When you spray saltwater into the air, you create nuclei that cloud condenses around, creating bigger and whiter clouds, thus bouncing more sunlight back into space.
That’s what David Young, a member of the panel that created the report, says. The fully automated vessels will cross the oceans absorbing water and spraying it into the skies. They say this will help the formation of big, whiter clouds, which will make the sun light bounce, lowering temperatures.
The idea seems neat, but the concept of anyone in planet Earth claiming to understand how climate works to this extend blows my mind. We are still trying to grasp how a complex system like the weather works, but someone wants to put an idea like this in motion, without knowing about the ultimate consequences? Like we say in my home country: Do you experiments with pop soda. [Copenhagen Consensus via Daily Mail]
Sunny
August 8, 2009 at 11:10 PM
Painting all our houses white would also cool down the planet in the same way, but I doubt we’ll see that either.
Also on that note, in some areas, planting trees can lead to global warming because they absorb light and heat up the surroundings. So the positive effect of absorbing carbon needs to out-weigh the heat they absorb. Conversely, deserts help reflect a lot of the Sun’s light back out in to space.
Report PermalinkCaptinCrunch
August 9, 2009 at 2:35 AM
Isn’t this essentially creating the same effect of global dimming except without pollution, but loads more expensive? And isn’t that basically just masking the effects of climate change?
I’m sure i saw a doco on global dimming where a couple of Aussi researchers showed that due to pollution particles in the clouds we were getting less sunlight, which was counter-acting global warming, but essentially a bad thing. Less sun = bad seems like commen sense to me.
This is a stupid fail of an idea, it belongs on halfbakery.com
Report PermalinkAlan S
August 9, 2009 at 3:51 PM
Yes but “pollution particles” factor into trapping heat within our atmosphere, whereas clouds PROBABLY won’t?
It doesn’t mention how much energy and carbon footprint is required to run these boats though.
Report PermalinkTommy
August 10, 2009 at 2:57 AM
Pirates would have a field day taking and breaking these babies up for scrap!
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