Nutty Professor Has Solution to Mitigate Global Warming

BBC NEWS ^ | 2/19/07

[Uncle Peter]

Launching rockets to create a sulphur screen high in the stratosphere is one way to counter global warming explored in a new BBC documentary, Five Ways To Save The World.

[Uncle Peter]

Nutty Professor Has Solution to Mitigate Global Warming.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere.

1995 Nobel Prize winner Professor Paul Crutzen believes that sulphur particles similar to those erupting from volcanoes could act as a natural cooling device for the planet, by creating a "blanket" that would stop the Sun's rays from reaching the Earth. Check out the story.

Mount Pinatubo ejected about 10,000,000 tons of sulphur into the stratosphere at about 10-40km above the Earth's surface. For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

This eruption, while relatively large in magnitude, pales in comparison the truly catastrophic events such as Krakatoa in the 19th century. 

His plan ignores the  combined effects of the amounts of sulphur currently being injected into the atmosphere,  as you read this, by any of the 8-12 volcanoes worldwide that are erupting at any given moment.

Professor Crutzen may have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but he is sorely lacking in Mathematics, Logic, and sadly, simple common sense.

The plan is wildly ignorant of what would have to occur logistically and what enormous amounts of capital would be required. A fleet of America's largest payload rocket: the TITAN V - which carries a maximum payload of less than 3 tons - would take Millenia to build. Assuming an extremely and totally unrealistic accelerated lead time of (1) month to build and launch a Titan V, it would take 22,222 years to accomplish only 1/10th of what Pinatubo did in a few weeks.

Do The Math

1- Amount of So2 needed: 1,000,000 tons (2,000,000,000 Lbs)
2- Titan IV Rocket Max Payload: 7,500 Lbs
3- Amount of Launches needed: 266,667
4- Cost of Launch: $110,000,000 USD
5- Cost for So2 shield $293,333,333,000,000 USD

The cost does not take into account the of the sulphur.  Launch costs verified at this authoritative website.

All this to reduce the Global Avarage Temperature a mere 0.06C.

[pissant]

Is this guy on RUdy's GW advisory team yet?

[NonZeroSum]

Such a scheme would never be done with Titans (for one thing, they're retired, for another, it's not necessary to go all the way to orbit, and it's a very expensive vehicle). It would be done with suborbital reusable vehicles, like the ones currently being developed for space tourism. Their cost per flight, and cost per pound to the upper atmosphere, would be lower by orders of magnitude. It would actually provide a great market for them.

[Red Badger]

It would be easier and cheaper to coax a volcano into erupting...............perhaps several........

[isthisnickcool]

Hey, let's add some potassium nitrate and charcoal. Anyone got a match?

[goldstategop]

I'm amused that liberals want to expend a lot of energy for a trade off that is worth virtually nothing. What this professor wants to build isn't even a perpetual motion machine! snort>

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Tucker822]

It was my understanding in order to "Save the World," you have to save the cheerleader. :D

[AnotherUnixGeek]

4- Cost of Launch: $110,000,000 USD
5- Cost for So2 shield $293,333,333,000,000 USD

This money would be put to much better use devising a system to detect and deflect large asteroids which could strike the Earth.

[Deguello]

It would be easier and cheaper to go back to burning high sulfur coal & diesel fuel. ~/sarc off.

[Uncle Peter]

Seems like you and Professor Cruzen had the same Math teacher.

The differential in cost of Orbital vs. Sub-orbital is irrelevant. The cost of building and launching even the cheapest of space vehichles is prohibitve at best, and insane, at worst.

You seem unable to grasp the fact that it will take hundreds-of-thousands of launches spanning untold centuries.

Puh-leeze!

Do the Math!

[NonZeroSum]

This guy's done the math. He's an actual aerospace engineer.

[The Great RJ]

Feeding cattle "Bean-o" would probably have the same effect only be less costly. Of course Al Gore is saving the planet by the purchase of global warming indulgences.

[mbynack]

It would be easier and cheaper to go back to burning high sulfur coal & diesel fuel. ~/sarc off.

Practices that were halted due to acid rain.

Except for the high cost, impossible logistics, and sulphuric acid falling from the sky - it's not a bad plan.

[Uncle Peter]

This person claims to be able to reduce launch cost's down by a magnutude of 1000. In his own words: "If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let's say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program"

STOP RIGHT HERE! Is this genius not aware of the fact that there are only a eight suitable launch facilities in the ENTIRE world? That would be Kourou - FG, Cape Canaveral - FL, Vandenberg AFB - CA, Xichang - China, Baikonur - Khazakhstan, Tanegashima - Japan, Wallops Island Flight Facility, VA, and Pacific Ocean platform.

Let's Do The Math

• 1 Million flights divided by 8 launch sites= 125,000 flights/launches per facility.
• 1 launch per month divided by 125,000 = 10,416 years

  This is responsible science?

  A Hundred Thousand dollars or so? You can't even paint a rocket gantry for that amount! Do the Math!

[agere_contra]

I have a question.

WHY IS THIS GUY WORRIED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?

It happens every 1000 or so years like clockwork.

This graph shows the climate history of the last thousand years: clearly depicting the Mediaeval Warm period and the Little Ice Age: it also shows that temperatures are increasing once again.

This rather more sciencematifical one showing the sinusoidal variation in temperature rather more clearly

And this complex set of study results show a variation from mostly warmer (red) temperatures in 1000 AD through a colder (blue) period (1500 AD) to today's hotter/redder periods again. There can be very little doubt about this sinusoidal global warming - but this periodic climate change has nothing whatever to do with CO2 or man's activity. It's completely natural.

[NonZeroSum]

You're apparently unfamiliar with the current state and direction of spaceflight. Suborbital vehicles take off like airplanes on runways, or vertically from concrete pads--no "gantries" required. Mojave, for example is a spaceport, as is Burns Flat, Oklahoma. One is being built north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Others are planned in Australia, Singapore, Dubai, etc. Their operating characteristics and costs are similar to those of aircraft, since they only go to Mach 3 or 4, and only to a hundred kilometers altitude (currently). They'd be ideally suited for this type of mission, which only needs to deliver raw materials to the stratosphere. With a sufficiently large fleet (a couple dozen vehicles per spaceport), the estimate of a hundred flights per day seems quite reasonable.

Such a project would never be done with conventional expendable rockets for exactly the reasons you state (though you also don't seem to be familiar with the fact that Titan is out of business, and that it would have much greater payload to suborbit than GEO).

[redstates4ever]

[Uncle Peter]

How difficult it is for you to understand that no matter what type of vehicle delivery system you propose, the numbers are daunting and unattainable.

You avoid doing the math, postulate concepts that come off as idiotic, half-baked, naive, incomprehensible, simplistic, and dangerously uninformed.

You propose a not-yet-built-still-on-the-drawing-board concept vehicle to do this.

"Couple of hundred flights a day" you say? Why not a thousand flights a day? Where did you get this figure? Out of thin air? How was your figure computed?

A less wacky concept would be to launch enormous Beach Umbrellas. - each a mile or two across - to shield us

You avoid all logic by reducing your postulate to an unsubstantiated and unprovable claim.

Show me your Math.

[NonZeroSum]

You avoid doing the math, postulate concepts that come off as idiotic, half-baked, naive, incomprehensible, simplistic, and dangerously uninformed.

And you insist on doing math that's demonstrably wrong.

The person who runs that site does this for a living, and is a consultant to the suborbital (and orbital) space industry.

You propose a not-yet-built-still-on-the-drawing-board concept vehicle to do this.

No, the vehicles are already designed, and being built as we speak, in Mojave, California (by Burt Rutan's company) and Oklahoma, among other places.

The math was done at that web site. Didn't you read it? With a fleet of a couple dozen vehicles (about the size of an executive jet), four flights per day per vehicle (it's just up and down--a flight lasts only an hour or so), a hundred flights a day is a conservative number.

I really don't understand what your problem is here. This is straightforward aerospace engineering, with mature technologies.

[edsheppa]

a hundred flights a day is a conservative number.

Except for the "excutive jet sized" thing, that's what I come up with too. I used the figures for a 747 as a proxy and came up with between 60 and 170 flights a day being sufficient to hoist 5,000,000 tons a year. It's probably closer to the lower number because the higher one assumes the plane would be fully loaded with fuel which isn't necessary just to fly for a couple of hours to discharge the cargo.

BTW, I much prefer a "space shield" approach since it can also be used to raise the amount of heat deposited and combat the coming ice age. Ultimately we might have a fine enough understanding to control climates quite precisely. Maybe even eventually some control of severe weather.