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
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I don’t see how it would work.
omg kinda like the purifier in fallout 3. I hope nobody injects the fev virus into this thing
looks like a good idea on paper but what happens when trillions of gallons of seawater if not more get sprayed into the air and evaporates even faster than normal? The bottom line scientists need to face is that global warming is part of a cycle, they have proof seas were 20 to 30 feet higher than today at one time, and Antarctica was a giant landmass and a tropical environment! We need to stop thinking about stopping global warming and learn a way to survive it, yeah it’s going to decimate the population but that’s what the world has always done, and we can’t stop it, without even more dire consequence.
I read not too long ago that all the sea ice in the North Pole area was gone, alot of people argue what happens when ice melts in a glass of water? not much if anything, but what’s melting now is continental ice, that WILL cause the sea to rise. Your great-grandkids will be dealing with this, you can bet on that. maybe not you though, so eat your cheezeburgers and play your xboxes all you want. You can’t stop it anyways
One more thing I want to add to this fray I’ve started, I know everyone knows about invasive species right? if you have one little microbe that’s just scraping by in a desert, but would thrive in an extremely wet environment, you have a catastrophe. Don’t think it can’t happen, lol. cya
Even if this were done using renewable energy resources and the salt were “filtered” out of the water… What would be done with the tons upon tons of salt left over? Dump it back into the ocean raising the local salt content of the area and send all the marine life in the area to the surface of the ocean only to be rained down on by the water that has been elevated in temperature falling from the clouds? Like others have said… Thermodynamics… its laws still have to be obeyed… Also have to think about the way this will effect local ecosystems
[...] I know we usually cover the innovative solutions that we humans invent here - but when nature itself comes up with a perfect solution to a really big problem; shouldn’t [...]