Cooling the Planet With a Bubble Bath 219
cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"
Tiny Bubbles? (Score:5, Funny)
Has he cleared that with Don Ho?
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What amazing insights you have into the environmentalist mind!
Please, tell me more about why I believe things!
Tiny Bubbles (Score:2, Funny)
Too bad Don Ho's gone...
Re:Tiny Bubbles (Score:5, Funny)
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Sigh :-) (Score:2)
I even hit the "get more comments" button after I posted, and it still only showed my posting. While great minds often do think alike, obvious jokes like this one go to the fastest fingers...
Cue Don Ho song... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the sea (in the sea)
Make me happy (make me happy)
Make me feel free (make me feel free)
Tiny bubbles (tiny bubbles)
Make me warm all over
With a feeling that I'm gonna
Love you till the end of time
So here's to the golden moon
And here's to the silver sea
And mostly here's a toast
To you and me
So here's to the ginger lei
I give to you today
And here's a kiss
That will not fade away
Poor guy, Don Ho... I haven't the heart to tell him, but all the women in his family are Hos!
Re:Cue Don Ho song... (Score:5, Funny)
FTS:
Either this physicist is full of shit, or Don Ho was.
Cue Aesop's fable (Score:3, Insightful)
A MAN (apparently Don Ho) and a Satyr once drank together [soupsong.com] in token of a bond of alliance being formed between them. One very cold wintry day, as they talked, Don Ho put his fingers to his mouth and blew tiny bubbles. When the Satyr asked the reason for this, he told him that he did it to make himself feel warm all over, because it was so cold. Later on in the day the Satyr went to the beach, and but the ocean was sat too warm at the surface. Some other man blew tiny bubbles into it. When the Satyr again in
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I never realized what a hip song this is until I started playing the tenor ukulele.
Seriously, if any of you would love to play music but don't want to spend 20 years becoming a virtuoso, pick up a halfway decent ukulele (spend about $100). There are dozens of excellent sites and organizations you can find on the web that will teach you how to play. You can start playing songs the first day. And it's better than prozac for chasing away the blues. And the ukulele is a cool instr
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I guarantee you'll get laid. You do realize you are speaking to slashdot readers, don't you?
I'm skeptical of the bubbles for the same reason many others have cited -- by cutting of sunlight to the ocean, you are depriving sea life of the base of it's foodchain, the plankton. Much better to simply paint all man made horizontal surfaces with silver paint (and keep them clean). Sure, it's bad on your eyes when you are driving, but it reverses the warming effect seen in urb
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I far prefer Brother Iz to Don Ho.
Iz's cover of "Over the Rainbow" is da kine, for sure.
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I always feel like they're not really thinking through all the possible ramifications. Bubbles in the Sea? It might be worth thinking about what that would do to ocean life.
My smart-ass first post not withstanding (I just couldn't resist the Don Ho joke), I agree with you completely. Bubbles might help alleviate climate change but they're likely to cause all kinds of havoc with the phytoplankton that are the base of the oceanic food chain.
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Tiptoeing beneath the tulips now I suppose.
Crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ocean acidification and overfishing will have killed it all off long before we finish building 1000 windmills to power this.
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Re:Crazy (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually you would not need to go to the spectrum. Since the bubbling water reflects more sunlight (which is what the cooling effect is based on), less sunlight enters the water. Less sunlight = less photosynthesis.
Less photosynthesis means less production of biomass, which I'd guess has a negative effect on the ecosystem. But less photosynthesis also has the effect of less consumption of CO2, so at the end this idea may actually have the opposite effect from what was intended.
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If the bubble layer were BELOW the layer where phytoplankton live
It would then be completely ineffective. The bubbles need to be on or near the surface.
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There is nearly no true plant life in the ocean. It's mostly algae.
That being said, air bubbles hurt corals and fish. They hate it. Ask any saltwater tank keeper what happens when there's too many bubbles in the tank. I had it happen just yesterday, and every single coral shriveled up until it was over, and stayed that way for a couple hours.
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Or the sea birds that need to see through the surface to find fish.
Re:Crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
I heard that the actual planet was going into an ice age, and that the recent global warming by man saved us all from 1000 years of frozen hell.
Seriously though, more heat is better than less heat, a run away cooling/frozen world is real bad, nothing grows at sub zero temps.
But a hotter planet with more co2, well plants grow faster, and who knows cows could grow to the size of dinasours :)
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Basically, you heard wrong. Yes, we are going into an ice age, but not for at least 10,000-20,000 years.
And while some plants grow faster/better at higher CO2 levels, the plants that profit most are actually called "weeds", even those crops that grow faster apparently end up bigger but with fewer nutrients (so more, but less nutricious).
And in most situations, CO2 is not the limiting factor in crop growth, things like water and fertilizer tend to be what determines how fast and how big plants grow.
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Says you. The last ice age lasted about 15-20 thousand years, and the previous warm period lasted about the same. Given that the last ice age ended 16 thousand years ago, I imagine we could see another ice age any time in the next 5 thousand years.
Also, the geological record shows that life was most prolific at its warmest, and most mass extinctions occurred during the ice ages.
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injecting CO2 into the air is an old green house trick, so it is a limiting factor (not as great as not enough water or fertilizer though)
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What about the sea life that relies on that heat?
It will live on, in our memories and hearts. At least until the effects of that sea life dying make it to our little corner of the biosphere.
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Re:Crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it. History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they think they do. Just look at the eggs: back in the day they were considered good, nutritious food. Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content. Oops! Guess again! They're a good source of omega fatty acids and really are good for you!
The law of unintended consequences comes into play as well. They guy is using a mathematical model. What's the model missing? "Garbage in, garbage out" is not a principle we want to apply to altering the global environment.
Any efforts to reverse "Anthropogenic global warming" should be confined to reducing the supposed causes. What's our incentive to stop polluting if we can "fix" it by blowing bubbles in the ocean?
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Any efforts to reverse "Anthropogenic global warming" should be confined to reducing the supposed causes.
All well and good, assuming that even instantly curtailing all anthropogenic CO2 emissions would make a jot of difference. If the climate is a feedback system [1], and enough CO2 has already been released for the runaway warming process to continue naturally as it has done many, many times in the past [2], then the damage is done. It's simply prudent to explore ALL the feasible geoengineering options available until it's clearly demonstrated they're not needed. Because if they are needed, they'll be needed
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As you yourself admit we have large gaps in our knowledge of how these things work. Global warming is bad but can be dealt with. There are many, many worse things you can do to the planet. Like accidentally wiping out most marine lift which this very well could do. Or runaway global cooling that would coat the whole planet in a sheet of ice. It's like saying we should treat a fever by dumping someone outside naked on the south pole. Then maybe dump the person into a pot of boiling water once hypothermia and
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Any efforts to reverse "Anthropogenic global warming" should be confined to reducing the supposed causes.
You need to reduce that "supposed causes" to "certain causes" else you're just engaging in another badly thought out geoengineering project.
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How's the kool aid?
Seriously, what will it take to change the minds of the true believers? How much evidence do we need to show that the worlds biggest "correlation equals causation" scam is, well, a scam to create a profitable carbon trading market for the liberal elite? Despite the public exposure of naked data manipulation, how about evidence suggesting CO2 isn't the culprit, but rather CFC's and cosmic rays? http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012/l [insciences.org]
What about previous temperature fluctuatio
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Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.
That was my reaction as well. I'm so tired of people trying to fix problems with solutions that are worse than the problems themselves. There's a reason you don't use air stones in saltwater fish tanks. The fish can get air bloat, it mucks with the PH and you can kill off corals. Not to mention, it would have a giant skimmer effect which would likely pollute our beaches. To do this on a massive scale is like trying to combat global warming by inducing a nuclear winter. They can't even begin to anticipate th
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best comment ever. if you ran for president, i'd seriously vote for you. part of the american problem is this demand for action on every issue, people don't seem capable of saying "you know what, it's not really that big of a problem, lets just do nothing".
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Ahh, but doing nothing is not an option. At least, you can't turn on the news without hearing that. Every time I hear someone say it, I finish their sentence with, "said Hitler to the Jews." If I recall, he had a "solution" too that didn't work out so well for many people.
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I just want everyone in power to pull their dicks out of our asses for a year or two, so that we can have a chance to recover from all their fucking "solutions."
That's pretty similar to how I described the 2008 elections. No matter who won, you knew you were going to take it in the ass, you were just voting for who you thought would be more likely to use lube first.
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Geoengineering is such a spectacularly bad idea as to warrant armed revolt in order to prevent it.
What's great about cognition by amygdala is that it's never wrong.
History has shown again and again that scientists understand far less about the complexity of natural systems than they wish to get paid for.
Arguing from a universal is another time-proven technique. If we negatively condition on human overreaching we'll become so lax we'll all die of unscrubbed bathtub ring.
Then suddenly they were demonized for their cholesterol content.
By the powerful cereals lobby, back in an era where people were less clued in about whitecoats for sale. Thankfully the tobacco interests ran a public education campaign on that score for several decades, and finally the message sunk in to a fairly broad swath of the general
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We're all on the same boat here - and I hope you realise how rocky it is!
Some people have been out at sea for too long, and now normal land is the wobbly area.
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I still say we just move the Earth (Score:3, Funny)
It can't be that hard... Just put some giant rockets on one side, and boom! What could go wrong?
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They'd have to be moving rockets because of course the earth rotates, and as most of earth is covered in oceans we'll have to use some sort of ocean bearing vessel.
I personally suggest we use frickin' sharks with frickin' rockets attached to their frickin' heads.
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Just put a railroad track (with bridges) around the equator and have a train travel from east to west such that it will make one round the world trip per 24 hours. Stick a rocket on top, and you're golden.
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Nah, just light the rocket from 11 AM to 1 PM every day, are we there yet?
Re:I still say we just move the Earth (Score:4, Funny)
Don't move the earth. Instead reduce energy production of the sun. Besides countering global warming, it also has the effect of increasing the sun's lifetime, because it uses up its fuel more slowly.
We just have to find the knob where to change the setting.
No mention of (Score:5, Funny)
a rubber duck. It's not a proper bubble bath without a rubber duck.
Re:No mention of (Score:4, Informative)
Same problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't all these crazy "reflect back light somewhere in the ocean" have the same problem?
Whether you're covering the ocean with a white tarp, stretching tin-foil over a large number of floaters, or creating loads of tiny bubbles you're still depriving the ecosystem of light it is most likely dependent on.
No light, no plankton, no life.
Am I wrong?
No plankton! (Score:2)
Soylent green is people! It's People! Ahhh you'll get my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead, bubbly hands.
--
Toro Heston
(Alternately, for the younger generation, "Wrong! No plankton, more money for Mr. Crabs!")
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It makes a lot of sense. If there's no life on the planet, no one cares about the temperature. Problem solved.
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It makes a lot of sense. If there's no life on the planet, no one cares about the temperature. Problem solved.
Yeah. Well, life will repopulate after we've fucked up the planet. And millions of years from now, that life will wonder what happened during this brief 20,000 year segment of history on this rock, chalk it up as a mass-extinction event like all the others, and the universe will have forgotten all our hopes and dreams.
That's "problem solved".... It makes you wonder if it hasn't happened before.
Re:Same problems (Score:4, Insightful)
It did not happen before the way that you are implying.
For a civilization to start creating a change in the global climate, the civilization has to be numerous and it has to possess various technologies.
We would have noticed the following:
1. Previous excavations of various Earth minerals starting with metals: iron, nickel, copper, uranium, gold, cadmium.
2. Previous energy production attempts: the oil would have been much smaller if they were pumped before, we know of the exact mass extinctions and time periods where coal, oil and gas were created. So during those times it would not be possible for such a civilization to exist, because it's nearly impossible to coexist with giant lizards and the lizards wouldn't dominate the planet to deposit all those carcasses that formed the oil, gas and coal stores.
3. Our excavations at various rocky mountain sites would have shown this age and we would have found similar excavations from those past civilizations.
4. Certainly some structures would have been found preserved, some machinery, roads, after all, we find skeletons of dinosaurs, so why not tools of the long gone civilizations?
5. Uranium probably would have been gone as well as some other heavy metals, converted to other forms by those energy users, who would have had to use various types of energy to achieve climate level shifts.
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Well, bubbles might also mean no oxygen exchange. So we'll wind up killing 80% of the planet's ecosystem off when the oceans die, to stop global warming. Yeah. That makes sense.
Yeah... this is why people put bubble-making aerators in fish-tanks: to starve the fish of oxygen.
/sarcasm
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No O2 exchange will not be a problem, when an aquarium get hypoxic, you blow tiny air bubbles into the water to increase the oxygen level.
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Ocean water is pretty gets anoxic too much below the surface anyways and at the surface both photosynthetic algea and frothing from the wave-action keep a lot of O2 in it.
And how many bubbles do you need (Score:2)
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Let the Chinese figure this one out (Score:2)
Good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Now all we have to do is build huge industrial complexes and ships to spend huge amounts of energy pumping tiny bubbles into the entire world ocean.
Well, I guess we've solved global warming. That was easy.
Yesbut... (Score:4, Insightful)
It would also increase evaporation and thusly the amount of water vapor in the air. Water vapor is more effective than CO2 at increasing global warming.
Have you thought of that? No? Didn't *think* so!
He also says that energy is not a limiting factor. He's a kook.
--
BMO
Re:Yesbut... (Score:5, Informative)
As a matter of fact the article mentions evaporation, suggesting that bubbles actually reduce the evaporation. If anyone is a kook in this situation, I would put odds on you (but it's more likely you're just lazy).
Re:Yesbut... (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the article.
He says the bubbles would slow down evaporation in lakes and streams (i.e., where he's not using the system). This is only because he's increased overall humidity from the evaporation of the ocean with his bubble toy.
Ever see bubbles burst with fast film? They create droplets which increases surface area. Evaporation is dependent upon surface area, temperature, vapor pressure, and barometric pressure. Increase any of these and you increase the amount of water vapor in the air. Doing this over a large area increases the surface area for evaporation to happen by a large amount
It's like you people have forgotten the most basic physics.
And yes, he's a kook. Only a nutjob would come up with something as ridiculous as this.
--
BMO
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B) What happens when we kill all the marine life (eg: food, O2 generation, food's food, etc) because someone took this dipsh*t's idea and blocked out their light?
It doesn't block out all their light. If it introduces oxygen and CO2 into the sea water, we might even see an increase in bioactivity, depending on the location.
C) The issue is OZONE depletion - we can make that already and routinely do in water purification - why don't we just patch the damn hole using technology since we used it to make it in the first place.
No way. It's like you haven't read the article. This is a fix for global warming by increasing the albedo of the oceans. And the ozone hole forms over Antarctica which it might do naturally (we don't know to the contrary) no matter what we dumped into the atmosphere.
D) If you fix 1 issue with a round about solution you have a new issue, especially when you don't know the damned system, and until we have a model that predicts every last raindrop's exact velocity, trajectory, landing point, starting point and resulting reactions (in a tree or ground or mixing with windshield wiper fluid) for the next 1000 years with perfect accuracy WE DON'T KNOW THE SYSTEM.
This is such a retarded observation. Fine, we'll never KNOW THE SYSTEM to your sati
Re:Yesbut... (Score:5, Informative)
Excess water vapor in the atmosphere quickly precipitates out as rain or snow. Consequently, you can't increase global warming significantly only by attempting to add water vapor to the atmosphere. If the temperature increases, that can cause humidity to increase, and that can cause additional warming. In climatology, you say that water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing.
Yes, I know, I'm ruining everybody's fun by mentioning facts again. What a party pooper!
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Excess water vapor in the atmosphere quickly precipitates out as rain or snow.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. This is a fact known by everyone who has even glanced at a list of greenhouse gases. It's also very effective.
Adding water vapor to the atmosphere increases the amount of heat the atmosphere can hold.
As you raise the temperature of the atmosphere (because you've added to the heat trapping ability of the atmosphere) you can evaporate more water.
Tell me where this is wrong.
I'll wait right here.
As f
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Water vapor has a huge heat of evaporation [wikipedia.org] and is actually lighter than air, 28.8 gm/mol vs 18 gm/mol, this alows it to carry vast amounts of heat well above the insulating CO2 release it and fall back as rain. Striking example of this heat pump effects are thunder-storms, tornadoes and hurricanes where warm moist air from the lower troposphere is violently shot up into the cold dry lower stratosphere. Mind boggling amounts of heat energy is moved by this effect.
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simpler solution (Score:2)
Destroy the Sun. There, I fixed that for you.
"Since the dawn of time, Man has yearned to destroy the Sun."
- C. Montgomery Burns
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> Destroy the Sun. :-)
But then we'd get a global cooling problem.
You liberals and your global cooling conspiracies!
Bermuda Ocean (Score:5, Interesting)
Before you muck about ..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before you start mucking about with geo-engineering the temperature, you'd better make damn sure you can UN-muck it or we're all seriously mucked!
What this means is:
1) Thousands of gyroscopically positionable mirrors in space allowing you to control sunlight = Good!
2) Planting oodles of trees everywhere we can do distribute the heat that we do have = "Well, OK, it'll work for most of the planet as long as you don't plant trees that are disease vectors for other organisms."
3) Throwing thousands of tons of [Insert favorite substance here] into the atmosphere/Ocean/Volcanoes and hoping it works and not having a clue as to the knock-on effects down the road = BAD, BAD, BAD.
Cheers!
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Planting oodles of trees everywhere..
More like, "let's put back the forests we've destroyed over the last couple hundred years, then plant some more"
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Just so you know, there are currently more trees in New England than before the settlement of the English.
The English settlers wouldn't have had a chance had it not been for the people living here hadn't had already cleared the land.
--
BMO
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Actually all of North America has more trees the before Europeans came. Most Industrial Forresters plant 2.5 trees for everyone cut, they make money cutting mature lumber not running out of trees to cut. Even the American Indians would cut and burn old stagnate unproductive growth to allow productive vigorous new forrests to replace them.
Re:Before you muck about ..... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you remember? You DID give me the time machine to warn everyone by posting on Slashdot. Remember what you said in the bunker?
"...everyone takes warnings posted on Slashdot seriously, so we put you in the time machine and...."
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Of course he doesn't remember, because he hasn't said it yet.
What if the planet is already getting Colder? (Score:3, Interesting)
What if the planet is already (or on the near verge of) getting colder?
Personally, I'm far more concerned about global cooling than global warming.
Global warming, on the whole, is more favorable to growing food / living things. Anyone doubting that need only read up on the effects of the various ice ages in the relatively extremely recent geological past. Even a very minor cooling period, such as the "little ice age" in the mid 1600s, while very minimal, had horrendous, adverse effects for humans...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age [wikipedia.org]
The "climate change" folks seeking to cool the earth should be wary - nature may respond with far more cooling than they'd bargained for!
Ron
How about solving the CAUSE?? (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like someone banging his head against the wall all the time, and coming up with the “solution” of taking painkillers... while continuing to run against the wall.
I am baffled by the amount of elaborate ignorant high-level idiocy it takes, to come up with such thoughts.
Hero of the moment gone.... (Score:2)
Where's Lawrence Welk and his Fantastic Bubble Machine when you need him?
Reflectivity (Score:2)
Wouldn't higher reflectivity of the ocean lead to an increase in the heat absorption of CO2 in the atmosphere, being that a given reflected photon would have twice the chance of striking a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere?
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Probably not because the bubbles reflect visible light back. CO2 is a supposed problem because the ground absorbs the energy visible and IR and re-radiates part of it back as Infrared that the CO2 absorbs and scatters, the visible light passes through the CO2 unscattered.
Bubble druggies (Score:2)
So the day we stop inputting the bubbles, we're all toast, except faster and crispier?
Crackpot ideas, even at Harvard (Score:2, Insightful)
From TFA:
Seitz says adding bubbles to a 1-square-kilometer patch of ocean is feasible, but scaling it up may be technically difficult.
No shit, Sherlock. I'm glad he goes to Harvard!
When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C.
Well I'll be damned. It's too bad he failed to mention how many millions of square miles that need to be filled with bubbles to achieve this (hint: it's more than
climate model huh? (Score:2)
I'm sure this guy is brillant, but he's approached the problem in such a one dimensional way that it's painful. I suspect he's not interested in ever implementing the idea, but the danger is some pressure group or politician might come across it and think it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Would this really work? (Score:2)
I remember using what was basically a giant plastic sheet of bubble wrap to help increase the solar gain of our swimming pool, and keep the water a more comfortable temperature than it otherwise would have been.
Obligatory Futurama Reference (Score:4, Funny)
Narrator: [in movie] Fortunately, our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last-minute way to combat global warming. Ever since 2063 we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.
[The movie cuts to a shot of a aircraft dropping a large ice cube into the ocean and then cuts back to the classroom.]
Suzie: [in movie] Just like Daddy puts in his drink every morning. And then he gets mad.
Narrator: [in movie] Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time. [There are shots of bigger ice cubes being dropped into the ocean.] Thus solving the problem once and for all.
Suzie: [in movie] But--
Narrator: [angry; in movie.] Once and for all!
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Neither problem is new, nor has either problem gone away. It's just that the public mind can only contain one global issue at a time. I would try to prove it, but you've proved my point better than I could.
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the public mind can only contain one global issue at a time
And that's on a good day.
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the public mind can only contain one global issue at a time
And that's on a good day.
Of a good week, of a good month, in a good year.
Re:Didn't he hear the new problem? (Score:4, Informative)
When you increase water temp, you decrease the dissolution rate of CO2 in the ocean, but you increase the amount of CO2 that is converted to H2CO3. The second impact is larger than the first.
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