Cloud seeding

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 03:47:24

CBC Radio: We've been cloud seeding for decades, but now we finally know it works

The team of researchers were testing cloud seeding, a technology designed in 1946 by chemist Vincent Schaefer, which involves infusing clouds with particles to turn lightweight water droplets into heavy droplets of rain or snow. Cloud seeding is used as a part of weather modification programs in countries around the world to attempt to do things like steering precipitation to drought-prone areas, or to enhance snowpack on ski hills. In Canada, it's often used to try to lessen the impact of hailstorms.
But the problem is that until now, scientists hadn't come up with a way to prove that cloud seeding actually worked outside of the lab.
"We had difficulties distinguishing what is generated naturally and what is generated by humans," said Friedrich, an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
This is the first time that scientists have definitively been able to accurately measure the amount of snow produced through cloud seeding. The researchers published their findings in the journal PNAS.

For years now people have claimed aircraft produce chem-trails. This is what it's for. One issue is whether this is safe. Spraying silver iodide into clouds as seeds to form snow? That means the snow is contaminated with silver iodide. The webpage includes an audio interview with the scientist who says this has also been done with dry ice. I think dry ice would be far safer. In the radio interview, the interviewer suggested sticking your tough out to catch snowflakes that you yourself created, but the research said you may not want to do that because of the silver.

Another issue with cloud seeding is control. In the past cloud seeding has produced some rain, but produces even more rain many miles downwind. The first rain is relatively controlled, but further rain is not. This study measured rain where they wanted it, to prove that cloud seeding actually worked. And as the article points out, causing rain in one area results in less rain downwind. And as I just wrote, downwind of that it produces more precipitation, but that secondary precipitation can be random areas and random amount of rain. When I say "random" it's actually dependent on local environmental conditions: amount of evaporation that adds moisture to the air, temperature and wind. Total effects of cloud seeding are not very controlled at all, and this study didn't even look at secondary effects.

As the article says, cloud seeding to cause snow in Alberta may cause drought in Saskatchewan. Cloud seeding is currently done, one reason is insurance companies want to cause precipitation in one area to prevent hail on a city where the companies has clients.

tahanson43206 · 2021-12-11 07:18:17

For RobertDyck re new topic ...

Best wishes for success!

SearchTerm:Cloud seeding research on

It seems that warmer air can transport more water vapor than less warm air, other conditions being the same.

If predictions of Global Warming are accurate, it would seem reasonable (to me at least) to suppose that more water will be picked up from the oceans and transported around the world.

A knowledge of practical techniques to cause water to precipitate where it is needed, and not where it is NOT needed, would seem valuable.

While your topic is about "cloud seeding" I hope there is room for gathering of information about heat management in an atmosphere.

It would seem useful to be able to remove thermal energy from air laden with moisture, so that conditions improve for precipitation.

It is well known how to add thermal energy to air, if there is water vapor present, using radio frequency energy.

It is possible there is a comparable aspect of the Laws of Nature that can allow removal of thermal energy using an electromagnetic field.

However, if such a capability exists, it is not well publicized.

The post mentions use of dry ice for cloud seeding.

The delivery of dry ice to warm vapor laden air would seem to be a technique for reducing thermal energy of the air, at the expense of elevating the thermal energy of the CO2, which would then be a part of the air mass.

If another gas were delivered to the atmosphere in a state of reduced energy, perhaps the desired physical effect might be observed without the addition of an unwanted gas into the mix. For example, if liquid Nitrogen were sprayed in the volume of air to be treated, would precipitation occur?

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2021-12-11 07:47:20

This forum includes members who can address the question I would like to pose.

This question is derived from and inspired by the closing line in the post that opens this new topic... reference to insurance companies and their interest in spending money up front, to avoid severe loss later ...

Given that hurricanes are a part of the weather pattern on Earth, and given that hurricanes are fed by solar energy stored in oceans, if liquid air were delivered into a hurricane at some suitable location, could the intensity of the hurricane be reduced?

Could the path of the hurricane be altered so it stays over the open ocean (ie, Atlantic for hurricanes or Pacific for typhoons)?

(th)

Void · 2021-12-11 11:29:15

Cloud Seeding may well be a terraform technique for Mars.

Materials exist both on Mars and it's Moons.

Seeds naturally exist, but may not get that high in the atmosphere.

High clouds have been said to have possibly made Mars more warm in the past.

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/planetary_news … arly-mars/
Quote:

High-Altitude Clouds May Have Warmed Early Mars

Water has a tendency to be super cooled unless it has a small material to condense on. The Mars atmosphere may be rather thin to get those dust motes up high enough, but it may be possible to dump them off of Phobos and Deimos. Maybe that even becomes a toroidal dust cloud that generates a magnetic field, as has also been proposed.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2021-12-11 11:32:53)

SpaceNut · 2021-12-11 13:21:29

The cloud seeding was talked about in other topics and its not just about the moisture in the air for it to attract and concentrate around but temperature as well. Since the dust from the Sahara is seen quite easily and if it was higher in the air it would attract that moisture to seed rain.

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 16:49:16

Tom,
You mentioned global warming. I again have to point out that global warming is real but has been grossly oversimplified and grossly exaggerated. The first action to deal with global warming on Earth is to accept reality.

Coal burning by industry spewing smoke through tall concrete smoke stacks created an updraft so strong that the soot was delivered to the stratosphere. People in the 1800s didn't know about the stratosphere but we do now. It doesn't mix well with the troposphere, which is the lower layer of the atmosphere, where we.live. Once pollution gets in the stratosphere it's very hard to get out. Basically all we can do is stop adding more and hope it settles out naturally. In 1970 legislation was passed to control pollution from coal burning. There were previous attempts but in 1970 it was effective and enforced, and in all developed countries. So we stopped adding pollution. The stratosphere started cooling as soot settled out. It was measured starting in 1990. Surface temperatures over land warmed naturally from 1550 thru 1855, but cooled from the summer of 1855 through the summer of 1970. There were spikes of global warming during both World Wars, but in both cases as soon as the war was over it dropped back. Not just to what it was before the war but to what it would have been if global temperature had continued to cool during that time. So there was no persistent effect to global e from the wars. When Mount Penetubo erupted there was brief warming in the stratosphere, but when the volcanic ash settled the concentration of soot from coal burning had significantly dropped. And stratosphere temperature dropped accordingly. When that Icelandic volcano erupted it happened again. Mount St Helens erupted before technology to measure y stratosphere, but there's no reason to believe it was any different. This was mother nature cleaning up our mess. The last of the soot from coal burning was gone out of the stratosphere in the summer of 2010. And the temperature of the stratosphere stabilized at exactly the same time.

Meanwhile as the stratosphere cooled, surface over land warmed. Rapidly. At the end of 1998 the rapid global warming stopped. Warming didn't completely stop, but slowed so much that scientists argued with eachother whether remaining warming was all due to nature or whether some is due to human activity. In 2010 most agreed some is still due to humans. But CO2 levels continued to rise. There was no correlation between CO2 and global temperature, so scientists concluded the theory that CO2 controls global warming has been dismissed. That means scientists consider it wrong. But activists and beaurocrats don't want to give it up.

If you chart global warming from 1550 to 1855, and assume that if humans hadn't screwed with it, temperature at the end of 1998 would have been exactly the same as what it actually was. That's exactly the point when rapid global warming stopped. So the rapid global warming was actually the planet recovering back to its natural temperature. Cooling required 115 years, it recovered in 28 1/2, so the warming appeared fast. But that doesn't change the fact temperature today is what it's supposed to be.

A lot of people today think the temperature of the mid-20th century was normal. But it wasn't. And infrastructure has been built assuming mid-20th century climate. We're going to have to adjust infrastructure for the actual real climate.

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 17:53:16

I should point out some scientists point out hundreds of thousands of years ago the Earth was warmer. Both poles melted and Canada's northern territories had tropical rain forest. That doesn't sound so bad to me, but equitorial locations were dangerously hot. High natural carbon emissions caused that, and today's annual carbon emissions are 5 times what they were then. But building up enough CO2 to do that took thousands of years. Even at today's rate it would take centuries to do that. We have time we don't need to sabotage the economy. We don't need net Zero carbon by 2050. That's the stated goal of Canada's current Prime Minister.

tahanson43206 · 2021-12-11 18:19:01

For RobertDyck ...

Thank you for your (implied) suggestion to forum readers (such as tahanson43206) to learn about the influence of soot and similar aerosols on temperature.

There appears to be a great deal of information available.

Below is a set of snippets provided by Google in answer to a query:

Greenhouse gases lead to warming of the atmosphere due to absorption of infrared (not visible) radiation. Atmospheric aerosol (solid and liquid) particles lead to atmospheric cooling due to reflection back to space of visible solar radiation.
Soot Leads to both Warming and Cooling of Regional Climatehttps://meteor.geol.iastate.edu › acid › blackcarbon
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What effect does soot have on the atmosphere?
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Clouds of self-levitating soot might help halt global warminghttps://www.space.com › self-levitating-soot-geoengineeri...
A new geoengineering method relying on clouds of soot and sun-reflecting ... high into the atmosphere can temporarily cool down the planet.
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The underestimated cooling effect on the planet from historic ...https://www.sciencedaily.com › releases › 2018/08
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Global Warming from Soot - News and blogshttp://blogs.edf.org › 2007/07/19 › soot_and_gw
Jul 19, 2007 — Atmospheric soot also contributes to global dimming, which cools the Earth by screening out the Sun, but its heat-retaining effect is stronger.
Soot particles influence global warming more than previously ...https://phys.org › Earth › Earth Sciences
Oct 29, 2020 — In the atmosphere, soot particles also have an indirect effect on the ... cloud top cooling causing more dry air being mixed in from above.
The Damaging Effects of Black Carbon - State of the Planethttps://news.climate.columbia.edu › 2016/03/22 › the-d...
Mar 22, 2016 — A major constituent of soot, black carbon is the most solar ... that reflect sunlight and cool the atmosphere, scientists do not know ...
Where there's smoke or smog, there's climate changehttps://www.washington.edu › news › 2013/01/15 › int...
Jan 15, 2013 — In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon ... in ways that can have either a cooling or warming impact.
Climate Impact of Soot Is Exaggerated, Study Sayshttps://www.climatecentral.org › news › study-climate-i...
Sep 27, 2014 — “We found a quite strong negative [warming] effect, a cooling effect which partly counteracts the warming caused by the black carbon itself,” ...
NASA Finds Soot has Impact on Global Climatehttps://www.giss.nasa.gov › research › news
May 13, 2003 — Since soot is black, it absorbs heat and causes warming. Sulfate aerosols are white, reflect sunlight, and cause cooling.
Aerosols and Incoming Sunlight (Direct Effects) - NASA Earth ...https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov › Aerosols › page3
Nov 2, 2010 — Tiny aerosol particles can be found over oceans, deserts, mountains, ... Maps of atmospheric heating and surface cooling caused by man-made ...

It would appear that a number of folks have dedicated significant parts of their lives to trying to understand this aspect of the behavior of the atmosphere of Earth.

If one of those learned persons had time to review the information you have presented, the result might be interesting.

I am not in a position to evaluate your statements, regrettably, but happily (unless you delete them) they will be available for some future investigator to ponder.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-12-11 18:21:10

Well with a long tornado trail hitting down yesterday and prediction of future weather being warmer we can expect things to not improve.
I had rain today when it should have been snowing..
Of course the jet stream as a lot to due with this direction of weather pattern.

Heat wave poised to ensure parts of U.S. see their warmest December on record 4f804861d374cce3e35a5f07ae041289

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 18:35:42

One cause of global cooling was reduced hurricanes. They're powered by temperature difference between surface of the ocean and bottom of the stratosphere where it touches the troposphere. Top of hurricanes is the boundary layer between troposphere and stratosphere. Greater then temperature difference, more energy available. Warming the stratosphere and cooling the surface of the Earth, reduced energy available. Cooling occured mostly on land but the sea was cooled somewhat as well. Removing the soot allowed the stratosphere to cool, and the surface over land warmed. The surface over sea warmed too, but not as dramatically because it hadn't cooled as dramatically. Ironically, removing the pollution meant more hurricanes. The total number of tropical storms per year remains the same, but the proportion of those storms that intensify to become hurricanes has increased. Today vs mid-20th century we have more hurricanes, larger in terms of miles (or km) diameter, and stronger in terms of wind speed. That's caused by cleaning up pollution from the stratosphere, not carbon emissions. So how many hurricanes were there per year in the first half of the 1800s? Before the industrial revolution of 1855? I suspect it was the same as today. But without satellite imagery, photographs, or even weather stations with anemometers (wind speed measurement), how do we confirm that?

Ps. I lived in a suburb of Richmond Virginia in 1996. There was a hurricane. We were fairly far inland so didn't get the full force. In 1999/2000 I lived in Miami; we got 2 hurricanes.

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 18:37:22

canada-has-594-7-billion-trees-canada-produces-559-megatonnes-of-49877593.png

SpaceNut · 2021-12-11 18:44:48

ever greens, no trees with leaves...

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 19:19:53

Canada has several ecozones. Winnipeg is in the Prairies but very close to Boreal Shield.

Plants
Jack Pine
Trembling Aspen
Balsam Fir
Black Ash
Mountain Maple
High Bush-cranberry
Baneberry
Wild Sarsaparilla
Bunchberry
Moss
Shield Fern
Sedge
White Spruce
Black Spruce
White Birch
Goldenrod
Blueberry
Speckled Alder
Labrador Tea
Willow
Water Lilies
Cattails
Pin Cherry
Tamarack

SpaceNut · 2021-12-11 19:55:24

That map of the biomes (Terrestrial Ecozones of Canada) shows that we are going to need many of them on Mars

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 20:04:39

If global warming follows the pattern of the same pattern as past interglacial periods, the peak with be 6°C above the pre-industrial temperature. However, the good news is that peak is not supposed to arrive for another 2,000 years. In geological terms that's quite soon; in terms of a human lifespan it's really not. Earth's climate is never static, it's always dynamic. We are still warming out of the last ice age. Long term we can expect 2,000 years of natural global warming, followed by roughly 7,000 years of global cooling. Then the next ice age starts.

My point is the goal of the Paris Climate Accord to limit global warming to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial temperature is naive. The accord was written by politicians who are not scientists, and don't understand the science. They assumed all climate change is caused by humans, and simply reducing industrial emissions will stop all climate change. The basic assumptions are all wrong.

RobertDyck · 2021-12-11 20:41:18

SpaceNut: Yea. I have the textbook "Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments" written by Martin Fogg. It was expensive when I bought it; it's even more expensive now. The author is a friend on Facebook. He tells me he won't write another. Dr. Chris McKay gave him a lecture about planetary protection. The chapter on Mars emphasized the paper written by Dr. Chris McKay et al. That paper talked about super greenhouse gasses and how to deliberately release them into the atmosphere of Mars to warm the planet. I wrote a post on NewMars somewhere to estimate how quickly we could do that. Assuming we build 10 sites on Mars to mine fluorine minerals, and assuming an output equal to ore processors in the Alberta tar sands, and assuming 4 ore processors per site, and assuming continuous operation 24/7 (or 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35.244 seconds per Mars solar day), and assuming a chemical factory produces super greenhouse gasses, then it would take 13 Earth years to produce all the greenhouse gasses needed. Then you have to wait. Those gasses act as a blanket to trap heat in. You still have to wait for the Sun to deliver heat. So the planet will gradually warm, and as it does so dry ice will undergo phase change to CO2 gas. That phase change will consume some heat. Once all dry ice on the planet, including adsorbed into deep Martian dirt, has been sublimated, then the planet will have sufficient pressure to walk on the surface without a spacesuit. It will still be a CO2 atmosphere, so you will still have to wear an oxygen mask. But that's a lot better than a spacesuit.

Once the planet has a substantial atmosphere, plants can grow. Further warming will melt water ice. This will create a water cycle with rain. Water, atmosphere, dirt and sunlight are the requirements for plants.

I also presented at a Mars Society convention about artificial bogs. My friend Bruce Mackenzie suggested calling them Dyckian bogs, named after me. The idea is to create a Manitoba peat bog, but speed up the process. Grind rocks and if necessary bedrock to create a layer of rock flour 2 metres deep. Periodically cut a pit into the bedrock, and lay a slow sand filter in each pit. The purpose is to draw water from the bottom of the bog, pump it to the surface. The slow sand filter will prevent the rock flour from clogging the pump. Plant peat, which is sphagnum moss and a variety of cyanobacteria. Sphagnum moss releases strong acid which breaks down igneous rock, releasing nutrients. Cyanobacteria fixes nitrogen from air producing nitrate in the water. Each produces nutrients the other needs. Moss also acts as a sponge to hold rain water, so this works in an area where the only water source is rain. Sphagnum moss like most plants requires a certain concentration of oxygen in the air. However, cyanobacteria does not. A plastic sheet across the surface could hold in oxygen, producing the necessary concentration for sphagnum moss. Not sealing the edges of the plastic allows rain to enter. It also means oxygen will leak out. That's Ok, we want oxygen in Mars atmosphere. Acid will convert ground rock into clay, releasing calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium.

I tried an experiment in an aquarium using a bag of rock flour that I purchased from a garden centre. And a sample of live top moss from a company that makes packaged peat moss. It worked at first, but the acid released so much lime that the water quickly changed from acid to alkali. So we will have to actively remove lime from the water. That lime will have to be saved, because when we're finished the lime will have to be added back to neutralize pH of the soil. A peat bog has such strong acid that most food crops cannot grow.

Loess mixed with clay and peat makes the best soil for agriculture. Loess is rock ground by glaciers. Rock flour is basically the same. The reason for 2 metre depth is wheat requires that soil depth. Other food crops require 2 metre or less.

Once conversion is well underway, we could slow the process by reducing bog pH. Still strong acid, enough to convert rock to clay, but mild enough for black spruce. A black spruce forest can grow in a peat bog. Trees will produce a lot of oxygen. And certain berries can also grow there: blueberry, raspberry, wild strawberry, saskatoon berry (aka Juneberry), cranberry, huckleberry, sarsaparilla (for root beer), lingonberry (aka cowberry, partridgeberry, mountain cranberry or foxberry), and cloudberry.

kbd512 · 2021-12-11 21:23:01

Where can I find a textbook defining how many parts per million of CO2 is ideal for maintaining our present environment?

What is the proper level of CO2 that humanity should maintain in Earth's atmosphere and is it remotely technologically feasible to maintain that level?

Is it 250ppm, or 300ppm, or some other value?

How much is "not enough" and how much is "too much"?

SpaceNut · 2021-12-11 21:38:39

Co2 is not the only number as we can have local numbers greater while others are less so its more of an average.

I put in the quest as you wrote it and
https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/201 … m-is-safe/
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the- … it-matters

Some 500 million years ago, when the number of living things in the oceans exploded and creatures first stepped on land, the ancient atmosphere happened to be rich with about 7,000 ppm of carbon dioxide. Earth was very different back then: the Sun was cooler, our planet was in a different phase of its orbital cycles, and the continents were lumped together differently, changing ocean currents and the amount of ice on land. The planet was maybe as much as 10 degrees C (18°F) warmer than today, which might seem surprisingly cool for that level of greenhouse gas; with so many factors at play, the link between CO2 and temperature isn’t always easy to see. But researchers have confirmed that CO2 was indeed a major driver of the planet’s thermostat over the past 500 million years: large continental ice sheets formed and sea levels dropped when the atmosphere was low in CO2, for example.

https://fifthseasongardening.com/regula … on-dioxide

As we discussed in the co2 concentration for food growth topic its also the levels of fresh oxygen that also must rise with it to compensate.

So for mars we have the current levels of energy and we need to know not just how much but what was the earths total air pressure back then with that higher co2 level to solve for how thick we need to make mars.

Some research to my question

https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archi … learn.html

https://www.science.org/content/article … g-humanity

RobertDyck · 2021-12-12 02:34:51

kbd512: CO2 varies. Over the last 450,000 years it has dropped to 200 ppm (0.02%) during ice ages. Notice that's parts per million, not billion. During the coldest 10% of the time of each ice age, it drops down to 180 ppm. During interglacial periods it rises to 300 ppm. It was roughly 300 ppm before the industrial revolution. It's risen to 400 ppm today. That's an increase from 0.03% to 0.04%, or an increase by 0.01%. To be precise this year it's 407 ppm on average, however that varies with season. During the summer we use less fuel because we don't need to heat homes or other buildings, and plants bloom to consume CO2. During the winter we use fuel for heating, and many plants become dormant, so CO2 rises. It can rise to 413 in winter.

This data comes from ice cores. Ice deposits in Greenland and Antarctica have very old ice. An ice core contains layers of snow that has been compacted into ice. Air between snowflakes become trapped as bubbles in the ice. The layers can be counted from present to see how old it is, and those air bubbles are a sample of Earth's atmosphere from the time the snow fell. Number of years ago scientists found an ice deposit deeper and older than previous, it went back 800,000 years. And a couple years ago they found an even deeper ice deposit: 2 million years. Early results showed higher CO2, roughly equal to what we have today.

For the last 1.2 million years, Earth has had an ice age every 100,00 years. That's typically 80,000 years of ice followed by 20,000 years of warm. There is variation, for example the last ice age lasted 25,000 years longer than usual. Scientists aren't sure why, but the leading suspect is eruption of a super volcano named "Campi Flegrei". Before 1.2 million years ago, the ice age cycles lasted only 40,000 years. I don't know how many years of ice followed by how many years of warm, but a new ice age started every 40,000 years. So the ice sheet did not build up as thick. Again, scientists are not sure why.

I said CO2 today is 0.04%. Levels too high can be dangerous to humans. At 2% it smells stuffy and can give you headaches. At 10% it can cause death. But environmentalists are concerned over an increase from 0.03% to 0.04%.

This makes me sound like a climate change denier. I'm not. I have proposed several new technologies to combat climate change and emissions. But the shrill demands of political activists have convinced governments to take stupid actions. They've convinced government that the sky is falling.

Calliban · 2021-12-12 05:41:29

On the topic of cloud seeding and the toxicity of silver iodide in rain and snow: toxicity is a function of tissue concentration. Silver iodide is a soluble ionic salt. For it to be toxic, it must accumulate within human tissues (or animal or plant) at sufficient concentrations to interfere with cell metabolism or clog membranes (I.e. kidneys). This is only going to happen if organisms have difficulty excreting it. So that is the question to answer. Do silver compounds bio-accumulate? Given that people have been eating with silver cutlery for centuries and silver chloride has been used as a disinfectant, I cannot see it being a big problem. But to answer the question definitely, we need to use arithmetic. How much silver iodide could end up in ground water? What are toxic limits? Can it accumulate to those limits?

Regarding CO2 induced climate change: We have discussed this a great deal on a number of different threads. My own opinion is that atmospheric CO2 levels are unlikely to rise dramatically higher than they are at present, because human use of fossil fuels will be constrained by geological limits. In other words, the high EROI fossil fuel deposits that are economically useful to man are now heavily depleted.

Global oil and gas production is increasingly running up against geological constraints. US shale oil production has already peaked in every basin except the Permian and is probably past its peak overall, as is global oil production. US conventional production peaked in 1971 and has declined every year since. It is now beneath 2 million barrels per day. US conventional production is now less than half what the UKs was back in 1999! How the mighty have fallen! UK North Sea production peaked at 4.1 million barrels per day back in 1999. It is now 0.7 million barrels per day. A decline of over 80%. Oil production has declined for all of the western oil companies except Total since 2000. The bottom line is that western oil companies would not be bothering with US tight oil or Canadian oil sands if abundant conventional oil reserves existed for them to exploit. The amount of drilling needed to access tight oil makes it very capital intensive.

Chinese coal production has been on a plateau since 2011. Chinese oil production peaked in 2015. The Chinese now plan to build about 150 new nuclear reactors in the next ten years. That is a faster rate of commissioning than any other nation has ever managed, even the French. Could it be that the Chinese know that their own coal production is about to decline? These people are not building nuclear reactors because of some altruistic concern about global warming! OPEC is struggling to meet its own production quotas and has no more than a few million barrels per day of spare capacity left. All but a handful of members are past their production peaks. By the end of 2022, global oil production will fail to meet global demand for the first time ever. Even back in 2008, when global conventional production peaked and prices reached $147/barrel, that did not happen.

Need I go on? Western elites have spent the past thirty years worrying about the wrong crisis. In reality, humanity is running out of fuel. We will never burn enough at a sufficient rate to fulfil the prognostications of the IPCC. The urgency of reducing fossil fuel consumption and substituting alternatives is driven by depletion, not by atmospheric contamination. And the solutions required are different to what the ruling elites have been pushing. We need options that allow oil production to keep going, not decline. Renewable energy can be no more than part of the solution to our problems, because of the amount of energy and materials needed to build the required infrastructure. Trying to build a renewable energy base at the scale needed will increase our fossil fuel consumption, which simply isn't an option given the constraints that fossil fuel production is running into. The solution to our energy problems must be power dense and cannot be intermittent. That means fission or inertial confinement fusion. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are a red herring. We have nowhere near the amount of economically accessible fossil fuel remaining for this to become our biggest problem.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-12-12 06:23:43)

RobertDyck · 2021-12-12 06:15:24

PubMed: Potential risk of acute toxicity induced by AgI cloud seeding on soil and freshwater biota

Abstract
Silver iodide is one of the most common nucleating materials used in cloud seeding. Previous cloud seeding studies have concluded that AgI is not practically bioavailable in the environment but instead remains in soils and sediments such that the free Ag amounts are likely too low to induce a toxicological effect. However, none of these studies has considered the continued use of this practice on the same geographical areas and thus the potential cumulative effect of environmental AgI. The aim of this study is to assess the risk of acute toxicity caused by AgI exposure under laboratory conditions at the concentration expected in the environment after repeated treatments on selected soil and aquatic biota. To achieve the aims, the viability of soil bacteria Bacillus cereus and Pseudomonas stutzeri and the survival of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans exposed to different silver iodide concentrations have been evaluated. Freshwater green algae Dictyosphaerium chlorelloides and cyanobacteria Microcystis aeruginosa were exposed to silver iodide in culture medium, and their cell viability and photosynthetic activity were evaluated. Additionally, BOD5 exertion and the Microtox® toxicity test were included in the battery of toxicological assays. Both tests exhibited a moderate AgI adverse effect at the highest concentration (12.5µM) tested. However, AgI concentrations below 2.5µM increased BOD5. Although no impact on the growth and survival endpoints in the soil worm C. elegans was recorded after AgI exposures, a moderate decrease in cell viability was found for both of the assessed soil bacterial strains at the studied concentrations. Comparison between the studied species showed that the cyanobacteria were more sensitive than green algae. Exposure to AgI at 0.43μM, the reference value used in monitoring environmental impact, induced a significant decrease in photosynthetic activity that is primarily associated with the respiration (80% inhibition) and, to a lesser extent, the net photosynthesis (40% inhibition) in both strains of phytoplankton and a moderate decrease in soil bacteria viability. These results suggest that AgI from cloud seeding may moderately affect biota living in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems if cloud seeding is repeatedly applied in a specific area and large amounts of seeding materials accumulate in the environment.

RobertDyck · 2021-12-12 12:13:45

One point Tom asked is heat management. Our planet has several systems to transport heat. Gulf stream, deep ocean current aka thermohaline circulation, and hadley cells. These must be maintained or we will have dramatic climate change.

Surface ocean currents:

Deep ocean currents:

Notice deep currents often flow backward to surface currents, but not always. The reason it's called "thermohaline" is because salt concentration changes, and depth changes. Notice thermohaline currents often cross. They can do that because they're at different depths.

A view of thermohaline circulation centred on the south pole. This is unique because during southern winter, floating ice off the coast of Antarctica grows. During southern spring it melts. As it melts, ice cold water flows down and over the continental shelf. That ice cold water flows across the ocean floor into the Pacific and along the east coast of Africa into the Indian Ocean.

An animated view here.

A more detailed view of the thermohaline current is available here.

In addition to ocean currents, there are air currents. Hadley cells:

RobertDyck · 2021-12-12 12:13:52

One feature of all this is the El Niño. As ice melts at the north pole, cold salt water flows south through the Bering Straight into the Pacific. As the north polar ice cap melts, it contains less multi-year ice. Multi-year ice is composed of a lot of snow, making it fresh water. Single year ice is salt water from the Arctic Ocean that froze. When multi-year ice melts, it's cold but the lack of salt allows the cold water to flow at the surface. This carries nutrients from the Arctic to surface water at equator, feeding plankton. Small fish eat the plankton, large fish eat the small fish. This provides plentiful fish for fishermen. It also means the surface of the Pacific is relatively cool, so less evaporation and less heat to the atmosphere. Winds blow from the Pacific over North America, then over the Atlantic, then over Africa. When Arctic ice has less snow, melt water is more salty. Cold salt water will flow through the Bering Straight into the Pacific. As it passes over the continental shelf it will hug the ocean bottom. That leaves few nutrients for equatorial plankton, so poor fishing. It also means warm surface water. That causes more evaporation into the atmosphere, and more heat delivered to the air. So we have warm winters and a lot more rain in North America. More rain in North America means less rain in Africa. You would expect these currents to change slowly, but whether the water flows on the surface or bottom is a trigger point. Geological evidence shows El Niño occurred rarely, over a thousand years between occurrences. Then centuries. Then years. Now it can occur multiple times in a single human lifetime. Each time El Niño occurs, there is less time between occurrences, and it lasts longer. This process has been going on for millennia, it isn't new. Eventually El Niño will get stuck, so it will be rare for a year to be without it.

tahanson43206 · 2022-05-11 11:05:33

With a nod to RobertDyck, who created this topic in the first place, and added the post #23 about El Nino (post #23 has correct spelling).

This post is about the beginnings of an idea by Calliban, published in another topic recently.

The idea was about how to harvest clean, fresh, desalinated sea water from clouds.

Clouds are a visible manifestation of Ma Nature moving billions and billions of tons of fresh, potable, desalinated sea water from the oceans to various locations on the Earth.

The question raised in another topic was how to harvest all that water from clouds.

The "traditional" answer is "cloud seeding". I was therefore not surprised to find that a NewMars member had already created a topic for this subject.

The answer toward which (I **think**) Calliban was heading was toward a system of "cloud harvesting".

As far as Calliban got with his idea, he would lift "something" into the air with a hydrogen balloon.

In the presence of "something" fresh, potable, desalinated sea water would cascade out of the clouds into waiting buckets/containers/tanks below.

Those waiting receptacles could be on the open ocean, so that fresh, potable, desalinated sea water would be intercepted before it fell uselessly in the ocean, or in locations on land where it is not wanted.

The harvested water could then be transported to wherever it is needed, using the most efficient process available.

One recent idea is to use Solar photons to deliver that fresh water to where it is needed, via solar powered drones.

(th)

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Cloud seeding

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