Climate Solution Methods |
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INTRODUCTION |
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Current investment to address climate change is focussed mainly on the mitigation
of further greenhouse gas emissions by a wide variety of means and a handful of
technologies, most of which are designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air
and to either to sequester it geologically or to turn it into biomass or useful
products. This handful includes Direct Air Capture (DAC) using machinery,
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), and various forms of
Afforestation. Even with some likely improvement in cost over time, most
reputable analyses indicate that all three will suffer from showstoppers in the
form of one or more of: scalability, cost, insufficient resource, timeliness, or
risk of reversal under increasing global warming. In addition, none directly
addresses the problems of other greenhouse gases, of solar or thermal radiation
management, of ocean acidification and stratification, of species and habitat
loss, of ice loss, of increasingly extreme weather events, of sea level rise, of
passing tipping points, and of the long-term effects of prior emissions, land
clearing, pollution, and ecological impoverishment.
OFFER
What is offered below are sixteen conceptual methods, the combination of which
addresses both carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and the above other problems in
different ways. Most require validation, modelling, gated testing and approval
prior to deployment. Whilst research is being undertaken at various
organisations to develop, quantify, model, test and validate some of them, all
such concepts that appear to have prospect need to be evaluated and compared. As
well, all should be assessed for their potential cost-effectiveness, their
effects, scalability, risk-to-risk profile, optimal interaction, measurability,
reversibility, and community acceptability. Readers are requested to see how
they might contribute to these efforts. Each concept will be given a short
description. Its key functions will be outlined, as well as the innovation
dependencies on which it depends. Attached to it may also be a summarising
graphic and/or document where that is short enough to be digested quickly.
Longer, supporting documentation is available on request for most of the
solutions. Whilst the order in which the concepts are presented is usually that
of decreasing expected climate restoration effectiveness, exceptions are made
when subsequent concepts are likely to depend on earlier ones.
QUANTIFICATION
'Quantification' attempts to estimate the order of magnitude of the effects of each method after it had been deployed to its reasonable maximum extent.
Being more difficult to quantify, their timing, cumulative and synergistic effects will be covered even more briefly.
And as changes in quantification caused by passing multiple tipping points, climate sensitivities and hysteresis effects are even more difficult to estimate, these will not even be estimated.
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| (Click a down arrow to see a short description of the method or click on the method in a colored cell to see a detailed description of the method.) |
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| 47 | | Atmospheric Vortex Engines (AVE)
AVEs are machines designed controllably to concentrate warm, preferably moist, air into 'twisters' that provide conduits for heat and moisture to rise faster than otherwise, thereby cooling and watering the planet. | |
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| 47 | | Atmospheric Vortex Engines (AVE)
AVEs are machines designed controllably to concentrate warm, preferably moist, air into 'twisters' that provide conduits for heat and moisture to rise faster than otherwise, thereby cooling and watering the planet. | |
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| Short Description | AVEs are machines designed controllably to concentrate warm, preferably moist, air into 'twisters' that provide conduits for heat and moisture to rise faster than otherwise, thereby cooling and watering the planet. | | Description | Combining Louat and Michaud's separate inventions, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_engine , it may be possible to utilise the result controllably to use the heat from waste industrial sources, warm surface waters, or hot lands to generate stable, mini-tornadoes that take warm, preferably moisture-laden air many hundred metres into the troposphere. Moist, rotating air, transforming into twisters or mini tornadoes, should rapidly rise and condense their water content as cloud and rain in the cooler, upper regions. They should be capable of forming reflective cloud, of releasing their heat content at altitude, and of thereby cooling the planet, as well as of generating supplementary, gentle precipitation downwind.
In effect, the method would simply enhance and simulate the natural function of thermals of forest transpiration, or of natural tornadoes and hurricanes - yet would pre-empt the formation of such extreme weather events.
Good locations might be in hot, low-lying coastal regions where large, annular solar ponds might be constructed. The elevation of these would be designed such that they could selectively be refilled with seawater at high tide. The AVE would be constructed inside the annulus and its air inlets would be sprayed with hot water from the black-lined solar pond. Some of the AVEs might beneficially be combined with salt manufacturing, where sea salt aerosols (SSA) derived from the seawater droplets lofted by the AVE precipitated out on nearby land or floating ocean platforms, whilst the warmed water vapour continued upwards into the cloud base.
Renewable energy for the pumping, and possibly some spare for other purposes, might even be harvested from the airflow using turbines, once the process had been started.
AVEs might also work well in complement to the upcoming technology of Small, Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMR), see https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx.
It may also be possible to capture at least some of the precipitation produced at cooler altitudes immediately downwind of the vortex by employing balloon-buoyed nets of hydrophilic material, as do spiderwebs with dew. | | Key Functions | Direct, regional cooling of air, sea and land surface. Albedo enhancement. Low-cost seawater desalination followed by partly-controllable irrigation. | | Innovation Dependencies | The key patents might now be expired. | | Quantification | | | Graphics: | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| 73 | | Bright Water
Reflecting microbubbles generated in either sea or freshwater can be used to increase cooling albedo or to reduce water loss through evaporation. | |
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| 73 | | Bright Water
Reflecting microbubbles generated in either sea or freshwater can be used to increase cooling albedo or to reduce water loss through evaporation. | |
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| Short Description | Reflecting microbubbles generated in either sea or freshwater can be used to increase cooling albedo or to reduce water loss through evaporation. | | Description | Prof. Russell Seitz in https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4737323/Seitz_BrightWater.pdf proposes generating microbubbles in the surface waters of the ocean and lakes designed to increase its albedo and hence cool the planet. Such bubbles are also being used to lubricate or reduce the hull friction of vessels, thereby either increasing their speed or reducing the fuel required. A second benefit resulting from such microbubbles in freshwater reserves, swamps and rice paddies open to the atmosphere is that it would reduce evaporative losses.
Regarding the generation of microbubbles and their optimal size distribution, it may be that Perlemax's no moving parts Desai Zimmerman Fluidic Oscillators (DZFO), see http://perlemax.com/about , could produce monodisperse (same sized) microbubbles of the optimal size at the lowest energy cost. Generated into water from the surfactant-rich, sea surface microlayer (SSML), no artificial surfactants might be needed. Note however, that nanobubbles generated in the SSML have lives measured in months. | | Key Functions | | | Innovation Dependencies | | | Quantification | | | Graphics: | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| 87 |  | Buoyant Flakes
Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | View |
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| 87 | | Buoyant Flakes
Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | View |
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| Short Description | Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | | Description | Previous attempts to farm the sea or to increase oceanic carbon sequestration have used soluble, artificial chemicals that do not remain near the surface. However, long-lived, ultra-slow-release buoyant flakes can be disseminated pneumatically annually by ship over selected ocean areas. The tiny flakes are comprised of natural, organic materials and mineral wastes. Like a self-feed system, these do not so much release the nutrients to the environment, as to make them available at the sunlit sea surface where the phytoplankton which need them can 'suck' them out of the exposed mineral particles in the flakes using their transporter enzymes or ligands. Thus, there is little chance of either over-fertilisation, eutrophication, toxicity, or of the nutrients being lost rapidly to the dark depths. The foundation of each flake is a single rice husk, rich in the opaline silica needed by diatoms. Glued to this by plant-derived lignin hot-melt glue is a sealed matrix of air and minerals designed to provide phytoplankton communities with whatever nutrients are wanting in that part of the ocean. As dark blue ocean waters are deficient in one or more macronutrients or trace elements (typically phosphate, iron, silica and transition metals - reactive nitrogen nutrient being able to be made from air by cyanobacteria), using buoyant flakes could turn these blue or desert ocean regions into productive, turquoise seas. Krill and most other diel vertically migrating (DVM) species consume much phytoplankton in surface waters at night, then respire and excrete the carbonaceous wastes in the dark, safe depths of up to a kilometre deep during daylight hours, thereby sequestering its carbon content. | | Key Functions | Increases the biomass and biodiversity of marine life; sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) securely as carbonaceous seabed ooze & rock, refractory dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and benign, dissolved, alkaline bicarbonate; increases oceanic albedo (reflectiveness) that cools the surface waters; increases atmospheric DMS aerosols that nucleate or brighten cooling marine clouds. | | Innovation Dependencies | None known | | Quantification | BUOYANT FLAKE OCEAN FERTILIZATION (BFOF)
The dissemination of nutrient-bearing buoyant flakes over ocean surface waters that are deficient in one or more key nutrients in order to increase phytoplankton growth, ocean biomass and biodiversity is a method of climate improvement that has been long known. At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in July 1988, John Martin stated humorously (but with serious intent) in a lecture his iron hypothesis: “give me a half a tanker of iron (scattered over ocean surface waters and absorbed by phytoplankton) and I will give you an ice age”. Now, our Buoyant Flakes will not only carry iron oxide waste, but also phosphatic clay waste, opaline silica (in rice husks) and micronutrients required by phytoplankton. The algae the flakes nutriate would also brighten the dark sea surface, nucleate solar-reflecting (cooling) marine cloud, increase marine biomass (fish, mollusc and crustacean stocks), and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide – at first in the euphotic (sunlit) zone, then by virtue mainly of diel vertically migrating (DVM) species, such as krill, lanternfish and bristlemouths, into the ocean depths where it would stay for up to millennia (depending on depth and location).
Now rice husk production is around 130Mt/yr and has little in the way of beneficial use. Rice husks contain ~17% silica. If 100Mt/yr of husk is made available for climate restoration use, and the husks are turned into buoyant flakes containing a mix of about 60% husk, 15% lignin glue, and 25% minerals that would make 167Mt/yr of flake. Now, the iron-rich red mud tailings from alumina refining contain about 47% iron, whilst Florida’s phosphatic clay wastes residual to phosphate extraction contain about 10% phosphorus. Hence, the rice husks would be adding 17Mt/yr of opaline silica to the surface ocean whilst, if each mineral were to be half of the 42Mt of minerals added to the husks, then each year we would be adding 10Mt of iron and 2Mt of phosphorus to the ocean surface, most of which would be taken up by living organisms. Furthermore, because the nutrients would mainly end up in oceanic biomass, they would tend to be recycled many times by the food chain and thus multiply oceanic biomass and its beneficial effects. 10Mt/yr of iron would fill many of Martin’s tankers, and would be disseminated thinly over most of the oligotrophic seas, not just the Southern Ocean.
Such nutrient supplementation would tend to render most dark blue seas into becoming a lighter, green or turquoise colour. The increase in albedo caused by this is not readily determined except by multi-spectral measurement by satellite over cloud-free areas, though an appreciation of its potential effectiveness might be gained simply from viewing photographs of algal blooms caused by blown dust or volcanic plumes. However, as algal blooms from over-zealous nutrient supplementation are to be avoided, the actual gain in albedo would be considerably less. Now, open ocean has an albedo of about 0.06, whilst green grass has one of 0.25. Omitting the important factors of cloud cover and cloud albedo, this means that turquoise waters nutriated by buoyant flakes might have an average daytime albedo of around 0.12, effectively doubling that of open, cloud-free ocean. The cooling effect of this in watts per square metre is to be determined, but is likely to be substantial.
Additional to this cooling effect would be that provided by the DMS emissions of the additional phytoplankton that would cause additional marine cloud nucleation and hence additional albedo.
Over the entire ocean such additional ocean biomass would result in an increase in carbon flow to the depths of the marine Biological Pump. This flow tends not to extend greatly to deep waters where the water is warm and well-oxygenated, because of bacterial action. However, in cooler waters, and particularly when facilitated by DVM species, the flow is likely to be considerable. It is thought that the DVM activity of the ~400Mt of Antarctic Krill, Euphausia superba, on its own is capable of sequestering large amounts of carbon as respired carbon dioxide or carbonaceous faeces, whilst it digests its nightly meal consumed near the sea surface, at depths of around a kilometre. Assuming that its average gut content is 5% of its bodyweight, that half of this gut content is water, and that half of that is carbon, this means that Antarctic krill could be sequestering 400 x 0.05 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 5MtC/day or some 18Mt of CO2 equivalent per day. Following long term Buoyant Flake supplementation over most of the global ocean, an expanded krill habitat, and sequestration by the other DVM species, might increase this sequestration rate several times over. | | Graphics: | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) |  | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| Short Description | The method mimics the effect of tropospheric loess dust on airborne pollutants. | | Description | Climate Photocatalyst is a development of the Iron Salt Aerosol (ISA) concept. The conceptual aerosol is said to mimic the fertilization effect of loess dust (~2.5% Fe) on marine phytoplankton, whilst improving on ISA's (~35.5% Fe) ability to photocatalyticly destroy tropospheric methane, soot, organic halogens and ozone. The nanoparticulate haze generated by the aerosol is claimed to have a substantial reflective cooling effect, though this must therefore be at considerable higher concentration than is required for methane+ destruction.
Components of the Climate Photocatalyst aerosol are the hydroxides of titanium and silicon, plus chloride, nitrate and ferric chloride. Delivery may be either by ship, drone or aircraft, but not to polar regions where adverse effects would likely occur.
The method of aerosol production and its effectiveness are TBD, as are the costs and environmental effects. Given the required mix, it is unlikely that sublimation could be used to generate nanoparticulate ISAs efficiently. Rained out aerosols are claimed to be captured, neutralised and buried by attachment to clay particles. | | Key Functions | | | Innovation Dependencies | Ability to generate and disseminate nanoparticulate aerosols of this composition high in the troposphere at an acceptable cost. | | Quantification | | | Graphics: | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| 61 |  | Fiztops
A Fiztop (a top-shaped producer of fizzy bubbles) is a floating, lightweight, solar-powered unit designed to generate long-lived, reflective nanobubbles in the sea surface microlayer (SSML). | View |
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| 61 | | Fiztops
A Fiztop (a top-shaped producer of fizzy bubbles) is a floating, lightweight, solar-powered unit designed to generate long-lived, reflective nanobubbles in the sea surface microlayer (SSML). | View |
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| Short Description | A Fiztop (a top-shaped producer of fizzy bubbles) is a floating, lightweight, solar-powered unit designed to generate long-lived, reflective nanobubbles in the sea surface microlayer (SSML). | | Description | When low-micron diameter bubbles are injected into the SSML they immediately lose a portion of their gas to the water surrounding them that then protects them from disappearance because of the multiple layers of surfactants, ions, organic fragments, and gas-saturated seawater they attract. This effect, and the fact that their neutral buoyancy does not expose them to the atmosphere (unlike larger bubbles), gives them lives of the order of months, during which their high albedo provides cooling to the waters below.
Their cooling services may tend to be complemented by increased evaporation and via the array of sensors and communications equipment that could be mounted on each Fiztop to provide self-status and real-time environmental data to service users. | | Key Functions | To so reflect a portion of sunlight from the ocean surface that the water is cooled, thereby protecting ecologies such as coral reefs, seagrass meadows, kelp forests, mangroves, fish nurseries and shellfish beds from bleaching or overheating, and the water from stratifying and losing some of its oxygen and nutrient content. | | Innovation Dependencies | Perlemax DZFO technology; Winwick diffuser technology; Artificial Intelligence System (AIS), comms and sensor technologies; and anti-fouling technology. | | Quantification | | | Graphics: | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| Short Description | | | Key Functions | | | Innovation Dependencies | | | Quantification | | | Graphics: | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| 57 |  | Ice Shields/ISA
In colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep. | View |
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| 57 | | Ice Shields/ISA
In colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep. | View |
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| Short Description | In colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep. | | Description | Thickening sea ice can be a means of sequestering CO2, provided that the chilled, dense, and gas-rich brine left after most of seawater's water content has been turned into ice is allowed to sink to the seabed. Anchored Arctic wind turbines could provide renewable energy to power low-lift seawater pumps and other system requirements. In the freezing season, AI-controlled satellite pumping stations would optimise intermittent flows of seawater, first onto newly-formed sea ice, then onto each low-angle conical ice shield as it built up, rather like how lava can form a mountain. A frigid atmosphere and ice surface causes forming, frazil ice crystals in the thinning, radial flow to attach themselves to the chilled ice below. The chilling residual brine concentrates the dissolved carbon dioxide and oxygen in the pumped seawater into the brine (and may absorb more from the atmosphere), together with most of the salt from the seawater. Falling off the edge of each ice shield, the 'brinefall' rivulets would take their contents directly to the seabed, where the CO2 can react with seabed carbonates to form benign, long-lasting, dissolved bicarbonate, and the oxygenation can succour benthic life. Back of envelope work suggests that this method has the potential to sequester up to 16GtC/yr in Arctic abyssal waters alone. Brinefalls on a wide scale would also reinvigorate the overturning currents that keep our oceans productive and temperatures relatively benign. Ice shield-arrayed polar regions would help return the global climate to its previous benign state. Over its extended life, a single, 2.5MW floating wind turbine might power the growth of up to 50, ~5km2 ice shields in a linked array that could be grown and grounded in water up to several hundred metres deep. Designated channels and polynyas amongst the ice arrays would provide access and habitat for polar wildlife and shipping. Deep arrays would repel the intrusion of warm water into the Arctic Ocean, thereby reducing melt loss and glacial calving. Thermals derived from released ocean heat to the atmosphere in the cold and dark seasons would take the heat directly by convection to the tropopause, whence it would radiate into space, unhindered by the insulating greenhouse gases below it, thereby cooling the planet. Increasing ice cover would reverse previous losses, whilst the semi-permanent increase in ice cover would effectively reflect warm season sunlight by its high albedo. Spare, warm season wind power might: be taken to market by HVDC cable; be used to capture and process seabed emissions locally into no-drill natural gas, hydrogen, ammonia, nanocarbon products and vat protein; be used to generate iron salt aerosols (ISA) from sublimated ferric chloride pellets that destroy polluting atmospheric methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon, ozone, CFCs and smog by photo-catalysis; or else be used to pump Arctic river water south for use by industry, for irrigation, homes and habitat restoration. | | Key Functions | Restoring cryogenic habitat, whilst allowing ship and marine life to access the regions; sequestering CO2 safely and for centuries; cooling the planet; reducing glacial loss; cooling the arctic and some sub-arctic regions; restoring benign hemispheric weather by increasing the polar vortices and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC); preventing coastal erosion; helping to oxygenate the deep ocean; providing renewable energy; and allowing ebullient methane and CO2 to be harvested before they reach the atmosphere. | | Innovation Dependencies | Polar weatherisation of floating wind turbines and pumping stations; AIS capability to so vary the intermittent pumping regimes that linked and often-grounded ice shield arrays can be grown out from the shoreline; development of ebullient ocean gas harvesting, processing and transportation methods. | | Quantification | Sea ice thickening by means of the Ice Shields design concept is claimed to result in net benefit across its many likely effects. The main benefits include: increasing polar albedo with its global cooling and weather stabilising effects; sequestering carbon dioxide and oxygen in the abyssal depths by virtue of those gases becoming concentrated in the frigid brine left over for ice formation that flows down each forming ice mountain in the colder seasons and sinks by gravity to the seabed, whence its CO2 content can react with seabed carbonates to form benign, long-lived and slightly alkaline bicarbonate; glacial stabilisation; cryogenic habitat restoration; methane emission suppression and/or harvesting; coastal stabilisation; increasing krill numbers and hence their carbon sequestration capacity and the size of the marine food chain; AMOC recovery; increasing bright snowpack and water resources; reducing ocean stratification; and making large amounts of renewable energy available in the warmer seasons, some of which might be used locally to make food or to oxidise ebullient atmospheric methane and smog.
Most of these effects, and other ones, also cannot be reliably estimated within an order of magnitude without there being proper experimentation, development and modelling. However, it should be possible to estimate the energy cost of the seawater pumping required to make a lenticular ice mountain of given height-depth and size under a given set of weather conditions. Thus, knowing the power that is deliverable by, say, a single, floating 2.5MW Arctic Ocean wind turbine in Arctic winter winds, is should be possible to theoretically calculate the areal rate at which the shallow waters of the Arctic could be covered and maintained in a grounded, linked and close-packed array of 500m height+depth ice shield lenses, each having an inclination angle above water (probably less below) of, say, four degrees and freezing some 80% of the pumped water (temporarily ignore below-water melting which will be low once the array has grounded or else is deep enough to repel warm surface currents). | | Graphics: | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) | | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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| 63 | | Marine Permaculture Arrays (MPA)
MPAs and their infrastructure are designed to bring cooling and nutrients so that kelp can be grown and harvested in most cool and temperate waters, often far from land. | View |
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| 63 | | Marine Permaculture Arrays (MPA)
MPAs and their infrastructure are designed to bring cooling and nutrients so that kelp can be grown and harvested in most cool and temperate waters, often far from land. | View |
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