Alternative & Renewable Energy Blog

Um, What would power these ships and would they belch out CO₂ .

Here in Harlow we want want any more rain thanks...
BTW it's gonna be tough to sail those ships across equatorial Africa and the Sahara

Del

Yes, I would think the energy costs to lift the salt water high enough to spray effectively would cause a lot of emissions of their own. The salt water would have to have a very large impact. It is interesting to see what people dream up though. I can't say it wouldn't work.

I've read that one scientist (memory here does not serve me as I can't recollect his name) suggested to dispense sulphur in atmosphere for making the clouds. I'm wondering is there of someone's more or less deep thinking for a feasible subsequents of such direct interference to global weather?

In Oz back in the late 60's early 70's the organisation known as the CSIRO had an opportunity to fund a large scale project of two proposals. There was only money for one of these projects. One proposal was to establish a semiconductor manufacturing process plant which was very feasible considering that Australia exports most of the silica sand (now) to the rest of the known universe for that process.The "Solid State" electronics world was in its infancy at the time. Or Cloud Seeding.

Cloud Seeding won the money, Australia made a few flimflam bureacratic scientists wealthy, and promptly gave away its potential as a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing. Australia still is susceptable to droughts despite the $quillion$ squandered on Cloud Seeding.

I just hope KRudd (Oz P.M.) doesn't find out about this latest scheme, He'll want to buy the naming rights to it.

Australians love history they like repeating their mistakes over and over and over and over and over again.

I know this to be true, as I recall being told the semiconductor industry was looking very heavily into setting up in OZ (fairchild if i recall correct) back in the early 70's and the government of the time decided not to give them tax breaks, instead pump money into more basic r&d that idiots could grasp, ie cloud seeding or making magic sand(IC) obviously the low IQ of the politicain shone thru and then began the rain dance ... Now the new rain dance climate change aka murray river by back... what a joke .. why not spend a billion on a desal plant running of hotrocks... there is all the water u need plus power .. and all based in SA ....

I didn't know that the alternative to cloud seeding was developing the semi conductor industry.

Even in the 60's it was obvious that IC's were going to be huge.

I wonder which glorified clerk made that decision.

Reminds me of the NSW government committee set up (in the 1880's) to examine ways of providing water for the stock routes. They met for umpteen years, but early on rejected the use of windmills. By the time they produced their report, the entire set of stock routes were being watered by windmills put in by private graziers!

"A committee is a blind alley down which ideas are lured to be quietly strangled to death" (I forget who said this).

It would make more sense to build a salt water lake inland on the outback and pump water into it.

Digging several pipe lines out to ocean could be done for that amount of money and wind powered pumps keep the lakes full for years to come.

Tree and animals woulds benifit from the water. Tigers drink salt water in India. The evaporation from these lakes would serve a much better chance of getting rain inland if they were dug near mountinas.

Back in the 1960s an idea was floated in Australia about building a canal from the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia to the gulf of Saint Vincent in the south.

This would be similar to a canal from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

The reason that this idea was considered was that it would increase the rainfall on the western side of the Great Dividing Range. It was considered that it just might be economically viable given the increased productivity of the land and how cheaply it could be done if atomic explosives were used to blast the holes required.

One of the reasons that I was told that it didn't get of the drawing board was that the additional water would cause a rise in the water table of vast tracts of land with a result that underground salt deposits would would be mobilised and this would ruin thousands of square miles of grazing land.

There are a lot of things to consider when you are thinking on a big scale.

BAB

I agree well pump the fresh water that now runs out into the ocean along the streams into a lake in the outback. No reason to let that freshwater escape.

That is still a lot of money. A plant to remove the salt could be built too. Slat is a commodity that can be sold to pay for repairs.

Seeding clouds just does not make it in my book.

Why not go capture an iceburg and station it down wind of Aussie land to create weather ??

"Back in the 1960s an idea was floated in Australia about building a canal from the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia to the gulf of Saint Vincent in the south."

Another version was to go from Spencer Gulf to Lake Eyre. This was supposed to increase rainfall in the region, which is the driest in a dry continent.

During the 80's Lake Eyre filled several times without any detectable longer term effect on local rainfall.

Misused irrigation has made considerable areas of grazing land saline. Apparently much of the Murray/Darling basin is over an old sea bed. Any increase in water table height brought the existing salt to the surface.

With the high evaporation rates in the outback, salinity of soil is a definite potential problem with most such schemes.

We need to think big, but also need to be very cautious when we want to try and modify climate.

Fortunately, most such schemes are not actually capable of doing what they claim, so they don't go ahead.

The other reason is that financiers regard them as too big a risk. They'd rather put their money in safer schemes like buying up bad debts!

Sounds like someone's green wash to get a piece of the action. I would venture that one Typhoon or hurricane puts more water into the air that this whole scheme.

Fresh water can be made from saltwater in the desert just using sunlight. The problem comes from using the desert as your growing medium. You lose all your nutrients to the water table. Put 2.6 to 5.3 billion in solar stills and farming in containers (think big and shallow) and your plants will deal with the CO₂ . Oh ya make a profit from the sale of crops also. Mandate a % of income/expense monies to be used for more farms. Damn there goes world hunger and local farms will not be able to compete unless tariffs are collected. Gee Taxes go down.

The only pipe dream is taxes going down Our Socialist governments (yes including the US) will always consume more because they get rewarded for spending more not less a perverse incentive. If you don't use up this years budget you don't get next years full allotment.

Swiftly pours acid on soapbox to hide the evidence, exit stage left.

Brad

Leaving aside arguing against the (inevitable) 'there's no such thing as anthropomorphic global warming', which this isn't the forum for in any case (and is done very well elsewhere), there seems to be a degree of misunderstanding about this project: the object is not cloud-seeding in the old 'Let's Make Rain' sense, but to modify the optical properties of the cloud so that it reflects more sunlight back into space, thus causing less heatin at the earth's surface. This is done by injecting masses of sea-salt particles into the base of a cloud, which in turn act as centres for formation of new cloud droplets, increasing the concentration of the droplets leading to the cloud being 'whiter' - reflecting more energy. This process is reliable and simple - unlike the next process required if rain were the object - persuading small droplets to agglomerate into rain-drop sized lumps.

Unlike many of the other suggestions for reducing insolation, this process is entirely controllable: within a few days of the pumps being turned off, the atmosphere would return to its previous state. It is also known to work (few people realise that with a bit of simple image processing, the past movement of ships in the oceans can be seen in the satellite images of cloud formations - the smoke from this ships alters the cloud's reflectivity). As the atmosphere is always in motion, the cooling effects, although initiated over the oceans, would soon be felt by the dry areas of the continental masses.

In comparison to other suggestions (such as putting a 'cloud' of reflecting discs between the earth and the sun) this is practical and cheap: cheap to fabricate and cheap to run, the energy for the pumps being obtained from on-board wind and water turbines.It's also worthwhile considering the provenance of the project: Salter is an engineer of considerable standing - the designer of the 'Salter Duck' - one of the few practical devices for extracting energy from sea waves, and Latham is an atmospheric physicist of world renown.

The big unknown is whether it could be implemented on a large enough scale, and made to operate with sufficient efficiency to have an appreciable affect: this could only be determined by a large-scale experiment.

At the present time it's the 1070's all over again. The price of oil skyrockets and amazing new efficient technologies start to come out of the woodwork. The price of oil drops and funding for "green" projects dries up. Until global warming is unbearable to those with the money this type of proposal won't "fly" :-).

anon

"At the present time it's the 1070's all over again"

Interesting typo because around the 1070's, the climate seemed to be in a warming phase with vineyards in England and Southern Scotland and grain being grown in Greenland.

Regardless of your view on global warming (real, scam or natural variation) it is good that efficient technologies and process improvements are coming into play.

Hopefully, these will become economical and established before the impetus to adopt them dries up.

Hopefully, these will become economical and established before the impetus to adopt them dries up.

Is Xerox involved?

Could this global warming be caused by the weakening of the Earth's Magnetic field? I was reading other information from a globalspec e-mail, that said it could be possible that the earth's poles are going to switch. If this is the case, they would get weak, and then swich polarity right. If my physics serves me correctly. Part of the reason we are protected from solar flares and such, is due to the magnetic field that exists around the planet that helps shield the effects. What I am thinking is... that if this field is weakening, there is less of this field in essence to deflect the onslaught of these flares, and energy. I would think, that with the increased energy being allowed to enter the atmosphere, that the climate would increase, regardless of what we are doing to stop or help the production of CO2. I also belive that the influx of extra salt water into the ecosystem would ultimately cause more problems than it solves, just look at the irrigation lake gone sour in the western US...