"Commence Operation... Vacu-suck."
Posted on 05/12/2010 8:26:26 AM PDT by NYer
The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.
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. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.
However, a study last year calculated that a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity.
Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei.
The trial would involve ten ships and 10,000sq km (3,800sq miles) of ocean. Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off.
(Excerpt) Read more at technology.timesonline.co.uk ...
$7 billion is chump change compared with every other tax/fee proposal that is floating around.
I say — “Evaporate, Bill, Evaporate”.
It will be cheaper for all of us...:^)
Now since then, we have heard about how the planet will practically autoignite because of plant food in the atmosphere, as if there were no biological controls either on land or in the upper 300 feet of the oceans where phytoplankton thrive and eventually will form the ooze which makes the oil of the distant future provided all goes well.
Now, in an attempt to mitigate a problem which we have been assured exists, despite problems with flawed data, severely edited datasets, obvious profit motives and agenda pushing, people propose to physically mitigate a problem which does not exist, not just profit from their lunacy and go home.
Let's say the climate does get warmer, the temperature (globally) rises by 5 degrees celsius, and the sea levels rise by a few meters.
Okay, some people are going to lose a bunch on their real estate investments and will have a hard time buying flood insurance, but people aren't cemented in place. The population of low-lying areas will move to higher ground, which will, by definition, become the new low-lying areas.
Millions of acres of previously untillable land, however, will become arable, by virtue of shifting temperatures, and even Greenland might be a bit more, well, green--in the literal sense.
Areas of the Canadian Arctic, Alaska, far Northern Europe, Siberia, and even Antarctica might become a bit more habitable, and as the foundations for new cities are dug, doubtless the remains of previous occupants will be discovered--all without the archaeologists having to wear parkas, just lots of bug spray.
Let's look at the opposite scenario, an Ice Age, where a third of the lower 48 is covered in ice, (and vast regions elsewhere) the amount of arable land decreases significantly, and the human population is squeezed into relatively narrow bands of habitable land.
Even with the expansion out onto the Continental shelves, (bared by falling sea levels) where doubtless there are remanants of past civilizations, or at least human occupation, things are going to get a mite crowded.
If you had waterfront property, you will be up hill from all that now.
Given a choice between the two scenarios, and keeping in mind that living in North Dakota has taught me that it is easier to stay warm where it is warm, that despite discomfort, heat is survivable, and cold not so much, I'd take a chance with the possibility that the climate is warming over inducing cold, cold which may well be added to a natural downtrend in temperatures and which will kill.
It is the ultimate human folly to tamper with a dynamic system we do not understand well enough to predict, especially when our flawed understanding of that system relies on questionable data taken over an incredibly short term, when compared with the life of the system.
To do so in a manner in which the (unpredictable) results could possibly invoke the worst-case scenario for the species is stupidity at its finest.
> I thought cloud cover on a planet keeps the warm in ...
I does if the object is to reflect the heat back to the earth. In this case, it reflects the sun’s heat back into outer space.
I don't think that's a good idea.......There are certain things in nature that should be left alone and this is one of them.
A FOOL and his money are soon parted!
Hey Billie,
Try playing with Mother Nature along with all your little friends who all of you now believe you’re God, and she will blow you straight to hell.
It’s a promise.
I think Bill should invest in tin foil hats to reflect the sun. We’ll know every liberal by their tin foil hat.
What will happen to the Dolphins and fish that get sucked up in the seawater? Starkist should build a factory next to the pump.
Water vapor is invisible. Clouds you can see and are made of water droplets, not water vapor, and have very different thermal properties.
"Commence Operation... Vacu-suck."
Making clouds is a very cheap way to desalinate and transport water, leveraging solar and wind energy. Rainfall is significantly higher 20 miles downwind of heat islands like cities and power plants.
Unless those clouds are located over arid regions, there is no benefit provided by the evaporative desalinization. It’ll fall largely back into the oceans from whence it came, by design.
I’m aware of the heat island effect upon rainfall (and snowfall), being due east of a manmade lake built to cool a large powerplant. Thunderstorms build over the lake and hang there for quite a while before moving with the prevailing wind. That lake is bathwater warm in the summertime. It makes waterskiing into the late fall possible without a wetsuit, too. And the fog, lol. It’s like a mini-maritime layer on some mornings.
I have come to the conclusion that elitists like Gates, Ted Turner, Soros, et al, want to kill off the vast majority of us so they can rule over the survivors in a “pristine” renewed earth. Who would have believed that the old “The Wild Wild West” TV series with its hairbrained schemes by Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless to depopulate the world would become prophetic?
Don’t the white papers from groups such as the Ford Foundation nearly say as much?
Because of the temperature difference, arid areas near the coast suck ocean clouds in, where at night they cool and rain out. The freshwater can then be collected and channeled. Nature just needs a little nudge to get the saltwater droplets a few feet off the surface during sunlight hours, then takes over. Arid areas like California could economically be turned into a rainforest.
I once dated a girl from northern California, who sincerely believed that redwood forests sucked the fog in off the Pacific, and that cutting them down would cause a drought.
Just in case anyone was wondering, you can be smart and still be a douche.
Ping.
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