John

It would be useful to know the state of development of stratospheric sulphur particle generation, transport and release mechanisms but I have seen nothing about the engineering aspects. Unless somebody can give us an update I think that tropospheric sea-salt aerosol is further ahead. We now have funding to etch the first silicon micro-nozzle chips and the filtration industry is already in mass production for pre-filtration for reverse osmosis which has much more stringent demands for clogging resistance than our nozzles. Their technology was originally used to remove 30 nanometre polio viruses from drinking water.

For a three-year time scale for Arctic ice I would suggest Diesel-powered, on-land spray sources based in the Faroes, the north-east coast of Iceland and northern Norway treating clouds over the water from the North Atlantic drift flowing north. They can clock up lots of operating time over the summer. If you can make an estimate on the amount of latent heat of fusion of the missing ice and believe the calculation about the ratio of energy for nucleus production to solar energy reflected from the drops which form on the nuclei, it seems that the spray quantity is not the problem.

Has anybody run a climate model on this?

Stephen


Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
Institute for Energy Systems
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
University of Edinburgh EH9  3JL
Scotland
Tel +44 131 650 5704
Mobile 07795 203 195
www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs


On 02/10/2010 09:11, John Nissen wrote:

The $64 trillion dollar question is whether we can get SRM to work quickly enough to save the Arctic sea ice. Suppose we gave ourselves 3 years to halt Arctic warming, which techniques would we develop and what would a sensible plan for experimentation and testing on them, as we build up to sufficient deployment by summer 2013?

John

---

Stephen Salter wrote:
 Hi All

Alan says that climate signals will be drowned out by chaotic climate variations. Both the papers that I pointed to in my email of 24 September were about picking up small signals from large, random variations. The second paper suggests that a 20 year run of the pseudo-random stimulus idea might be able to detect changes which are one or two percent of the root mean square of the natural variation. I am still hoping for suggestions.

If I knew a bit more about chaos I would like to argue whether or not the climate is chaotic or we are just ignorant about climate. The best scientists and philosophers used to think that planetary motions, the behaviour of chemical elements and the incidence of infectious illnesses were chaotic. Believing that something is chaotic is an excellent way of never discovering useful things about it.

Stephen

Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
Institute for Energy Systems
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
University of Edinburgh EH9  3JL
Scotland
Tel +44 131 650 5704
Mobile 07795 203 195
www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs


On 28/09/2010 20:44, Douglas MacMynowski wrote:
Alan - I doubt there's any real disagreement here, but just a
clarification; climate variability/noise is irrelevant to the question
of whether some form of SRM can be tested, but of course critical to
the question of how long it would take to detect a signal.  If the
goal is to estimate changes on a global scale, that will take decades
and significant forcing levels (we have a paper under review on this
subject that puts numbers on that trade-off).  Other than the moral
hazard, I see no basic difference between testing this, and any other
experiment in any other field of engineering or science.  Clearly with
one Earth, I agree with learning everything we can with computer
testing first, but if we ever did want to do this in full-scale, I'd
rather start small and learn something rather than just turning it on
and hoping for the best.

doug

On Sep 27, 11:44 am, Alan Robock<[email protected]>  wrote:
   Dear Ken,

I think you are being rather picky with words.  In any case, I never
said it cannot be tested.  I said it cannot be fully tested in a
real-world in situ experiment without full-scale implementation, because the climate signal will be drowned out by chaotic climate variations and
because injecting into a pristine stratosphere cannot test injecting
into an existing cloud. Of course computers can be used for testing. That is what I do, and I advocate much more of it. The statement below
refers to in situ experimentation.

Alan

Alan Robock, Professor II (Distinguished Professor)
    Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
    Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222 Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected] New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock




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