VIRTUAL MEETING | Marine cloud brightening as an emergency brake on climate disaster
LOCATION
SPEAKER: Professor Stephen Salter, University of Edinburgh.
BIOGRAPHY: Stephen Salter is Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at Edinburgh University. After an apprenticeship in the aircraft industry as fitter and toolmaker making parts for the SR177 supersonic rocket fighter and the Skeeter helicopter he worked on instrumentation for the Hovercraft and the Black Knight rocket. He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and stayed to work as inventor’s mate for Richard Gregory making a solid-image microscope, astronomical instruments and noise recording from bird’s eggs. He moved with Gregory to Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh to make the Freddie robot and an early touch screen on the absurd assumption that children might one day have access to computers. Following the cancellation of the artificial intelligence programme he moved to Mechanical Engineering to work on energy from wind, waves and tidal streams. Projects include wave tanks, desalination, voter-friendly traffic congestion charging, computer-controlled hydraulics, flood prevention, mine clearance, suppressing explosions, nuclear disarmament, increasing the capacity of road bridges, hydrogen-fuelled aircraft and now on the design of seagoing hardware for Latham’s proposal to reverse global warming by making clouds whiter. Reports of his retirement are exaggerated.
ABSTRACT: The climate policies of most Governments, with a few predictable exceptions, are to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to zero over time scales of varying numbers of years.
By the time we get to zero emissions, the atmospheric CO2 concentration will be higher than now by an amount which will depend on how long it takes. This means that floods, droughts, sea level rise, ice loss and bushfires will be substantially worse than now. Zero is too big. We have to find ways to actually remove CO2. If that cannot be done quickly enough, we must also use real cooling in the right places until the CO2 removal technology can be developed. The amount of energy involved is terrifying but several methods may be possible.
One was proposed by John Latham in 1990. He wanted to exploit the well-accepted Twomey effect. This is that cloud reflectivity depends on the size distribution of cloud drops. For a given liquid water content a large number of small drops reflects more than the same amount of water in large drops. Drop formation needs an initial condensation nucleus. These are scarce in clean mid-ocean air. Latham suggested spraying submicron drops of filtered seawater into the marine boundary layer where turbulence would ensure mixing. It is the number of successful nucleations of cloud drops that matters, not the mass of spray.
This was a 45-minute talk followed by a 15 minute Q&A. The meeting was open from 5:50 pm for attendees to join and the event started promptly at 6:00pm.
Please note the joining instructions provided the virtual meeting link closer to the event.
UPDATE:
Registration has now closed. Please email conferences@rmets.org to now register and recieve the Joining Link.
SPEAKER: Professor Stephen Salter, University of Edinburgh.
BIOGRAPHY: Stephen Salter is Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at Edinburgh University. After an apprenticeship in the aircraft industry as fitter and toolmaker making parts for the SR177 supersonic rocket fighter and the Skeeter helicopter he worked on instrumentation for the Hovercraft and the Black Knight rocket. He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and stayed to work as inventor’s mate for Richard Gregory making a solid-image microscope, astronomical instruments and noise recording from bird’s eggs. He moved with Gregory to Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh to make the Freddie robot and an early touch screen on the absurd assumption that children might one day have access to computers. Following the cancellation of the artificial intelligence programme he moved to Mechanical Engineering to work on energy from wind, waves and tidal streams. Projects include wave tanks, desalination, voter-friendly traffic congestion charging, computer-controlled hydraulics, flood prevention, mine clearance, suppressing explosions, nuclear disarmament, increasing the capacity of road bridges, hydrogen-fuelled aircraft and now on the design of seagoing hardware for Latham’s proposal to reverse global warming by making clouds whiter. Reports of his retirement are exaggerated.
ABSTRACT: The climate policies of most Governments, with a few predictable exceptions, are to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to zero over time scales of varying numbers of years.
By the time we get to zero emissions, the atmospheric CO2 concentration will be higher than now by an amount which will depend on how long it takes. This means that floods, droughts, sea level rise, ice loss and bushfires will be substantially worse than now. Zero is too big. We have to find ways to actually remove CO2. If that cannot be done quickly enough, we must also use real cooling in the right places until the CO2 removal technology can be developed. The amount of energy involved is terrifying but several methods may be possible.
One was proposed by John Latham in 1990. He wanted to exploit the well-accepted Twomey effect. This is that cloud reflectivity depends on the size distribution of cloud drops. For a given liquid water content a large number of small drops reflects more than the same amount of water in large drops. Drop formation needs an initial condensation nucleus. These are scarce in clean mid-ocean air. Latham suggested spraying submicron drops of filtered seawater into the marine boundary layer where turbulence would ensure mixing. It is the number of successful nucleations of cloud drops that matters, not the mass of spray.
This was a 45-minute talk followed by a 15 minute Q&A. The meeting was open from 5:50 pm for attendees to join and the event started promptly at 6:00pm.
Please note the joining instructions provided the virtual meeting link closer to the event.
UPDATE:
Registration has now closed. Please email conferences@rmets.org to now register and recieve the Joining Link.