.)
I personally don't see global warming being much of a problem as we are inexorably on the path away from carbon-based fuels. Photovoltaics have dropped to the point where they are competitive with fossil fuels and the price is continuing to drop at an exponential rate. We getting very close to the point where fossil fuels will not be needed for electric production (and that production will cover personal transportation).
IF global warming is as bad as some activists are saying then we have already passed the point of no return; frozen methane in the oceans will be released into the atmosphere and there is nothing we can do about it. Therefore, in my opinion, we need a technological solution to this ecological problem, The alternative is to simply stop breeding and bring the population of the earth to under a billion people.
Now, if that's the case. A lot of people will have to die. We can't help them for the good of the planet. etc
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond