Bill Gates Funds Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines 403
lucidkoan writes "Environmentalists have long argued about whether geoengineering (using technology to alter the climate) is a good way to tackle climate change. But the tactic has some heavy hitters on its side, including Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder recently announced plans to invest $300,000 into research for machines that suck up seawater and spray it into the air, seeding white clouds that reflect rays of sunlight away from Earth. The machines, developed by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining, turn seawater into tiny particles that can be shot up over 3,000 feet in the air. The particles increase the density of clouds by increasing the amount of nuclei contained within."
What could (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, let's ignore for a moment the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas responsible for up to 76% of the greenhouse effect (as opposed to CO2 which is responsible for 1/3) of that. Let's also ignore the magical energy source required to pump all this water into the air. What could possibly go wrong? Where can I buy stock? /sarcasm
Re:What could (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest unicorns on a treadmill.
Brett
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure there's a consensus on what being a "heavy hitter" means, and people can find lots of reasons for hating Bill Gates, but let's not pretend that he doesn't know anything about technology.
He wrote Basic interpreters in several assembly languages which is something that probably 75% of Slashdotters have never done the equivalent of. Nor was he born with a silver monopoly in his mouth - there was a lot of work and smart decisions made before Windows was classified as a monopoly.
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I would think such a thing may be possible. It shouldn't require any MS code at all. I'm not quite sure how the juggling act would go between filesystems, unless you made a filesystem file and ran the OS from there, but accessed the old files with something like ntfs-3g. You could probably do it using a static compiled binary under cygwin. Since it's static, it should be portable to target machines. Then you could do something like...
cd /
dd if=/dev/zero of=/
Re:What could (Score:4, Informative)
OK, let's ignore for a moment the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas responsible for up to 76% of the greenhouse effect (as opposed to CO2 which is responsible for 1/3) of that.
Water vapor traps in a lot of heat on the earth, but water vapor in the form of clouds reflects a lot of energy; raising albedo by seeding clouds for a net loss of heat could actually work. Better yet the amount of water vapor in the air is naturally regulated, so excess water vapor and clouds are not so difficult to remove as CO2.
Let's also ignore the magical energy source required to pump all this water into the air.
Clean Coal, with the magic of Mr. Clean! =D
What could possibly go wrong? Where can I buy stock? /sarcasm
Yeah, cus Bill Gates has never been wrong before! Wait, what was that about a chasm? Yaaaaaaaah!
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Lets also ignore 76 + 33 = 109%. Let's also ignore methane, another potent greenhouse gas.
I actually studied this as part of my Master's. IIRC, the number is around 13 watts per square meter overall (this is a net loss of energy, aka cooling). This number includes t
Re:What could (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually studied this as part of my Master's. IIRC, the number is around 13 watts per square meter overall (this is a net loss of energy, aka cooling). This number includes the net heat gain from the clouds at night. (Clouds at night prevent IR radiation from escaping into space, thereby warming the Earth.)
Alrighty, crank up those machines after the night air has cooled, stop them before sundown.
What Gates is funding is research. All the hypothetical problems suggested here are valid, but will be tested during the research.
Re:What could (Score:5, Informative)
I will say that there are OTHER possible side effects, for example, the clouds WILL block sun from getting to the crops, so there will be less food. And I am sure that there are other ones that are not thought about.
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I would assume that since H2O+CO2 makes carbonic acid (H2CO3, or acid rain), that letting the clouds come back down would flush the CO2 out faster than leaving them up.
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Re:What could (Score:5, Interesting)
Water vapor concentration depends directly on the temperature of the air, and has a life cycle of about 2 weeks. In other words, it is not part of a positive feedback loop. If you pump too much into the air, it just rains out. Once the sun goes down, water vapor condensates out.
You can make Global Warming worse by adding water vapor to the air, but if enough sunlight gets reflected back out through cloud formation, it's a good deal. The cost of putting enough water into the air though.... is a different matter. Not sure if that's a cost-effective way of going about it.
Re:What could (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, Wired had an article about this years ago. It might be considered a good idea on islands near very cold deep water, because the condensation from the pipes is also a source of fresh water. These same islands often find fresh water extremely hard to come by otherwise. Haven't heard of this advancing beyond a lab-stage though.
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Re:What could (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's slashdot, but I would still like to point out your remarks have nothing to do with the technique described. Besides that, 76% + 1/3 > 1, so you should go over your numbers again...
They talk about producing clouds, not water vapor. Clouds are made of liquid water in tiny drops, forming from vapor around some sort of nuclei, it's actually mentioned even in the summary! The energy issue need not be that much of a problem. Energy is needed, but how much? Probably nothing relevant to global warming, so it's just a matter of cost.
The problem of salt is also insignificant, given the task is done deep in the ocean. The salt will not get carried for 5,000 kilometers without a huge drop in concentration, if at all.
Having said all that, further tests must be carried out, of course, we still have no backup planet. From what I understand, that is the whole point in investing in research.
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This idea is discussed more thoroughly in Steve Levitt's book, SuperFreakonomics. The idea apparently thought up by several individuals in a patent-holding company called Intellectual Ventures (IV) which has a number of noteworthy academics and scientists. I suggest you read more about the idea before rejecting it. It is not surprising that Bill Gates has invested in the idea given that the creator of Intellectual Ventures was a high-level executive at Microsoft, and friends with Bill Gates. Gates has inves
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Well, let's see. The salt falls back down. A proportion of it falls to the ground, slowly salting farmland. Famine sets in, and after the temporary greenhouse impact of a few hundreds of millions of corpses decaying, anthropogenic global warming reduces by virtue of less "anthropo" to "genic" that carbon dioxide.
Problem solved.
Re:What could (Score:4, Insightful)
That was exactly my reaction.
I live in a (tropical) seaside town and people several km inland have problems with sat corrosion - this stuff can stay in the air.
Bringing salt inland (e.g. for prawn farming) has already had a severe impact in some places.
Now, this is apparently going to all happen out at sea, but even so it could have an impact (on precipitation) and it could get carried further than we think (if volcanic ash can get from Iceland to Africa, how far can atomised salt go?),
Re:What could (Score:5, Informative)
Because last time I checked, when I stuck my tongue out when it rained, I didn't taste any salt at all, and I am 99.9% sure that the rainwater I drank used to be in the salty seas not too long before. Just because it seems to fulfil symbolic logic doesn't mean it's true.
You obviously have never lived near the ocean. The rain isn't "salty" enough to be tasted, but there is salt in the air. Anything that can be corroded will be corroded faster near a body of salt water.
Re:What could (Score:4, Informative)
Wars? Civil rights? International relations? Law enforcement? Disaster rescue?
Re:What could (Score:5, Informative)
The rainwater you drink is condensed water that evaporated naturally. Unless they forgot to mention a filtering step they're talking about shoving atomized saltwater directly into the air.
Re:What could (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually had a similar idea a while back, which would be more eco-friendly as you're suggesting. It would involve buoys and black plastic sheets. The sheets would sit maybe 1" under the water, to encourage evaporation. If the sheets were spread out, they wouldn't cause damage to the ecosystem below. So, maybe 1% coverage over 100 square miles is 1 square mile of increased evaporation and therefore more clouds and rain.
It takes a lot for evaporation to become a cloud though. It may be that all that would be created is just raised humidity in the area.
Re:What could (Score:5, Informative)
You, sadly, don't know what you are talking about. The air on areas which are adjacent to the ocean has a high concentration of chlorides which, if not designed with this in mind, can get reinforced concrete structures to completely corrode and crumble in a span of 3 to 5 years. The high concentration of chlorides in the air vary according to multiple parameters, including the topology and some papers have been written that show that high chloride concentrations can be found in areas which are up to 10m above sea level, which means that in some flat areas such as river deltas and flood plains you can find concentrations of chloride a couple of km inland which are practically as high as right in the beach.
But never mind that. Just stick your tongue out, lick the funny rain and let the truthyness of that guide your reasoning. After all, who the hell needs those idiot scientists who have proven multiple times the exact opposite of what you claim?
Re:What could (Score:5, Funny)
when I stuck my tongue out when it rained, I didn't taste any salt at all,
If I was choosing my nick again I would be the RTFT-TROLL (yes; that loud)
Here it is; the article title again, but this time a bit marked up for those of you so bloody stupid you can't see it.
First when I joined this site, it was read the summary, then it's read the article... now it's read the title too? Screw this, I'm leaving this site. I was more than content to just pick a word or three (changing a few) to base my wild speculation on (such as "Gates Salt(ing) Clouds")
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Lets also ignore the possible impact of having that much salt pumped into the air...
Could be interesting; microscopic salt crystals from the ocean are a major source of the nuclei that precipitation condenses around. Deliberately throwing more could have some unexpected results.
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That should have read "Deliberately throwing more in the air could have some unexpected results."
Remember: always use the preview option, kids.
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Could be interesting; microscopic salt crystals from the ocean are a major source of the nuclei that precipitation condenses around. Deliberately throwing more could have some unexpected results.
How's about an expected result? It cools the atmosphere as water condenses and forms rain? Do this out at sea and you get cooled zones. Certain cooled zones, part of a process known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), alter the weather over the U.S.
Believe it or not, the concept is based upon observations of ongoing, present-day phenomenon.
Re:What could (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I think the expected results are pretty much a given. Being that Bill is in Seattle, but it's rainy there about 340 days of the year, he'll have the operation set up from San Diego to San Francisco.
The winds there tend to go East. So now you're sending what is great seeding for rain clouds over the desert Southwest United States.
I argued for cloud seeding and other methods for adding rainfall into the desert regions, which could make them more habitable. Freshwater rivers and lakes would be replenished. More plants would be able to grow. Several people pointed out that there is an existing and viable ecosystem there already. It's not as dense as we're used to seeing in forest areas, but it definitely exists.
Lets not forget what happens to Southern California when they get more than 3 days of rain in a row. The "Los Angeles River" (I quote that, and you'll understand why if you've ever seen it) becomes a fast moving deathtrap that frequently overruns its "banks", and sweeps the occasional car or kid into it. Mudslides wash away hills, houses, and even close interstates. That's always national news. So, instead of it happening occasionally, it would be a regular event. In time, we'd grow accustom to it, and people (the survivors) would migrate to safer areas. The mudslides would become less of a problem as the loose soil washes away and plants and trees begin to grow. Then again, the massive wildfires of Southern California would be less of a problem, since it would rain frequently.
With increased plant growth, our atmospheric CO2 levels would drop. Humidity in these areas would also rise, and non-native animals would migrate into these areas.
So, it sounds like a win-win situation, with the exception of the arid environment ecosystem which would be totally destroyed.
The problem with that is that we would essentially be terraforming significant areas. I know we haven't learned quite yet that man playing god isn't a great idea, as we're still very primitive (no offense, but we are). The bigger problem would be that to sustain the terraforming, the system would have to remain in place forever. Without the system, the area would return to its previous state. Since you'd eventually have vast woodlands where there was just desert before, that would die off, and a single wildfire would become a world wide disaster. Imagine an area consisting of New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California burning. That little volcano pop in Iceland would be nothing in comparison.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They're planning on atomizing sea water into the air.
Sea-water has salt in it.
A high salt content makes agricultural land unfertile.
Frequent salty rains over a land area would slowly increase the salt levels in that area, effectivelly poisoning the land.
So they won't be doing it close to land at at all: it will be done in the middle of the ocean where all that salt will simple fall down to the ocean again. Lots of clouds to reflect the sunlight back into space work just as well (if not beter) over the ocean
Re:What could (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, I'm all for blocking more sunlight. That way we can just acidify our oceans in peace. Who needs those pesky "corals"?(/snark)
Any global warming "solution" that doesn't involve actually lowering the CO2 level of the atmosphere isn't a solution. And I agree with those who are concerned about the ramifications of this. Increased planetary cloudcover. Less sunlight reaching the surface. The temperature drop being only masking and contingent on the continued operation of an ever-increasing number of devices with finite lifespan. What could go wrong? ;)
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I don't see why that is the case. Thinking rationally involves deciding which actions give you the greatest probability of achieving your goals. Looking in to all our options gives us the best chance of stopping global warming.
Re:What could (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today! As I posted above, we're on the ride, while we're still building the track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air. However, it's hotter, with climate like we humans have never seen since we invented writing.
Our last chance to keep our climate like the last 10-15k yrs is to geo-engineer. Our only chance to get off this ride in the next 40 years is to put all our chips on 00 and spin the wheel. They aren't good odds, for sure....
Re:What could (Score:4, Interesting)
1)All laboratory experiments show this.
2) All paleoclimate records show this. (To be fair, there are a ton of feedbacks in the system, but historical warm periods are very closely correlated with very high levels of CO2.)
3) All current observations show a very close correlation between CO2 and global temperature. In fact, there is nothing else that comes anywhere close to that correlation.
4) With reasonable parameters in models, previous CO2 data very closely predicts current temperatures and temperature distributions.
From a climate science standpoint, there is absolutely no doubt that increased CO2 leads to increased temperatures. Hell, even from a physics standpoint there's no question about it. In fact, the basic physics and chemistry aren't overly hard. Where the questions lie is in how the earth system as a whole responds to increased temperatures.
Clouds are perhaps the #1 area of uncertainty at the moment. Venus is scorching hot because of cloud cover and a strong greenhouse effect. Hotter on average than Mercury, which is a lot closer to the sun. Yet Mars is a frozen wasteland with no appreciable greenhouse effect or clouds. From ground and satellite observations we can see that, on average, low, thick clouds reflect more sun than they trap heat, and cause a net cooling. High, thin clouds trap more heat than they reflect, causing net warming.
But we lack data on "paleoclouds" - nobody really knows if a warmer planet leads to more low clouds or more high clouds. Most of the physics seems to indicate more clouds, (ala Venus) and paleoclimate records show wet periods corresponded with warm periods, and dry periods with cool periods.
I take a fair bit of issue with your last statement. You don't seem to know much about computational climate models. The entire point is to parametrize physical processes that are too computationally demanding to actually model. We can't model every raindrop, so we model net amounts based on parametrizations which agree with what we see. For instance, many model parametrizations are based on NCEP reanalysis data. It's freely available data, collected from a vast array of measurement devices. Pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, evaporation, precipitation, incoming solar, albedo, etc. The parametrizations we make are an aggreate of real data and pretty well known physical properties.
The big issues are the things we have no data for. "Paleoclouds", eg. Nobody knows what clouds were like 1 million years ago. We can estimate, based on what we know, but it's just a guess. Even something as simple as albedo is tricky. When we lose permafrost, the albedo of the poles changes. But what does it change to? Obviously it lowers, but the actual value depends on the types and distribution of plants that grow there. We've just got to guess at that. Do these uncertainties mean that global warming isn't happening? Not at all. It just means that the spread of predictions is that much larger.
One key thing we do know: The deep ocean has about a 1000 year circulation. We can trace the age of the ocean by testing for things like man-made nuclear particles and CFCs, among other things. When we examine 50 year old and newer water vs hundreds of years old water, the CO2 content of the new water is enormously higher. In fact, it looks like the ocean has taken up almost 50% of the CO2 we produced so far. As any chemist, physicist, or anyone who's opened a warm soda can tell you, warm liquids hold less gas. This potential slowdown of our major carbon sink, combined with our increasing emissions will likely have profound effects on future climate, above and beyond what's currently being modeled.
P.S. The IPCC models are a decade old. They only are using very well established, well reviewed models that have stood the test of time. The newer, more complete, less parametrized, and significantly more complicated models show a spread around the IPCC models. However, the bulk are above IPCC predictions for temperature. It doesn't help that we're following the worst-case IPCC emission scenario.
Re:What could (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the fun thing this and nearly all of the serious geoengineer proposals that I have seen is that they are easily turned off. If there is some horrible consequence to making the ocean a little more cloudy? Ok... turn them off. We are already geoengineering through industrial pollutants. We might as well geoengineer some more to try and fix the problems. The path to using this techs is pretty clear. Start small, work up to the effect you want, turn it off if you don't like where it is going.
As far as "masking" the problem, what is wrong with that? So we need to run a bunch of sprinklers in the ocean. Is it cheaper than the substantial costs of reducing CO2 output now? If it is, then we should seriously think about doing it. That isn't to say that we shouldn't work on removing CO2 in a more permanent way or work on emitting less, but it could be a hell of a lot cheaper and political far more feasible than the alternative. Do you have to maintain these and replace them? Sure, but that goes with almost any technology. It isn't like the fact that power plants wear out stop us from building an electrical grid. You just include replacement in the cost. It is hardly an insurmountable problem.
If you really believe that climageddon is upon us, geoengineering really is shaping up to be the only way to level off the warming. The cost to reduce CO2 emissions now at levels high enough to stop global warming are through the roof. The political cost is even higher (if not utterly unpayable). We are going to fail at reducing CO2 emissions in the short term. Why not deploy technology to counteract our unintentional geoengineering at a fraction of the cost of "fixing" the problem. Don't stop working on the problem, just give the world some breathing room. Transitioning over to clean and renewable energy is the direction we want to go regardless, making it so that we need to make the transition in a few generations rather than a few years results in a drastically reduced cost.
Frankly, I think that geoengineering makes hardcore environmentalist pissy because it snatches away the best issue that environmentalist movement has had in decades. When it comes down to it, reducing CO2 emission with today's technology boils down to reduced consumption and energy usage. You can tie those two things to pretty much anything in the environmentalist cause. Global warming makes an good proxy in any fight over the environmental. Arguing that coal is bad because it pumps out toxic crap in the PPM range is a very hard argument to make to your average uneducated dolt. Simply declaring coal is a going to cause climageddon on the other hand is much much easier to understand and get worked up over.
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76%+33%=109%
Good point, you need to give 110% to be successful!
300 HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:300 HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! (Score:5, Funny)
Off to register 'squirtsforsure.com' Soon to the the hottest pr0n site on the internet.
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>>finally, he's acting like a proper evil mastermind...
A couple weeks ago I was telling a class of community college students I was lecturing to that Bill Gates was planning on doing this, and gave a proper evil mastermind laugh, but none of them thought it was funny.
Kids these days...
But yeah, this is old news. Most people learned about it from Super Freakonomics. Maybe it's news that he's actually going to do it, I guess.
The real debate is coming... who gets to control the weather?
Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
I believe the phrase is "What could possibly go wrong..."
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I believe the phrase is "What could possibly go wrong..."
Pehaps "what clouds possibly go wrong..."
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Actually, I think a better phrase for this is "Bill, I think you misunderstood all that talk about cloud computing."
You know what this reminds me of? (Score:2)
Re:You know what this reminds me of? (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely! On the other hand, we've rather fallen into climate engineering, and we really have no choice but to blunder around not knowing what we're doing. If we could quick scrub carbon dioxide from the air, and put it back to what it was in 1850 and keep it there, we could take this slowly and with proper experimentation.
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But anyway, get a thousand start-ups trying a thousand different compensation mechanisms (that's what this is, after all, not doing anything about the underlying cause). Some fail spectacularly. Some don't really do anything cost-effectively. A small few are successful, and change the world.
Who knows. For $300k, no big deal. Worth a shot.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
Undersea computing?
Fatal flaw (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, the machines are solar-powered.
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That's why it's a perfect negative feedback system. Genius.
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But they shoot up 100 tons of plankton per hour to their death.
Bill Gates announces World's Largest Supersoaker! (Score:3, Funny)
Awesome.
How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, nature is never in a "balance". Forest fires, wild fires, volcanos, tsunamis, global cooling, ice ages, global warming, desertification, floods, forestation, those things all happened before, during and after man.
I'm from South Dakota, so I've looked alot at the geological history there. It used to be under the sea, under glaciers, partially under glaciers, burned by wild fires that crossed the entire region, forested, then less forested, it used to have volcanos, it's been covered by ash from other volcanos, it will be covered by ash when Yellowstone cooks off.
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This isn't "we," it's "he." He is funding this research with his own money. You don't have a say in it.
Furthermore, "we" know how to reduce carbon emissions. But doing so has a tremendous economic cost--one so high it won't ever happen under democratic rule.
I just blew a seal... (Score:5, Funny)
...700 feet into the air
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Re:I just blew a seal... (Score:5, Funny)
cue lawsuits for flood damage (Score:2)
I just don't see why we can't have lawsuits over the the stuff that caused the warming in the first place?
Oh yeah, all those people fighting to not have CO2 be a controlled emission.
Seriously, there are far to many people on this planet and we need to be careful of everything we do. It all has consequences.
Salt in the air? (Score:2)
As someone that has lived near the ocean for his entire life; I am not exactly happy about having salt infused water vapor in the air. If you live near the shore, you have to deal with house paint, car finishes, wooden surfaces decaying, wearing away and failing...
Anybody from an area of the world that has salt applied to their roads in the winter care to share stories about salt corroding their car's undercarriage?
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Like dipping your car in acid... oh wait.
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Hasn't been a problem for me at all. I'm driving my wife's old Civic for commuting, it's a mid-90s model with some 220k miles on it. No problems with rust or corrosion on it, despite having been driven on wet salty roads each winter for a decade and a half.
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Anybody from an area of the world that has salt applied to their roads in the winter care to share stories about salt corroding their car's undercarriage?
How about someone who's worked at a facility that extracts salt from seawater using solar evaporation? Just parking my car out front a couple of hundred feet from the nearest evaporation pond for three years was enough to make it rust. Even metal inside the vehicle has rusted to the point that I can't adjust the passenger seat anymore.
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Anybody from an area of the world that has salt applied to their roads in the winter care to share stories about salt corroding their car's undercarriage?
I was in this car once, you see, and the floor had a hole in it, on account of the rust from all that road salt.
Fascinating stuff, right? I don't usually bring it up because it's sure to threadjack and derail any ongoing conversation with the implacably captivating qualities of such an anecdote, but you brought it up.
Vaporware (Score:5, Funny)
From tfa (Score:2, Insightful)
Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air.
You're joking...right? Rockets deploying millions oof mirrors into the stratosphere? Artificial trees??? What about the real one's which do the job just fine? Seriously though, who let the mad scientist out of his lab?
$7 billion is peanuts to stop global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
The article says that 3 ships is nothing. We need $7 billion worth of ships to stop the temperature from increasing.
WHAT? We can stop warming in its tracks for just $7 billion? That's very little money.
Operational cost (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, responding to my own post: I wonder what the operational cost would be for this. What fuel are these things supposed to use? Shoving all that water into the air would take a crapload of power.
They can't take fossil fuels -- that would be a logistics issue, and would be counter-productive (though possibly still the most efficient approach).
I have this image of 3000 nuclear-powered boats, and I wonder what the mean-time between failures on such a system would be.
Something tells me there will be a side effect (Score:2, Interesting)
They are talking about spraying SALT water into the air. Normally when clouds form it comes from normally evaporating water that leaves the salt behind. That is the reason the dead sea is so salty and for that matter how salt planes form.
So, what does this system mean for salt in the rain? I seem to remember that to make a point you tear down your enemies city, plow the ground and sow it with salt so that everyone gets the point. Salt and agriculture don't mix.
It is possible that the salt will fall down q
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How do they remain suspended in te air? They're so small that the force of gravity is about equal to the air resistance they encounter. I have absolutely no idea how you can turn sea water into a super-fine mist, and then shoot it 3,000' into the air. For it to stay there, it has to have massive air
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I would be pretty shocked if the answers if the smart folks who thought this up and got handed a large money sack did not already answer most of your questions, but I can probably guess the answers to your concerns.
If the salt hangs in the air for any length of time in any concentration... do it some place not near land. In fact, from all I have read on geoengineering, you want to do your work in the poles, so even if the salt hangs, it is a moot point. We also have a few thousands miles of Pacific with n
This is useful for other things (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally, I think that Gates is causing more issues than solving (trying to stop hurricanes is a HORRIBLE mistake; it brings up nutrients from deep down; likewise, killing mosquitoes may actually stop evolution), but this one will help bring fresh water throughout the world as well as temporaly help with the global warming issues until we switch off of fossil fuels. Interestingly, if China, the worlds largest polluter of nearly everything, was to clean up their h2so4, then it would raise global temps quickly. With the clouds, it allows us to not worry about temps, while we go back to encouraging all nations to clean up their act.
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They're not really trying to add more water vapor to the atmosphere. They are trying to add more condensation nuclei to help in the formation of clouds. The concentration of condensation nuclei over the open ocean can be pretty low at times inhibiting the formation of clouds.
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So everything Gates does is evil... unless it help's keep your lawn green...
Well, for those of us who enjoy asparagus, strawberries, artichokes, apples, blackberries, raspberries, peaches, apricots, rice or any of the other agricultural products grown in the western United States, creating a more sustainable source of water is a good thing for more than just lawn maintenance.
Cloudy environment (Score:2)
ah-HA! (Score:2)
Brawndo - it's got what plants crave! (Score:2)
Sea water sprayed into the air, salt drops on land, crops die.
Seems stupid... (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea that spraying some water 3000ft into the air in the hopes that it will aid cloud formation seems ... stupid.
3000ft isn't very far and if there isn't enough convection, it isn't going to go up much further... The colder denser air would descend and stay near the ground. This idea sounds about as smart as setting up thousands of Van de Graaff generators all over town, hoping that the ozone generated would plug the ozone hole.
I think a much simpler solution would be this:
1. Cover a large area, perhaps the area of 10 football pitches, with good old fashioned black tarmac.
2. Have a simple sprinkler system, not too dissimilar to a lawn sprinkler system, covering the entire area.
3. When the sun shines, turn on the water.
4. Hopefully, the large area, heated by the sun, will cause enough convection to carry the water vapour up through the atmosphere, where it can form clouds.
There is a problem with salt buildup if using seawater, changing the albino of the tarmac ... but I'm guessing that if there is some form of drainage system in place where slightly saltier water could drain away, that should suffice.
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To start, you're correct in your critique of the plan. 3000' is not far enough. Nor will they be able to get proper cloud aerosols up there, to form cloud nuclei, without them falling back to earth. And should all that work out well, their budget is an order of magnitude or two too small. And even if they had that money, it's a crap shoot if the clouds will warm or cool the earth.
To try to do this more "simply", using 10 f
Moisture drift and salt (Score:2)
In many places on the Earth, air moves (on average) in predictable ways. This leads me to a number of questions.
Can we put these ships in a position so that those clouds pass over areas which need more rain?
Would that cause rain there?
Would that rain be salty?
Is this a way to (as a secondary benefit) bring fresh water to areas needing rain, or would it destroy the land downwind by slowly coating it with more and more salt?
one has to wonder... (Score:2)
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Nope. He just watched The Animatrix last night.
Is this a joke? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a joke?
The rate of evaporation from the oceans is about 400,000 cubic kilometers per year.
To increase that by just one percent would mean pumping 4,000 km^3 of water.
Just raising that much water to 3,000 feet would take approximately, oh let's see, carry the 0x100,
about 1,651,445,966.51 horsepower. One Point Six BILLION horsepower.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately, they're not suggesting that increased evaporation is the important part. It's an increase in cloud cover.
Dynamical responses (Score:2, Interesting)
Pissing in the Wind (Score:2)
Cloud Services, LOL (Score:4, Funny)
No relataionship to the Microsoft Cloud Services advertized here on /.
Tech solution (Score:2)
See, Gates isn't really a good marketer (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates should have paid Steve Jobs to propose it. That way the summary would have said something like "Jobs discovers breakthrough solution to global warming".
Hmm. Now that I think about it the iPad displays are pretty large and shiny. If we spread a million of them across the sky...
cloud computing... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Has some heavy hitters on its side (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Isn't water vapor... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. But putting more water vapor in the atmosphere will not contribute to global warming, because any excess water vapor put into the atmosphere precipitates out as rain, snow, or dew within about a week. In other words, water vapor is not a forcing.
Excess carbon dioxide, on the other hand, can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That's why burning fossil fuels has the effect of increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to warming.
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But the benefit of increased albedo from the new clouds is also a temporary effect. Therefore, it is important to determine if the project will have a net improvement. Otherwise, what's the point?
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The CO2 from volcanoes does count. It's just that there's not enough of it to worry about. On average volcanoes emit about 1-2% as much CO2 as human emissions.
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This is a good point, but clouds have high albedo which reflect significant amounts of sunlight off the Earth. The question is which effect is stronger? My guess is albedo; if most of the sunlight never reaches the Earth it can't be trapped by water vapor.
As the summary says, geoengineering is controversial. It is also incredibly complex. The research is in very early stages (300K is nothing for a project this size), and I'm sure water vapor's greenhouse effect is one of the things they will watch closely.
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Popular media may treat the term "water vapor" loosely, but as far as I understand the part about it being a greenhouse ga
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Re:Bill Gates misunderstands (Score:5, Informative)
No. It will be down moderated because it is a moronic post, and it uses way to many words to convey the BS.
The Yellowstone Caldera will take many years, probably hundreds of smaller eruptions before any major super-volcanic eruption. Your statement that it is 40 thousand years overdue is not based on any reasoning and no geologist would agree with you.
Global warming is real. It is caused by humans contributing shit-loads of Carbon to the atmosphere. It will have consequences on the human race. There is probably a tipping point where the changes in the planet will be dramatic.
p.s. It serves me in no way to be taking this position other than the fact that I kind of give a shit about the future of our species.