Geo-engineering a fix for climate change?

[Fat Tone]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7014503.stm

[Lizzard[MPE]]

weird.


I for some reason picture two guys high in a room saying "heeeyy i got ittt .. lets put pipes in the ocean to control the temperature."

its interesting to say the least. I for some reason just don't know how i feel about it all.

[Lizzard[MPE]]

I have a feeling it would alter a lot of things in the world, things we wouldn't see coming. But hey, if it saves the planet.. it saves the planet.


we really have ****ed up the natural order of things/

[VJ]

This of course would impact ocean currents... I wonder if predicting the changes caused by this can be done accurately enought with the current knowledge and technology.


Jörg

[Fat Tone]

I imagine that's one thing we can say for sure...that we can't predict the changes accurately.

I wonder if you can extract useful energy out of those pipes at the same time?

[Lizzard[MPE]]

Just with the one fact of lesser hurricanes in the gulf region..

when they make landfall, they can kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars of property damage when they hit heavily populated areas.

that we know.

But... what are the good things about hurricanes?

I cant think of any because its 5 in the morning... but theres a good reason that there are floods, theres a good reason for earthquakes and volcanoes.

Mother Nature does her thing, and we just gotta deal with it...not change it. ya know.

[Lizzard[MPE]]

Is it something i dreamed up.. or did the US military try to drop something in a hurricane once to make it go away?

look how that turned out..

[Lizzard[MPE]]

I'm not making much sense. I should really get some sleep.

I'm not really against this plan of action.. but not too thrilled about it either.

Does it just seem weird? I'll read the article again when i wake up.

[Brian Ellis]

I could think of a number of effects that this idea would have and significantly increased CO2 absorption is not particularly one of them, IMHO. Ocean water has an average SG of 1.026 at 4°C and 1,021 at 30°C. This difference is such that, if the water were 4° at the top, the cold water would simply fall back down to the bottom! However, it's unlikely to be 4 °C at the top, because the rate of rise will depend on the amplitude of the swell and its frequency. If the pipe were 200 m long and the swell were 2 m crest to hollow at 10 second intervals between crests, it would theoretically take 1,000 seconds for the water at the bottom to reach the top (in reality much more, because a robust flap valve would not close instantaneously). There will be some heat exchange en route, during this time.

On a more practical level, the Gulf of Mexico has much maritime traffic, especially large tankers. If thousands of these things were planted there, they would present a distinct hazard.

Interesting idea, though!

[rylan]

Well the scientists can't even predict a weather forecast accurately a few days out, let alone know for sure whats going on with global climate. So there is no way they'd know the results of messing with something like this... could make things worse, better, do nothing, or something totally unexpected.

[Brian Ellis]

Actually, we are beginning to have a better idea of climate than weather. There are several reasons for this:
- climate is a matter of mean effects, whereas weather often has to do with unusual peaks in some direction than another
- we have to have weather predictions in a matter of hours, even minutes; climate models may take weeks of super-computer time. Weather models are therefore leaner with fewer input data
- weather is often dependent on local conditions; even a small hill can sometimes modify a forecast, where climate would not even notice it exists
- in critical areas, the XY grid for weather forecasting is as small as 10x10 km but has only a boundary + 5 data sets on the Z axis (ground, 530, 1230, 2820, 5700 and 9300 m approx., actually expressed in hPa), to cut down on the number-crunching: climate takes account of 14 equal slices into the stratosphere.

In truth, you cannot really compare them.

However, I agree that playing the sorcerer's apprentice with either weather or climate is dangerous. To mix my metaphors, it is impossible to know what will escape from the can of worms.