Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming 492
SUNSTOP writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Maryland scientist has proposed a public patent that he claims could combat global warming. The proposed plan would require massive amounts of water to be sprayed into the air in an effort to bolster the earth's existing air conditioning system. "First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation. Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University whose computer simulation of Ace's invention suggests it would significantly cool the planet. The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said."
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Right here! [utexas.edu]
He cared deeply about the human dilemma and the rape of Earth.
He advocates killing 90% of the worlds population with the ebola virus.
http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html [sas.org]
Is my calendar wrong? (Score:2, Informative)
I could swear it's December 19th but somebody is playing April Fool jokes. Really, the solution to global warming is that the earth will get too hot, humans will either die from the heat, kill each other for the little remaining habitable land, succumb to some terrible pandemic due to compromised immune systems, or starve because we can't grow any more food. In any case gobal warming will be solved because there will not be nearly enough humans left to screw up the world any more. So what's the problem? Nature will take care of things.
Re:SNOW! (Score:2, Informative)
Chemical? (Score:3, Informative)
Although I understand most folks do use dihydrogen monoxide [dhmo.org] in their evaporative coolers and misters. Not that is scary stuff! I sure wouldn't want to aspirate too much of it.
Re:A Little Known Maryland Scientist Has Made Publ (Score:3, Informative)
Believe it or not, climate model physics includes thermodynamic heat transfer.
The point is that some of the heat in the water vapor gets radiated to space, when the vapor is lofted to higher and cooler altitudes. Also that it can induce sunlight-reflecting cloud formation.
Evaporative climate control not a great idea. (Score:2, Informative)
Let's take a look at this. To be viable you would have to evaporate an amount of water that is significant compared to the water that is already evaporated. Given that a largish thunderstorm cell has energy content on the order of an H bomb, methinks that the budget is going to be a bit stretched.
For houses this works well. For planets, no.
Also evaporating water may drop the temperature, but it doesn't drop the heat. You're just storing it as latent heat of water vapor. In that form it can still play with the rest of the climate engine.
Even if it were possible, there are good reasons to think that it MIGHT be counter productive.
1. Water is a potent greenhouse gas, blocking different IR bands than CO2. Increasing the average water content of the atmosphere may well cause the average temp to go up.
2. Enough water vapour and you increase the number of clouds. Increasing the number of clouds can push the climate either way: Thick clouds tend to cool the earth, thin clouds tend to warm it. Last time I checked (some years ago) cloud modeling was one of the sticky points in climate models.
3. If you used fresh water for this, it's going to put a major drain on our fresh water supplies. If you use salt water for this, you will put a huge amount of cute microscopic salt crystals in the air. These act as condensation nuclei for water droplets. The formation of rain is dependent on the number of nuclei. Too few and you get a few large drops of rain that result in light rainfall. Too many and you get masses of cloud with drops too small to fall, or that evaporate on the way down.
A possibly more viable form of climate control would be to use H bombs to turn mountain tops into stratospheric dust. We have significant data that large volcanic eruptions can cool the atmosphere for a few years. I don't know if anyone has figured out how much of this is due to dust, and how much to sulfates. Sure this method increases the background radiation. But I think most people would take a 1-2% increase of cancer in 20 years rather than become a refugee of rising ocean levels.
(Caveat: I've not done the math. How many bombs a year does it take to do a Krakatoa? What is the radiation release of an H bomb designed to pulverize the maximum amount of rock and inject it into the stratosphere? I submit that the math for this is less than trivial.)