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
That’s such a dumb idea, it just might work! A lawn sprinkler for the planet. Ingenious.
It looks inexpensive to implement so everyone could benefit - immediate mass buy-in, which is it’s killer attribute.
It doesn’t replace anything, so it’s a winner for new business. It takes us from an agricultural hope-we-get-good-weather to a horticultural this’ll-do-instead era.
Gots to take the climate bull by the horns somehow. What harm could it do?
Simple solutions like this appeal to many people - they’ve got the “everyman” feel to them. Global warming wouldn’t be a critical issue if all it took was turning the ocean into a giant water fountain.
Where do you think the energy to pump the water into the air would come from? The fossils fuels burned to achieve this would contribute to even more warming.
While some of the water pumped into the air would evaporate and carry heat away, some would also fall back into the ocean. This water would stratify and not mix with the cool water beneath the ocean, it would sit at the top and release heat into the area, so no cooling effect there. The evaporated water has to go somewhere - by increasing the humidity of the atmosphere, you increase its thermal conductivity (wet air can carry more heat since water can hold alot of thermal energy). Winds would carry this hot air to other places in the world - increasing temperatures elsewhere.
This is an idea for localized cooling and would just exacerbate global warming. What a nutjob.
Very interesting on the drawing board, but the planet would be much better served by humans learning to respect it and live in harmony with it - not thinking about how we can “fool” mother nature - we have a bad track record when it comes to thinking we’re smarter than the planet.
This has always been the American way. Fuck everything up really badly, then try to fix or mitigate the damage through science and technology.
The cheapest route would be to not fuck things up to begin with!
this is quite possibly the stupidest idea I have ever heard. We cannot combat global climate change. I say climate change rather than global warming because the climate is currently in a 3 year cooling trend. Sure, David defeated Goliath, but they were both men. We should not compete with the forces of nature lest we desire to be defeated by our own folly. Not to mention that this idea is particularly dumb. like pretty much everyone has commented, the salt will likely kill or interrupt the function of local vegetation and wildlife. Further, what is the effect of the spraying, the article just says that some model said it could work. Is that the same model that failed to correctly predict the effects of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, or the path and intensity of Katrina. I almost hope this happens so we can all see how stupid we have become.
“Leave nature alone. Haven’t we done enough.”
-George Carlin
Please just use less fossil fuels and develop renewable energy. The technology is there and has been there for harnessing them efficiently and it will only improve if the (monetary) will is truly applied. Enough with patents and schemes.
I do not believe the scientific principle employed with this system is that of evaporation. Rather, the goal of the system is to increase cloud cover over the oceans, thus increasing the reflectivity of our atmosphere and reducing the amount of infrared energy reaching the oceans.
See, oceans are good heat sinks and good transporters of that heat. In the same way that polar ice cools water which is then circulated around the oceans; this system too will cool the oceans and transport that colder water around the globe. I believe the locating of these pumps in arid climates is simply to increase the likelihood of cloud formation with a readily available source of dust and dry air.
Also, power for these remote pumping stations must be made on location. Wave and/or tidal depending on what sea conditions exist at the pumping site. These satellite pumping stations would be completely autonomous save for networked command and control from a central location.
And how would fruit ripen with half the sunlight?
My goodness. So many naysayers.
Do you really think someone would geo-engineer a solution to climate change, one they have poured many years of work into, and then use fossil fuels?
Especially when they don’t even need to? Renewable energy is ideal for this.
The pumps could be powered not just with wave/tidal power, but remember - coastal wind is usually coming from offshore, especially where there is hot desert next door, as in these suggested locations.
So the other obvious way to pump the water up the 200 foot tubes would be using wind turbines. Turbines that already typically perch on top of a 200 foot (or taller) pole make the ideal combo unit. Duh.
And like in the seawater greenhouse, (renewably powered) evaporation would be used to get rid of the salt, first, probably using condensers by bringing up deep water (colder) from the deep ocean.
This would not entail spraying the actual saltwater on land!
But we’ll see when it gets published this Spring in Nature or Science by Caldeira. I bet that it does not use fossil fuels!