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Did you read the article, it said it could make fresh water with minimum energy input, basically what you would do is pump seawater up a hill into a reservoir, and let water pressure push the water through the membrane so it comes our fresh out the bottom, the energy involved would be in pumping the water up the hill into a reservoir, maybe we can even use the tides to do this, the ocean level rises and falls with the tides. We could use the tides to fill a reservoir at high tide, and at low tide the water pressure would push the water through the membrane to create fresh water, we would need energy to push water uphill for irrigation projects anyway. It takes energy to pump water out of the ground from a well, maybe this is comparable to that, depending on how efficient the membrane is. The salt would ideally be pumped back into the ocean with the remaining salt water so it does not clog the filter.
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Osmotic pressure of sea water is around 400 psi. The pump must provide this pressure just to balance the tendency of the water to move towards the side with dissolved salt, from the fresh water side of the membrane. Then it must provide a lot more pressure to give a respectable flow of water out of the salty side to the fresh side. With a better membrane this latter part of the pump pressure may be reduced a bit, but there is an irreducible part of the pump pressure which depends only on the salt concentration. As the water flows through the membrane the salt concentration increases on the seawater side until the flow stops. before that happens the high pressure sea water is passed through a pressure recovery device to help pressurise the new sea water feed that replaces it. Membranes are subject to fouling and need cleaning. They also have a limited life and are expensive. A better membrane would be a good step forward.
If the pump pumps to an elevated reservoir that serves as a storage tank for pressurised water feed to the membrane, that reservoir must be more than about a thousand feet above the membrane assembly or the water pressure would have to be boosted by another pump. At that level a reservoir full of sea water would be a major threat to ground water reserves so that might not be so good.
Incidentally this process can be run backwards allowing power to be generated. There is work going on in Norway to develop this.
Sometimes articles are written or edited by journalists who have little idea about the process they are reporting on.
Last edited by elderflower (2017-04-04 08:51:29)
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Membrane separations are usually done well above 500 psi, as best I understand it. 1000 psi should be a pretty typical figure. That's over 433 feet of elevation change, if you use elevation to create the pressure. In most desalination plants, they just pump it to pressure against the membrane. There's quite a lot of strong brine by-product too. Somehow you have to dispose of that so it won't get sucked into your intake pipe, and without killing too much local life at the efflux point. Strong brines are pretty toxic. It can be done, but it does require careful thought not to shoot yourself in the foot.
Myself, I like the idea of vacuum-flash distillation, using some source of waste heat that you already otherwise have as the necessary heat source. For over a century, the Navy has done this using waste heat from ship's boilers, and just sailing away from the waste brine they dump. Carriers today can do this sitting in port. Not so sure about the smaller vessels. My direct knowledge of naval power systems is 4 decades obsolete.
There ought to be a way to add such a unit to every chemical plant on the coasts. They have plenty of waste heat.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-04-04 13:38:25)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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Membrane separations are usually done well above 500 psi, as best I understand it. 1000 psi should be a pretty typical figure. That's over 433 feet of elevation change, if you use elevation to create the pressure. In most desalination plants, they just pump it to pressure against the membrane. There's quite a lot of strong brine by-product too. Somehow you have to dispose of that so it won't get sucked into your intake pipe, and without killing too much local life at the efflux point. Strong brines are pretty toxic. It can be done, but it does require careful thought not to shoot yourself in the foot.
Myself, I like the idea of vacuum-flash distillation, using some source of waste heat that you already otherwise have as the necessary heat source. For over a century, the Navy has done this using waste heat from ship's boilers, and just sailing away from the waste brine they dump. Carriers today can do this sitting in port. Not so sure about the smaller vessels. My direct knowledge of naval power systems is 4 decades obsolete.
There ought to be a way to add such a unit to every chemical plant on the coasts. They have plenty of waste heat.
GW
433 feet isn't too bad, this is what I would do, build a dam that is 433 feet high, pump some seawater into it from a nearby ocean, place the filter at a pipe at the bottom of the dam, for every two gallons that is pumped behind the dam, one gallon passes through the filter and the other gallon is poured back into the sea, the sea dilutes the salt concentration back to its normal value and more seawater is pumped behind the damn. Since the reservoir is so huge, the difference between the seawater pumped in and the seawater spilled out is very small and does not effect the local ecology. By continually passing seawater through the reservoir, you are keeping the salt concentration approximately the same as the ocean, only about 50% of the water that goes in gets filtered eventually, the other 50% is spilled back into the ocean to be replaced with more ocean water. windmills, solar, or perhaps even the tides can power the water pump. The power source does not need to be constant.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-04-06 09:01:25)
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If you have the pump to produce 1000 psi, why bother building the reservoir? Steel pipe plumbing is easier and cheaper than building dams. Just pump against the membrane.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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A dam is also a means of storing energy through gravitational potential, you can use renewable sources of energy to fill a dam, such as solar, wind, the tides, if you use just a pump, you will need a constant supply of energy, so that eliminates solar, wind, and the tides as a means of producing this power. Water availability needs to be 24/7. A reservoir is a means of providing a constant supply of fresh water. In the desert, solar, wind, and tides are available assuming the desert abuts an ocean. You can use the desert as farmland if you irrigate it with desalinated water.
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There is a huge difference between low and high pressure systems: the kinds of equipment and materials, and the design practices, are different as night and day. Systems associated with most (not all) reservoirs are low pressure systems (under 100 psi), which is ordinary water system piping and components. Systems associated with desalination membranes are high-pressure systems (over 500 psi). That stuff is pretty much the same as steam equipment: very much heavier, stronger, and expensive.
As for powering pumps, by far most pumps today are run by electric motors. Electricity is easily made from wind and solar, not so easily yet by tides. The intermittent nature of supply is easily overcome with battery storage, especially in combination with a grid backup connection. AC/DC conversion is quite efficient these days.
Pumping liquids is easier and far more energetically efficient than compressing gases, even at very high pressures, precisely because of the near-incompressibility of the liquids. Usually, the compression method of choice at high pressures is some sort of positive-displacement pump, while a dynamic item like a centrifugal pump is appropriate at rather low pressures.
If you need a source of irrigation water (a very low-pressure application), or a city water supply (still low pressure at under 100 psi), or a modest amount of water-turbine electricity generation (under 100 feet of head = 43 psi), then a reservoir is a good choice, given adequate geography! It is the right choice when you do not have to build too-high or too-long a dam to impound the water. Both too-high and too-long very quickly make projects financially infeasible. That is why site geography rules the selection.
There are definite limits to what we know how to do reliably, and a dam no more than about a 1000 feet high between two closely-spaced solid (!) rock cliffs is about the max supportable with reinforced concrete technology. Earth fill dams are never anywhere near that tall, and for very good technical reasons (they cannot hold), although they can be a few miles long.
That's not to say we won't have better methods available in the coming centuries. But we do not have them now, or at any time in the near forseeable future.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-04-07 09:43:58)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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A reservoir could have a bottom that is lower than the bottom of the dam, you could put a pipe and intake at the bottom of that body of water, and have the pipe end up some place even lower for added water pressure. One possible place they could build such a dam would be the Mediterranean Sea.
Problem is that people live on the shore of this sea, but you could irrigate the Sahara desert with the resulting fresh water.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-04-07 11:06:16)
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Tom, the bottom of the Mediterranean is hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface of the Sahara. There's no outflow from your membrane that does not require pumping, because there is no deeper hole yet, and if there was, it has finite volume.
If I have to pump anyway, why on God's green Earth would I be building all these dams and other infrastructure just to achieve high hydrostatic pressure across a desalination membrane? Why do all of that, when I can just pump up across a membrane in a conventional plant?
From the surface, it's just not that much more pumping to send the fresh water product where it is needed (a few hundred feet at most). Exactly that is already underway in Saudi Arabia and some other countries in the region. It works, and has for some years now.
You seem so wedded to a totally impractical notion. Why do it the hard way when we already have far, far easier ways? Where is your common sense?
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-04-07 12:18:57)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) is an ancient lake in the northwest of the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt. In prehistory, it was a freshwater lake, with an area estimated to vary between 1,270 km² (490 mi²) and 1,700 km² (656 mi²).
It persists today as a smaller saltwater lake called Birket Qarun. The lake's surface is 43 m (140 ft) below sea-level, and covers about 202 square kilometres (78 sq mi).
Years ago I did a calculation for reverse osmosis desalination. I looked up total water drop from the Mediterranean to this lake, and alternately water drop from the Nile river to this lake. No matter what the route, water pressure from change of elevation alone was not enough for desalination. And this is the lowest spot you'll find in the Sahara.
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Vacuum flash distillation effectively uses a free source of energy. A large nuclear reactor (1200MWe) could yield about 2.5 tonnes of fresh water per second. That's enough for 2 million people at a consumption level of 100 litres per day. Waste water can then be recycled to supply crops with the water they need.
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Graphene sieve turns seawater into drinking water
2025 the UN expects that 14% of the world's population will encounter water scarcity.
The trouble with nuclear is the waste heat which is why we are where we are in the first place as the earth is warming as we can see it from the ice.
Power as Antius noted must be a free energy source to allow for it to make the best of vacuum distallation. The solar heat can be used to do some of the distallation via the evaporation method especially along the african coast near the desert area.
The chamber once unloaded from each cycle can be processed and seperated into the minerals which can be used in other processes.
While this one installation design can deliver all water its not necessarily the best option as we need to deliver that water to a large area of use so designing each unit to cover a portion of the area makes what we do locally have less impact on the environment as well.
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Waste heat-powered vacuum flash is something I recommend as well. Pick some facility like a power plant in a suitable location near a saltwater source, and use its waste heat to produce fresh water from salt water, as a secondary product. The more facilities you add this feature to, the more fresh water you can make.
Any facility with waste heat will do. Power plant, chemical refinery, factory, steel mill, whatever.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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The Sun generates more waste heat than a nuclear reactor.
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Tom, you need to know more about something than just its name or a gross overall number, in order to make a practical suggestion.
The entire Earth intercepts 1 part in 2 billion of the sun's radiant energy. That tiny piece is spread out pretty dilute over the sunlit side. At 30 N near solar noon on a sunny summer day, the radiant energy flux is ~ 1 HP/sq. yd. Less under other circumstances.
Solar thermal panels without concentrators will heat water to at most ~ 180 F, pretty close to zero flow, and a lot cooler than than with significant flow rates (enough to transfer useful quantities). Sorry, but that's just too dilute and too low a grade of heat to do high-rate vacuum flash. And it is intermittent.
Rather than try to band-aid it with concentrators that track the sun, and all the support gear needed to do that, why not just use higher grade waste heat from facilities you already possess that were already built for other purposes? Heat from things like exhaust stacks and steam condensers is available at ~ 300 F. Gobs of it. Available 24/7, year-round, too.
Instead of building a new single-purpose plant, just add a pump, a membrane tank, salt water influx pipe, concentrated brine efflux pipe, and freshwater product piping to an existing facility.
That's just plain common sense. Not to mention better economics.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-04-08 21:06:34)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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The trouble with nuclear is the waste heat which is why we are where we are in the first place as the earth is warming as we can see it from the ice.
* The Topaz Solar Farm, one of the largest PV arrays in the US of A, produces 550MWe, cost $2.5B, covers 25km^2, and doesn't produce a single kWh of electricity at night from its PV arrays. Coal or gas provides power for the other 16 hours of the day.
* A 550MWe molten salt reactor (MSR) core would fit within a 10m^2 area, and two units would easily fit within a 100m^2 area. The reactors would produce electricity 24/7/365. Even if it cost $2.5B - and according to Transatomic Power Corporation (TPC) it probably would, then at least it's producing electricity 24/7 using .1km^2 vs 25km^2 of land area for the power plant.
* The Sun delivers 1kW/m^2 at sea level on a cloudless day. The average power density of the TPC molten salt reactor is ~82MW/m^3 using 5% LEU, not Th or HEU, so we already have the nuclear fuel in our supply chain. It would produce approximately 50% of the radioactive waste that a PWR produces. The fuel is Uranium dissolved into molten salt, so there would be no soon-to-be radioactive cladding materials to dispose of.
Power as Antius noted must be a free energy source to allow for it to make the best of vacuum distallation. The solar heat can be used to do some of the distallation via the evaporation method especially along the african coast near the desert area.
How many thousands of square kilometers will be devoted to this solar sea water distillation to provide drinking water to more than a billion people?
If you decide to put these plants offshore, do you have any idea how expensive it would be just to construct the platforms, never mind the constant maintenance required?
The chamber once unloaded from each cycle can be processed and seperated into the minerals which can be used in other processes.
Alternatively, we could use the most compact and powerful heat engines known to man. Presently, that'd be nuclear fission reactors. Although our Sun is the single most powerful heat engine on Earth, the collection area is gargantuan, using present conversion technologies, for utility grade applications. You can see Topaz Solar Farm from space.
Alpha Laval High Efficiency Evaporator
* Corrosion resistant Titanium construction for critical components
* 95% up-time
* Can run at 30% to 100% rated capacity to contend with changing demand patterns
MEP-6-1000:
2.5m vessel
1,000m^3/24h capacity
1.3kWh/m^3 to 3.9kWh/m^3/24h electrical = 3.9MWe/24h per day
128kWh/m^3 to 385kWh/m^3/24h thermal = 385MWt/24h per day
1m^3 = 264.172 US gallons or 264,172 gallons per MEP-6-1000 flash evaporator unit per day
5 gallons / person / day = 52,834 people served per day (Americans use an average of 176, but we're just trying to keep people breathing)
1,000,000,000 / 52,834 = 18,927 1,000m^3/24h capacity units
Alfa Laval can supply 7,000m^3/24h units, so a minimum of 2,703 units
73,815MWe required for 24/7/365 operation
That's 74 1000MWe nuclear reactors, each of which produces 4.8t of waste per year, or 710.4t of radioactive waste per year, using 5% LEU. The Thorium reactors can actually use a good percentage of the tonnage of that radioactive waste for fuel. Assuming each site has 3 reactors, that's 25 sites requiring 7.5km^3.
For Cadmium Telluride PV arrays, 1,850km^3 (slightly less than half way between Rhode Island and Delaware in total area) worth of solar panels to just provide the electricity required for 8 hours per day. We haven't touched on the thermal requirements yet or the other 16 hours of the day when our flash evaporators still need to run to make drinking water. The solar molten salt plants to generate the thermal requirement are substantially smaller, but still far substantially larger than molten salt nuclear plants, so hundreds more square kilometers required for the thermal plants. Basically, a land area the size of Delaware would be required to provide for the electrical and thermal requirements, assuming coal or gas pick up the slack. We haven't even touched on the pumping requirements, either.
While this one installation design can deliver all water its not necessarily the best option as we need to deliver that water to a large area of use so designing each unit to cover a portion of the area makes what we do locally have less impact on the environment as well.
Not necessarily the best option? You weren't kidding about that. Shevchenko's BN-350 sodium cooled fast reactor provided 120,000m^3 (31,700,640 US gallons) of fresh water per day when it was in operation along with ~150MWe to the city it serviced. That's enough to supply 5 gallons to 6,340,128 people. 158 such units would be required to supply 1,000,000,000 people with fresh water.
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These are the words being used for the political reversal of climate change that "global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt the U.S. economy, signed an executive order last week that aims to roll back Obama-era policies regulating carbon emissions."
Then why would the Chinese government recently canceled construction of more than 100 new coal-fired power plants and plans to invest at least $360 billion in green energy projects by 2020. It is a building boom expected to create an estimated 13 million jobs. China already leads the world in total installed solar and wind capacity.
The Paris climate accord signed by nearly 200 nations, the 2014 agreement calls for holding global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in hopes of preventing devastating droughts, storms and sea level rise.
The burning of dirty coal causes from the previous list a lot of damage...
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These are the words being used for the political reversal of climate change that "global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt the U.S. economy, signed an executive order last week that aims to roll back Obama-era policies regulating carbon emissions."
Then why would the Chinese government recently canceled construction of more than 100 new coal-fired power plants and plans to invest at least $360 billion in green energy projects by 2020. It is a building boom expected to create an estimated 13 million jobs. China already leads the world in total installed solar and wind capacity.
The Paris climate accord signed by nearly 200 nations, the 2014 agreement calls for holding global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in hopes of preventing devastating droughts, storms and sea level rise.
The burning of dirty coal causes from the previous list a lot of damage...
You realize that no treaty has the force of law unless approved by the US Senate? By the way, making something more expensive doesn't create more jobs. Solar power either comes in on it own without subsidy and creates those jobs by itself, or if it requires subsidy to exit, it will cost jobs Government regulation has never created a single net job, it always cots more jobs than it creates, as the jobs created are for regulatory compliance and do not add value to the consumer. Why should coal miners in Appalachia care about those people living on the coast, the coal miners live way above sea level, global warming will never threaten them, yet you are asking them to give up their jobs so that people on the coast will not have their homes flooded.
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Wrong as usual as the executive orders have remove regulations that dictate that corporate greed will take over and those miners lifes will end quicker than if they had been left in place.
We have also talked about the subsidizes to which all of them can end including for oil, gas ect not just solar.
The regulations were put in place to slow the death rate not only for the miners but also the general population which is being pushed along by the bad air which will now happen by the relaxed regulations...
All in the name of greed...
Coal: The World’s Deadliest Source Of Energy
2009 report by Physicians for Social Responsibility, coal contributes to “four of the five leading causes of mortality in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.” The American Lung Association pegs the death rate from coal pollution at about 13,000 per year in the United States.
Estimates for deaths caused by air pollution across the globe are harder to come by, but are likely orders of magnitude higher.
Mortality Rates Among Coal Miners
As of February 11, 2016, this MSHA homepage is no longer being maintained. Visit the new MSHA homepage here.
https://arlweb.msha.gov/MSHAINFO/FactSh … hafct2.htm
Polluted air causes 5.5 million deaths a year new research says
Study Links 6.5 Million Deaths Each Year to Air Pollution
China Faces More Air Pollution Deaths
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SpaceNut,
How many more people would die every year if they didn't have drinking water, food available for reasonable prices, or vehicles to transport them to work to make money to buy food / live indoors / etc?
If you can't figure out what the answer to that question is, then you might want to look at how a lot of people in Africa live- or don't, sadly, as is often the case.
If we decided to stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, how many more people do you think would be dead because there was no clean drinking water, food, or heat available?
Using fossil fuels comes with undesirable consequences, but so does living like a lot of people in Africa. They have little coal or gas and no money for multi-billion dollar solar and wind farms. We're not using electric or hydrogen powered cars because the technology isn't ready to supplant gasoline and diesel. We're not using solar panels and wind farms to supplant coal, natural gas, and nuclear because the sun doesn't shine for at least 12 hours of the day and the wind doesn't continuously blow in most parts of the world.
You want to "slow the death rate" amongst coal miners by leaving them unemployed and making them wards of the state? Look no further than Chicago to see how well that's worked out. All magical thinking aside, what would you do with our coal miners? Do you have any actual solutions? Most of us here are fully aware of the problems.
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To be fair, Americans use a lot more energy than they have to. Coal only supplies a third of US electricity - were Americans to adopt a more Old World lifestyles (not necessarily Continental - it has a large English heritage to draw upon in the design of efficient small towns connected by rail), it would be able to get by on far less energy without having a lower quality of life. England is not an unpleasant place to live, and neither is Switzerland - the latter, with it's decentralised political system and high gun ownership rate, should appeal to Americans I think (if they copy it, I hope they also copy the chocolate...).
Use what is abundant and build to last
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England is more crowded than the United States of America. A lot of Americans like open spaces, they like lots of wildlife, if we were to all move closer to the cities towards available rail lines, we'd lose all that including our 1 acre plots, our standard of living would go down as the price of real estate near rail lines skyrocketed, and we'd all queue up to pack the commuter trains to go to the city. We'd have to go shopping one grocery bag at a time, as that is all we can carry onboard the train. All this packed living makes us more vulnerable to terrorism and nuclear war by the way!
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Lolwut. Why would you be taking the train to go shopping.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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not just the miners death rate but also all of the people that would be effected by the pollution of burning the dirty coal as well....That second group of people health cost are through the roof and so are the levels of disability payments due to this one source....
Today we experienced temperature around 84 F in early spring where temperatures are normally in the 60's and wet for the season....so we have and are experiencing climate change....
Here is just one area that could be of great concern as the temperatures rise....
Sudden Outburst Of A Rare Parasitic Infection Blamed On Climate Change
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not just the miners death rate but also all of the people that would be effected by the pollution of burning the dirty coal as well....That second group of people health cost are through the roof and so are the levels of disability payments due to this one source....
Today we experienced temperature around 84 F in early spring where temperatures are normally in the 60's and wet for the season....so we have and are experiencing climate change....
Here is just one area that could be of great concern as the temperatures rise....
Sudden Outburst Of A Rare Parasitic Infection Blamed On Climate Change
No actually that is called weather, weather is highly variable, you have some highs and some lows. You can't really expect every day to be average, and a single say's high temperature is no indicator of global warming. I think we should just roll with it, rather than attempt to engineer the World's climate as we don't know how! I made a few outrageous proposals on how we might engineer the World's climate, you thought they were unrealistic an unfeasible. I pointed out that we could start shoveling dirt today in Antarctica, that would be the equivalent of cutting out carbon emissions in hopes of affecting global climate in the future.
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