6 ms·

Can artificially altered clouds save the Great Barrier Reef?

32 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

pvaldes 5y ago
This kind of experiments should be done only by people with previous experience culturing corals. I see at least two possible problems here.
- fileeditview 5y ago
  I would be happier if nobody did these kind of experiments. I have the feeling that playing with the weather may be our last and most stupid failure. Doesn't have to have crazy consequences after the first, second or third time. But at some point it will just turn everything to sh*t.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Humans have been playing with the weather ever since we started cutting/burning down forests faster than they can grow back.
    - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
      That doesn't read like an endorsement of planned geoengineering.
      - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
        AdrianN was responding to a comment about "crazy consequences" to messing with the weather. His point was that thus far there haven't been any, despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.
        DemocracyFTW 5y ago
        > thus far there haven't been any [crazy consequences], despite centuries of human-driven weather changes. which obviously is not true, right?
      - adrianN 5y ago
        The only type of geoengineering I would endorse without much hesitation is sucking CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But I don't think that the weather system is sensitive enough that we can't try nudging it with measures that are easy to stop and whose effects only last a couple of years (e.g. injection sulphur into the atmosphere).
- grapescheesee 5y ago
  I see many issues with weather modicifation. I would love to see the coral reefs, and it starts a lot closer to the ground. Weather modicifation has been a dream military tool, with some unprecedented applications. They are as far away from saving the environment as you could get.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Everyone running a fossil fuel engine is engaged in their own little bit of weather modification...
    - macilacilove 5y ago
      Orders of magnitude should matter in an insightful conversation.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        The coral reefs are in trouble because of how many of those car engines there are. Each one is orders of magnitude smaller than this proposal, but together? I think that’s relevant in this case.
  - Grimburger 5y ago
    > it starts a lot closer to the ground Climate change will harm coral at higher latitudes, at a slow enough rate they will migrate southwards, the rampant agricultural runoff will keep going regardless of the climate though and it has just as much a negative impact. Talking about fertilisers flowing into the reef and farmers causing much of the damage is a quick way into political suicide. It's not an easy issue to solve in a country with a 24 hour news cycle full of ever more outrage.
- Grimburger 5y ago
  Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted. Maybe just give us the benefit of the doubt here.
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    It's good to hear from an Australian that environmental policies like fire management and cloud seeding have made ecological disasters a thing of the past in your part of the world /s
    - ehnto 5y ago
      It was a lack of application of known fire management policies, due to reduced spending, that escalated the impact of the fires.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    > Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted So... can we conclude yet that it does not work for saving the coral reef?
  - sumedh 5y ago
    and yet most of the Australia is still a desert.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      Can't tell if that comment is tongue in cheek, but the goal was never to change the desert. Cloud seeding is mostly used to supplement already arable land for crops and hydro power I think.
- bathyspheric 5y ago
  Why would coral culturing specialists like Madeleine van Oppen be the best at testing atmospheric alterations? Do you mean that the ultimate effects on the corals are important, rather than just a reduction of insolation?
bserge 5y ago
dr_dshiv 5y ago
My son is working on a school essay about cloud brightening and the great barrier reef. He is trying to understand why there is so much opposition to doing this research. Any hints or reasoned arguments to share?
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I guess fuckups are potentially very bad and very hard to contain. Could be long-lived too.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  That would deprive him from the joy of finding the answer by himself. Learning critical thinking is a valuable skill for any child and this case is an easy example to try his wings in this sense.
  - smokey_circles 5y ago
    Humans are a cooperative species. Seeking help and wisdom is part of the process. Nothing is being taken away or deprived here, and from what i can tell that's a hell of an overreach on such little context, unless you've caught something I missed?
  - krsdcbl 5y ago
    Hard disagree. The suggestion that you should find an answer all by yourself through just thinking is a primer for unchallenged speculations. Asking someone is the very prerequisite to develop your ideas. Looking at data is an asynchronous way of asking someone. There is no critical thinking without exchange.
- bathyspheric 5y ago
  I would say that there is a lot of interest in some quarters for this sort of solution, as it might mean that we could save the GBR without curtailing the energy industry. I think resistance to these ideas might be related to dealing with the symptoms; high ocean temperatures, rather than the causes; human-induced climate change. I support science-based evaluation of all these ideas, but without ignoring or addressing potential causes.
DemocracyFTW 5y ago
Under the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, the government has yet to strengthen its climate pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement, as many nations have done in the past year. Morrison has personally ruled out committing to net-zero emissions. Pushing for a technological fix to global warming without moving to aggressively curb greenhouse gases is “sheer lunacy”, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison): The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia in last place for its climate policies and was the only country to score 0 for the same metric in 2021. During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Morrison dismissed suggestions of a link between Australia's emissions or policies and the intensity of the bushfires and initially downplayed the influence of climate change on the fires, but later admitted that climate change may have contributed. Morrison declined to set net-zero emissions or other climate change targets, unlike other world leaders. Morrison allegedly requested climate change policy targets be removed from a proposed 2021 Australia–United Kingdom trade deal and initially suggested he would not attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but later confirmed that he would. Morrison's government pledged that Australia would aim to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, but did not introduce this into national law; Morrison said he believed market forces and not government regulation can address climate change. His government's climate action plan has been criticised as "lightweight", "meaningless", and a "mockery" that contains "no policy or strategy whatsoever". Market forces, sure. How much CO2 is emitted by those boats with their high-powered water pumps? How much noise is injected into the water body when these vessels operate in numbers day in, day out? How many vessels and hours of operation will be needed to have a cooling effect? Where do the clouds, where does the water go once it is vaporized and left drifting? Come to think of it one could imagine to suck huge quantities of marine water to vaporize it and let it drift as clouds over land; thinking in the abstract, that could contribute to more shade, lower temperatures and more precipitation over hot and arid areas, thereby improving conditions for plants, animals, and humans. But, and this is a big one: how much energy will this need? How is that energy produced? How much water would one have to evaporate? What are the consequences for marine life? What are the consequences when the next government decides to cut funding? And what about the salt content of the aerosol, for certainly it will be utterly uneconomic to desalinate the water prior to spraying it? My hunch is that those figures won't work out and that artificial clouds over the Great Barrier Reef also won't work out. The reef is called great because it covers an area of ~344,400km², roughly the area of countries like Finland, Congo, Germany, or Japan. According to the USGS[1], the water in a cloud with a volume of 1km³ weighs about 500,000kg. A 1m thick cloud layer over said area has a volume of 344.400km³ if I'm not mistaken, so weighs around 172,200,000kg. So in order to work one would think it to be requisite to spray in the order of a hundred million kg of water like almost daily into the air from seagoing vessels. There's an almost constant wind over most of the oceans so low-faring clouds will disperse in a matter of minutes or hours; the clouds however would be most desperately needed around noon each day which complicates things. Perhaps one could move the ships to upwind locations each day so clouds generated in the afternoon and the night get a chance to drift over the reef. But imagine to do that for a country-size area: You'd need a fleet of tens or hundreds of thousands of not-so-small vessels. I cannot imagine photovoltaics to be a sufficient source of energy (for one, space is very limited on any vessel, and ironically, the vessel's reason for being there is to reduce impact of solar power). You'd need nuclear or hydrogen because otherwise you'd have to burn through untold tons of fossil fuels. At any rate, the waters will not be calm anymore. The noise of the evaporators and the propellers will be deafening in the air and in the sea. All told, a badly thought-out publicity stunt. [1] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/how-much-does-cloud-weigh https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
TedShiller 5y ago
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  I'd really like it if we could avoid these kinds of flippant "look at how cynical I am, I know better than to trust these corporate stooges" answers that don't actually bring new or insightful argument (or in this case, any argument at all). We already get enough of those on reddit.
  - darkhorse13 5y ago
    These "flippant" responses are the only acceptable reaction to this non-stop tomfoolery to be honest. And no, Reddit would upvote this link a billion times and gild it with awards on their "I love science" subreddits.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    [flagged]
bananapub 5y ago
Australia as a whole doesn't even believe climate change is happening or should be stopped, so...no.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I don't get that impression from the public, but it's clear the federal government isn't particularly interested in changing anything to help. It is nice to see some individual states giving it a crack, South Australia ran for one full week on renewables recently, and has fairly high renewable input in general. There are solar-hydrogen plants, desal plants and green-steel initiatives all underway as well. I can see a lot of good happening, albeit a bit late.
amosj 5y ago
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky." [1] (note: I am absolutely for trying to save the great barrier reef, and I'm not qualified to judge the feasibility or consequences of this approach, so no moral or other judgement intended. If it can be made to work without breaking Earth production, I hope it gets merged) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEHSXL9UPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEHSXL9UPM
- ehnto 5y ago
  Unfortunately there is no staging environment, so we'd be doing it live!

32 points by dr_dshiv 5y ago

This kind of experiments should be done only by people with previous experience culturing corals. I see at least two possible problems here.

fileeditview 5y ago
I would be happier if nobody did these kind of experiments. I have the feeling that playing with the weather may be our last and most stupid failure. Doesn't have to have crazy consequences after the first, second or third time. But at some point it will just turn everything to sh*t.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Humans have been playing with the weather ever since we started cutting/burning down forests faster than they can grow back.
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    That doesn't read like an endorsement of planned geoengineering.
    - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
      AdrianN was responding to a comment about "crazy consequences" to messing with the weather. His point was that thus far there haven't been any, despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.
      - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
        > thus far there haven't been any [crazy consequences], despite centuries of human-driven weather changes. which obviously is not true, right?
    - adrianN 5y ago
      The only type of geoengineering I would endorse without much hesitation is sucking CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But I don't think that the weather system is sensitive enough that we can't try nudging it with measures that are easy to stop and whose effects only last a couple of years (e.g. injection sulphur into the atmosphere).
grapescheesee 5y ago
I see many issues with weather modicifation. I would love to see the coral reefs, and it starts a lot closer to the ground. Weather modicifation has been a dream military tool, with some unprecedented applications. They are as far away from saving the environment as you could get.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Everyone running a fossil fuel engine is engaged in their own little bit of weather modification...
  - macilacilove 5y ago
    Orders of magnitude should matter in an insightful conversation.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      The coral reefs are in trouble because of how many of those car engines there are. Each one is orders of magnitude smaller than this proposal, but together? I think that’s relevant in this case.
- Grimburger 5y ago
  > it starts a lot closer to the ground Climate change will harm coral at higher latitudes, at a slow enough rate they will migrate southwards, the rampant agricultural runoff will keep going regardless of the climate though and it has just as much a negative impact. Talking about fertilisers flowing into the reef and farmers causing much of the damage is a quick way into political suicide. It's not an easy issue to solve in a country with a 24 hour news cycle full of ever more outrage.
Grimburger 5y ago
Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted. Maybe just give us the benefit of the doubt here.
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago
  It's good to hear from an Australian that environmental policies like fire management and cloud seeding have made ecological disasters a thing of the past in your part of the world /s
  - ehnto 5y ago
    It was a lack of application of known fire management policies, due to reduced spending, that escalated the impact of the fires.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > Australia has been seeding clouds since the 1960's uninterrupted So... can we conclude yet that it does not work for saving the coral reef?
- sumedh 5y ago
  and yet most of the Australia is still a desert.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Can't tell if that comment is tongue in cheek, but the goal was never to change the desert. Cloud seeding is mostly used to supplement already arable land for crops and hydro power I think.
bathyspheric 5y ago
Why would coral culturing specialists like Madeleine van Oppen be the best at testing atmospheric alterations? Do you mean that the ultimate effects on the corals are important, rather than just a reduction of insolation?

bserge 5y ago

dr_dshiv 5y ago

My son is working on a school essay about cloud brightening and the great barrier reef. He is trying to understand why there is so much opposition to doing this research. Any hints or reasoned arguments to share?

rich_sasha 5y ago
I guess fuckups are potentially very bad and very hard to contain. Could be long-lived too.
pvaldes 5y ago
That would deprive him from the joy of finding the answer by himself. Learning critical thinking is a valuable skill for any child and this case is an easy example to try his wings in this sense.
- smokey_circles 5y ago
  Humans are a cooperative species. Seeking help and wisdom is part of the process. Nothing is being taken away or deprived here, and from what i can tell that's a hell of an overreach on such little context, unless you've caught something I missed?
- krsdcbl 5y ago
  Hard disagree. The suggestion that you should find an answer all by yourself through just thinking is a primer for unchallenged speculations. Asking someone is the very prerequisite to develop your ideas. Looking at data is an asynchronous way of asking someone. There is no critical thinking without exchange.
bathyspheric 5y ago
I would say that there is a lot of interest in some quarters for this sort of solution, as it might mean that we could save the GBR without curtailing the energy industry. I think resistance to these ideas might be related to dealing with the symptoms; high ocean temperatures, rather than the causes; human-induced climate change. I support science-based evaluation of all these ideas, but without ignoring or addressing potential causes.

DemocracyFTW 5y ago

Under the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, the government has yet to strengthen its climate pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement, as many nations have done in the past year. Morrison has personally ruled out committing to net-zero emissions. Pushing for a technological fix to global warming without moving to aggressively curb greenhouse gases is “sheer lunacy”, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison): The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia in last place for its climate policies and was the only country to score 0 for the same metric in 2021. During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Morrison dismissed suggestions of a link between Australia's emissions or policies and the intensity of the bushfires and initially downplayed the influence of climate change on the fires, but later admitted that climate change may have contributed. Morrison declined to set net-zero emissions or other climate change targets, unlike other world leaders. Morrison allegedly requested climate change policy targets be removed from a proposed 2021 Australia–United Kingdom trade deal and initially suggested he would not attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but later confirmed that he would. Morrison's government pledged that Australia would aim to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, but did not introduce this into national law; Morrison said he believed market forces and not government regulation can address climate change. His government's climate action plan has been criticised as "lightweight", "meaningless", and a "mockery" that contains "no policy or strategy whatsoever". Market forces, sure. How much CO2 is emitted by those boats with their high-powered water pumps? How much noise is injected into the water body when these vessels operate in numbers day in, day out? How many vessels and hours of operation will be needed to have a cooling effect? Where do the clouds, where does the water go once it is vaporized and left drifting? Come to think of it one could imagine to suck huge quantities of marine water to vaporize it and let it drift as clouds over land; thinking in the abstract, that could contribute to more shade, lower temperatures and more precipitation over hot and arid areas, thereby improving conditions for plants, animals, and humans. But, and this is a big one: how much energy will this need? How is that energy produced? How much water would one have to evaporate? What are the consequences for marine life? What are the consequences when the next government decides to cut funding? And what about the salt content of the aerosol, for certainly it will be utterly uneconomic to desalinate the water prior to spraying it? My hunch is that those figures won't work out and that artificial clouds over the Great Barrier Reef also won't work out. The reef is called great because it covers an area of ~344,400km², roughly the area of countries like Finland, Congo, Germany, or Japan. According to the USGS[1], the water in a cloud with a volume of 1km³ weighs about 500,000kg. A 1m thick cloud layer over said area has a volume of 344.400km³ if I'm not mistaken, so weighs around 172,200,000kg. So in order to work one would think it to be requisite to spray in the order of a hundred million kg of water like almost daily into the air from seagoing vessels. There's an almost constant wind over most of the oceans so low-faring clouds will disperse in a matter of minutes or hours; the clouds however would be most desperately needed around noon each day which complicates things. Perhaps one could move the ships to upwind locations each day so clouds generated in the afternoon and the night get a chance to drift over the reef. But imagine to do that for a country-size area: You'd need a fleet of tens or hundreds of thousands of not-so-small vessels. I cannot imagine photovoltaics to be a sufficient source of energy (for one, space is very limited on any vessel, and ironically, the vessel's reason for being there is to reduce impact of solar power). You'd need nuclear or hydrogen because otherwise you'd have to burn through untold tons of fossil fuels. At any rate, the waters will not be calm anymore. The noise of the evaporators and the propellers will be deafening in the air and in the sea. All told, a badly thought-out publicity stunt. [1] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/how-much-does-cloud-weigh https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

TedShiller 5y ago

PoignardAzur 5y ago
I'd really like it if we could avoid these kinds of flippant "look at how cynical I am, I know better than to trust these corporate stooges" answers that don't actually bring new or insightful argument (or in this case, any argument at all). We already get enough of those on reddit.
- darkhorse13 5y ago
  These "flippant" responses are the only acceptable reaction to this non-stop tomfoolery to be honest. And no, Reddit would upvote this link a billion times and gild it with awards on their "I love science" subreddits.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  [flagged]

bananapub 5y ago

Australia as a whole doesn't even believe climate change is happening or should be stopped, so...no.

ehnto 5y ago
I don't get that impression from the public, but it's clear the federal government isn't particularly interested in changing anything to help. It is nice to see some individual states giving it a crack, South Australia ran for one full week on renewables recently, and has fairly high renewable input in general. There are solar-hydrogen plants, desal plants and green-steel initiatives all underway as well. I can see a lot of good happening, albeit a bit late.

amosj 5y ago

"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky." [1] (note: I am absolutely for trying to save the great barrier reef, and I'm not qualified to judge the feasibility or consequences of this approach, so no moral or other judgement intended. If it can be made to work without breaking Earth production, I hope it gets merged) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEHSXL9UPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEHSXL9UPM

ehnto 5y ago
Unfortunately there is no staging environment, so we'd be doing it live!