Dear John,
You pose an Interesting question. Perhaps it could be rephrased a bit.
If the urgency for the intervention of Arctic (sea ice, Greenland,
permafrost, etc.) were such that its preservation become an
international priority (governance questions aside), how long would it
take for cloud brightening SRM, stratospheric particle enhancement SRM
or any other technique to be operationally ready? And the budget?
Sincerely,
Oliver Wingenter
On 10/2/2010 3:55 AM, Stephen Salter wrote:
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
--
Oliver Wingenter
Assoc. Prof. of Chemistry
Research Scientist
Geophysical Research Center
New Mexico Tech
801 Leroy Place
Socorro, NM 87801
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