Inventor Wants to Geo-Engineer a Planetwide “Refrigerator”
Bailing out the entire human race might turn out to be cheaper than bailing out Wall Street:
Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, suggests inventor Ron Acer in a patent petition for “a colossal refrigeration system with a 100,000-fold performance multiplier.”
“The Earth has a giant air-conditioning problem,” he said. “I’m proposing to put a thermostat on the planet.”
He estimates that his design would cost only a few billion dollars to implement on a global scale. (Much less than $700 billion)
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He suggests installing devices that spray seawater up to 200 feet into the air next to deserts and other arid or windy sites near seawater, such as the African, South American and Mediterranean coasts.
An internationally known climate scientist has roughly simulated Acer’s idea on a model that’s used extensively by top scientists to study global warming, and estimates that this could cool the world by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit every 30 years, reducing the current warming rate.
In addition, it would be the cheapest way to transport water to drought-stricken regions, counteract desert expansions, increase natural irrigation for crops and boost the output of hydroelectric power plants.
The scientist, Stanford’s Kenneth Caldeira at the Department of Global Ecology, says that Ron Acer’s giant humidifier might just work. He will submit his computer findings for peer-reviewed publication this spring. Caldeira is among the scientists who met last year in a last-ditch effort to brainstorm geo-engineering climate change solutions.
As Caldeira put it: “Every brilliant innovation in the history of technology looked a little bit loony when first proposed.” Ron Acer holds 70 patents worldwide but has had commercial success on fewer than 20 of them.
Related technology:
Seawater Greenhouse
Teatro Del Agua
From Greg Gordon at McClatchey Newspapers
Image Credit: fjny via flickr.com on a Creative Commons license
I’d like to see this tested along the African coast to see if it would work, though the wind patterns typically are offshore flows. I’d also like to see how the salt from the saltwater interacts with the environment.
If anything, it’d be interesting to see a trial run on this happen just to get a better idea of how this would work.
I heard of a group of people doing a similar thing. They thought that the water sprayed would have to be very tiny droplets, and only the ocean was producing a size that small and in that kind of quantity. It might be the same guy. Considering his track record with patents, I can only hope that the idea works well.
It never ceases to amaze me how human beings so want to control this planet, as if we are the only species on this planet, and the most important. We have been on this planet for such a short time, and the domination we seek is neverending.
This is just another band aid over a gushing wound. Will this give China the ok to continue building coal fired plants at an average of 1 every two weeks? We are in real trouble here and every day it is getting worse. Progress without renewable energies is killing the planet. I wonder what it will take to people to firmly realize this planet is in peril. We are burning saved solar energy so much faster than the planet can release the heat…
Not to worry though. Mother Nature will adjust. It’s just going to be a very painful 1000 years of crazy weather. Who will begin starving first?
I don’t see how this benefits global warming. The heat absorbed by the water evaporating will just be re-emitted when the vapor condenses into rain. In fact, heat that would have gone into the ocean is released in the atmosphere, making the warming happen a smidgeon sooner - though hardly that much.
Yes, the evaporated water may fall as rain, but this seems a very scatter-gun way of doing it. Normal desalination leading to drip-irrigation would seem a better use of resources.
Homer, I can understand you picking my Petunia, but did you really have to salt the earth so nothing would ever grow again?
Certainly a novel thought, but the salt deposits would be a problem on coastal land.
Secondly, laws of thermal dynamics might apply - wouldn’t you really just be moving that heat into the water? …and generating even more by the pumps? How about just melting down some of those pesky polar ice caps?
Great, and what happens to all the salt? Last I checked salt water chokes most land vegetation. I’d imagine that this may have a net cooling effect of the planet, but not likely to help stop deserts from growing and is likely to kill any current crops in the area as well.
Won’t the saltwater destroy a lot of stuff?
as the seawater isn’t boiled but evaporates the salt doesn’t go up into the air.
and this works by creating clouds that reflex sunlight back into space.
and the best part is if it doesn’t work or isn’t needed any longer, you can just stop and have no lasting effects.
it wouldn’t take billions of dollars… need to think more simply. a great many problems can be solved with just the proper application of gun powder.
just get a couple of MOAB bombs from the military and just bomb the living f out of that part of the ocean…. it’ll send seawater, fish, dolphins, whales and jacque cousteau into the freakin’ stratosphere at a fraction of the cost. if water alone is such a good sun screen, just imagine the addition of blue whales….
anyhoo, this has always been my personal philosophy. fight global warming with nuclear winter… very very easy.
jin