Photo right- NASA: Ship trails over the Bay of Biscay -illustrates a scientific phenomenon known as the "Twomey Effect". I first learned of Roland's Blog while "half"-listening to the french radio, Europe.
Roland is quoted on the radio; "as being a passionate reader and observer of scientific and technological progress, choosing what grabs his imagination at the moment - his hearts desire - "ses coups de coeur.""
I checked two recent posts 7 & 8 Sept08 and found an irresistible urge to delve into this work. I suppose that's the whole point of scientific communication.
Roland's blogs are extremely well presented, are well very documented via the classical post embedded links technique. New to me was the excellent link and tag presentation system, a problem that I have recently confronted with leading me to experimenting a Tag Cloud approach-also useful for analysing word relevance marketing input. Roland Piquepaille uses the Yahoo associated Delicious social bookmarking platform. His site is well worth more than a fleeting visit by any serious aspiring content oriented blogger, as it was to me, in my own efforts to improve my approaches to blogging.
Content is rich, but easy to read. It is I believe, from a rapid perusal, a useful contribution to the scientific technological, engineering and medically oriented blog-sphere. Albeit the very very high quality of sources both from scientific press news and online peer reviewed Journals. cf. Main Sources below.
Here I shall echo, to a large extent, only the first post I read, at Roland's Blog[Link-html] concerning a fairly radical approach to fighting climate change by a method well known to the scientific and engineering community as: autonomous cloud-seeding by a fleet of ships. This is the sort of thing reported here cf. photos. The important corpus of scientific data may be consulted via links below.
This is a big project if undertaken and cost estimates advanced are reported by Piquepaille. Serious science is deeply involved who further remarks in the following taken from his blog:
"This project has been led by Professor John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Latham worked with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh led by Professor Stephen Salter, whose main field is Wave Energy for Electrical Power Generation. You can see another picture of these conceptual cloud-seeding ships on page 3 of a paper presented by Slater in October 2005, "Beyond carbon: consideration of albedo control technologies to mitigate climate change" (PDF format, 6 pages, 653 KB)."
He further remarks that the research is supported by the highly reputable Royal Society and has been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, PTRS_A under the title "Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming" on August 29, 2008."
Piquepaille portrays an couple of often published speculative photos - artists views & a trial platform to fix the reader's attention and summarises sufficient data to whet the appetite of the motivated engineer or perhaps the motivated engineering firm -NB. NASA have tackled much more challenging & horrendous tasks.
Trial Rig
It is interesting that the decision makers and activists , take note that various pros and cons from a variety of sources are mentioned. Good places to get a balance view should the project be required to be taken from print to product - the probability is, I surmise, not a Non-Zero option, unfortunately, whatever our feelings to the contrary maybe in spite of continuing expert's lashing "Global Political Leadership. "
The link to the full text of this paper (PDF format, 18 pages, 1.75 MB). This article was included in a special issue of the PTRS journal named "Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change" which carried another article co-authored by Latham, "Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds."
Main Sources well worth reading:
(1) Edwin Cartlidge, for PhysicsWorld.com, September 4, 2008, and includes numerious comments and further references.
Roland is quoted on the radio; "as being a passionate reader and observer of scientific and technological progress, choosing what grabs his imagination at the moment - his hearts desire - "ses coups de coeur.""
I checked two recent posts 7 & 8 Sept08 and found an irresistible urge to delve into this work. I suppose that's the whole point of scientific communication.
Roland's blogs are extremely well presented, are well very documented via the classical post embedded links technique. New to me was the excellent link and tag presentation system, a problem that I have recently confronted with leading me to experimenting a Tag Cloud approach-also useful for analysing word relevance marketing input. Roland Piquepaille uses the Yahoo associated Delicious social bookmarking platform. His site is well worth more than a fleeting visit by any serious aspiring content oriented blogger, as it was to me, in my own efforts to improve my approaches to blogging.
Content is rich, but easy to read. It is I believe, from a rapid perusal, a useful contribution to the scientific technological, engineering and medically oriented blog-sphere. Albeit the very very high quality of sources both from scientific press news and online peer reviewed Journals. cf. Main Sources below.
Here I shall echo, to a large extent, only the first post I read, at Roland's Blog[Link-html] concerning a fairly radical approach to fighting climate change by a method well known to the scientific and engineering community as: autonomous cloud-seeding by a fleet of ships. This is the sort of thing reported here cf. photos. The important corpus of scientific data may be consulted via links below.
This is a big project if undertaken and cost estimates advanced are reported by Piquepaille. Serious science is deeply involved who further remarks in the following taken from his blog:"This project has been led by Professor John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Latham worked with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh led by Professor Stephen Salter, whose main field is Wave Energy for Electrical Power Generation. You can see another picture of these conceptual cloud-seeding ships on page 3 of a paper presented by Slater in October 2005, "Beyond carbon: consideration of albedo control technologies to mitigate climate change" (PDF format, 6 pages, 653 KB)."
He further remarks that the research is supported by the highly reputable Royal Society and has been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, PTRS_A under the title "Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming" on August 29, 2008."
Piquepaille portrays an couple of often published speculative photos - artists views & a trial platform to fix the reader's attention and summarises sufficient data to whet the appetite of the motivated engineer or perhaps the motivated engineering firm -NB. NASA have tackled much more challenging & horrendous tasks.
Trial Rig
It is interesting that the decision makers and activists , take note that various pros and cons from a variety of sources are mentioned. Good places to get a balance view should the project be required to be taken from print to product - the probability is, I surmise, not a Non-Zero option, unfortunately, whatever our feelings to the contrary maybe in spite of continuing expert's lashing "Global Political Leadership. "
The link to the full text of this paper (PDF format, 18 pages, 1.75 MB). This article was included in a special issue of the PTRS journal named "Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change" which carried another article co-authored by Latham, "Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds."
Main Sources well worth reading:
(1) Edwin Cartlidge, for PhysicsWorld.com, September 4, 2008, and includes numerious comments and further references.
(2) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0136 Published online
Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming by STEPHEN SALTER 1,*, GRAHAM SORTINO 2 AND JOHN LATHAM 3
1Institute for Energy Systems, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK 2School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK 3National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, USA
NB. Geoscale engineering articles available online via FirstCite, (among many titles on diverse Science and Technological Issues).
Coping with carbon: a near-term strategy to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power stations
Issue Title
Theme Issue ‘Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change’ compiled by Brian Launder and J. Michael T. Thompson
DOI
10.1098/rsta.2008.0113
Online Date
Friday, August 29, 2008
All Roland Piquepaille's selections may be found on his full blog at this [LINK]
Footnote:
The “Twomey effect”, says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud’s albedo-ie. the reflectivity of clouds lying about 1 km above the ocean’s surface.
By spraying fine droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within each droplet act as new centres of condensation when they reach the clouds above, leading to a greater concentration of water droplets within each cloud.
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