Home > Uncategorized > Geoengineering: Bill Gates keeps investing his personal fortune on ways to offset man's impact on climate – this time on artificial clouds to increase albedo; libertarians cheer?

Geoengineering: Bill Gates keeps investing his personal fortune on ways to offset man's impact on climate – this time on artificial clouds to increase albedo; libertarians cheer?

Bill Gates – who clearly must have a screw loose (because all of us smarter people are absolutely sure that puny man can’t possibly affect climate, unless we’re trying intentionally, of course) – continues to invest in geoengineering projects that might be helpful to dampen climate change.

His latest venture? According to a report in Times Online

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.

Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.

However, a study last year calculated that a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity.

Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei. The trial would involve ten ships and 10,000sq km (3,800sq miles) of ocean. Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off.

To the extent that he’s investing his own money and not twisting anyone else’s arms, I imagine that good libertarians and conservatives are cheering. I mean, hasn’t Gates embarked precisely on the type of bold, we-can-fix-it type of course that George Reisman and Stephan Kinsella have envisioned? And there’s still hope that Gates might finally invest in the pet idea of Dr. Reisman and Stephan of open-air “nuclear winter” testing!

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