Monday, October 12, 2009

Stratocumuloqatsi

Want blue skies ? Think again …

It’s clouds that you actually want - white clouds, to be more precise; as white as if they were featuring in a tooth-paste ad -, for you are a concerned citizen and climate change is high on your personal agenda.

I came across this article in Newsweek by Bjorn Lomborg, Director of of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He’s also the author of a book called “The Skeptical Environmentalist” which didn’t exactly go unnoticed and led the author to be accused of scientific dishonesty. When you get an entire website devoted to trying to debunk the supposed myths in your book, you know you are in a Dan Brown-ish league of your own, but it also makes you kinda interesting. To be sure, in this article Lomborg is not putting forward original ideas from himself, but what struck me was the sort of “Convenient Truth (?)” he is preaching, i.e. that we can fight global warming, not by cutting carbon emissions (at least not in the short run, for we’ll never make it in time to avoid a disaster if we purely rely on that sort of methods) but by making … the clouds more white, or “climate engineering” as he calls it.


One possibility is to make a small investment in climate engineering—ways of artificially lowering the temperature to postpone the rise in temperatures. For instance, automated boats could spray seawater into the air to make clouds whiter, and thus more reflective, augmenting a natural process. Bouncing just 1 or 2 percent of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth back into space could cancel out as much warming as that caused by doubling pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. Spending about $9 billion researching and developing this technology could head off $20 trillion of climate damage. To put this in context, the U.S. annual budget on climate research is $6 billion a year: for just 18 months' worth of this spending, we might be able to avoid any additional temperature rise for the rest of the century. Climate engineering would raise ethical and logistical issues that warrant discussion, but we should welcome the possibility of a cheap, effective response to global warming.



Hallelujah ! A mere 9 billion USD and our planet is safe for some time to come. How come I do feel some scepsis about this, as I always do when I hear something that actually sounds to good to be true ? Yet I can’t deny either that it is one of the sexiest ideas I’ve heard about in this entire climate change debate and it actually claims to be a (stop-gap) solution, which makes it refreshing from the mostly gloomy soundbites we more often get to hear in this sort of discussions. Everything posturing as even only part of a solution is welcome in my opinion, for though I may not be able to save the world, I do care about my own self-preservation, amongst others.


Lomborg took the idea from John Latham and Stephen Salter – and some acknowledgement of that fact wouldn’t have been out of place, I figured. Anyway. here’s in a nutshell how the original author of the idea envisages it to work:

Clouds play an important role in the global climate system. Some types, such as marine stratocumulus clouds, can have a significant cooling effect thanks to their ability to reflect sunlight back out to space before it ever reaches the surface of the planet.

Prof Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh has a plan to expand the size and whiteness of these clouds using a fleet of remote-controlled, energy-self-sufficient ships. The ships use energy from the wind to propel themselves around and spray minuscule droplets of sea water into the air. These droplets become the nuclei, or "seeds", around which reflexive stratocumulus clouds can form.

As the water evaporates, tiny particles of salt would be carried into low-lying stratocumulus clouds by rising air currents. The salt would whiten the clouds, making them more reflective, and also create more water droplets, further reducing the amount of sunrays penetrating the atmosphere.


I think it’s going to be an eerie sight, this fleet of “drone” ships floating around our oceans, spitting water into the air like whales and creating clouds that hover above their hulls as if they were tied to the ships like balloons (just imagine Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass taking this on for a sequel to their Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi / Naqoyqatsi trilogy. Surely they wouldn’t have to look for some good cloudy day). Professor Salter is well aware as well that, even if his plans would get beyond the design phase and would actually be implemented, this is not the final solution to the climate change problem:

Salter believes that if fifty of these ships were built each year the fleet would be capable of increasing the reflexivity of the planet sufficiently to cancel out the temperature rise caused by man-made climate change. This wouldn't solve the CO2 problem, nor will it tackle ocean acidity. But the plan could create a window of opportunity in which the global economy could be decarbonised without the earth being pushed over the threshold of runaway global warming

The Newsweek article was interesting but does leave several questions unanswered, such as what would be the to-be-expected side-effects of this technique and what does the author mean with the ethical issues related to this subject. Still, to me it had a nicely reassuring effect to know that Big Science is actually working on solutions that can buy us time in this race against the clock, for as the Manchester Report clearly points out: Professor Slater's solution is by far not the only one that is on the drawing table.

The final turnaround however will only come when all of us realise that we need to decrease the size of our shoes, i.e. drastically reducing our ecological footprint. And that is going to take some while before we get there, so in the meantime I'm open to all suggestions ... till we get it really right in the end.

Sincerely Yours.

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