Tropical Cloud Generation:
A desperately needed solution that will blunt some of the worst effects of climate change, and give the world time to decarbonize.
The climate is changing. It is no longer a future problem, it is a current and intensifying crisis, and the world still emits at least 30 BILLION TONS per year more CO2-equivalent greenhouse gasses (30+ Gt-CO2e/yr) than natural sinks absorb. There is no indication that the world will achieve net-zero emissions (where emissions equal natural sinks) within the next 30 years. Even if we set out and began decarbonizing with unprecedented expansion of investment in renewable and nuclear power, we would not likely see net zero in 30 years, and we have not yet seen that level of expansion begin.
Meanwhile, hurricanes (tropical cyclones) – fueled by warm sea surface temperatures – are becoming far more destructive as they have more energy from warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) to power them once they form. Between 1980 and 1989, the damages from hurricanes in the US averaged 18.4 billion dollars per year. The average U.S. damages over the 2017-2021 period exceeded $130B/yr. These costs are continuing to rise and accelerate. Globally, the same escalation has been seen in the intensity and damages of typhoons and cyclones (tropical cyclones, by different names) making landfall in Asia.
The ocean temperatures in the South Sea surrounding the Antarctic Ice Sheet have warmed at well over double the rate that we had previously thought. The ice shelf protecting the Thwaites Glacier (often now dubbed “the doomsday glacier”) – which serves as an ice dam for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – will break up and disintegrate within 5 years, after which point the glacier itself will begin to collapse. The median climate projections now show sea level rise of ~40 cm (~16 inches) by 2050 for the Gulf Coast.
Image courtesy of SC National Guard.
The primary production (by the phytoplankton) of the tropical ocean waters is beginning to dwindle as the rapid increase in surface temperatures has led to greater stratification – less mixing and exchange as the upper sea surface has grown warmer and less dense, and the nutrients that phytoplankton need for their development sink into the dense cool waters, locked away from the upper layers where light and O2 are plentiful and could allow phytoplankton to grow. Which is gradually reducing the effectiveness of sea life as a global carbon sink.
All this, and the world still won’t likely drop to net zero emissions for many decades!
Even when we do reach net-zero emissions, the planet will continue to warm for decades (the ocean currently acts as a giant heat sink that keeps the planet cooler as it slowly warms to an equilibrium).
We need time, and we need a solution that mitigates, forestalls, or reverses some of these effects while society has a chance to continue to decarbonize, prepare for rising seas, and hopefully will eventually decarbonize into net-negative – enhancing carbon sinks so that the atmosphere gradually loses more carbon than our society emits.
Ending Hurricanes, Reversing Sea Level Rise, and Blunting Global Warming
by Tropical Cloud Generation (TCG)
In most tropical ocean water, while the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is very warm (sometimes over 30C), often the sea temperature is much cooler only 20-70 m below the surface – between 15-20 degrees C (59 – 72 F). So by mixing the surface water with this sub-surface cooler water, we can quickly and substantially cool the surface water. (A side effect of doing this is the nutrients in the deeper water needed by the phytoplankton would mix with the upper layers along with the cooler water, and more biological life could develop in the tropical oceans.)
The means by which this all can be accomplished would be a small fleet of
“Sea Mixers”.
The Sea Mixers would be made by repurposing large retiring aircraft carriers by adding very large downward-thrusting propeller blades, forcing a massive amount of the surface water downwards as it cruises, which then mixes with the cool deeper waters and forces them towards the surface in a growing “cool patch” of cooler water surrounded by much warmer water.
By cooling small patches of sea surface, this would drive large wind and weather interactions at the boundary of the cool patch – where warm surrounding waters meet the cooler waters of the patch. The fog, clouds, storms, and wind effects would all serve to shade the region from the sun and transport some of the energy into the high troposphere – where half of it will radiate into space. This would serve to cool large areas either surrounding or downwind of the initial cool patch.
Once the initial cool patch is large enough to ensure that it would generate fog, wind effects, clouds, and storms for months (likely in the 40-60 km diameter range) the Sea Mixer would cruise ~150 km further away and begin mixing another cool patch, which would then generate more clouds and storms, and the Sea Mixer would move on and to mix another one.
By cooling the surface temperatures in key (shockingly small) regions of the ocean, we can prevent hurricanes from forming. More than 75% of all hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean have originated in one small ~500 km diameter region south of the Cape Verde Islands.
Data from the NOAA National Hurricane Center
Most of the rest that make landfall come from a small region Northeast of the coast of Venezuela and the Central/Southwest region of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). You can find out more information about how hurricanes can be disrupted and how the cool patches will interact with atmospheric weather to form clouds, wind, and rain in our “Hurricanes and Sea Breezes” page.
Using the same approach – mixing cool patches which would then generate fog, clouds, and storms – we could cool the surface temperatures in southward-flowing currents of the three major Southern Gyres: The Brazil Current, the Agulhas Current, and the East Australian current. These currents do not intersect directly with the waters of the Southern Ocean, but they intersect and mix with the Subantarctic Front of the Antarctic Circumpolar current.
(Diagram courtesy of Academic Press / de Vos Design) Photo: Academic Press / de Vos Design
So, cooling the Southern Ocean will require significant cooling of these three Southward flows. But as the Antarctic Circumpolar current cools, we could reduce or even reverse the rapid disintegration and melt-off of the Sea Ice Shelf surrounding and protecting the great Antarctic Ice Sheet. Sea Ice has an albedo (reflectivity) of between 40-90%, while ocean water has an albedo of 0.06%. As the sea ice recovers, there will be far less warming of the Southern ocean in the summertime, as more of the incoming solar energy is reflected rather than absorbed, and more ice can be protected and begin to rebuild.
Every cool patch that is mixed will – in addition to driving weather interactions – have hundreds of thousands of tons of vital nutrients for phytoplankton welled up into the surface waters, allowing much more biological life to develop. This will increase the rate of carbon sink within and surrounding that region for years, and will do so at a much more rapid rate than any carbon sequestration project that has been completed to date. To find out more visit our “TGC side effects” page.
For each cool region (surrounding the initial “seed” of the mixed cool patch), the heat-sink effect of the ocean will continue to protect us from even faster climate change. As we work to protect ourselves from hurricanes and protect the world from sea level rise, we can also give some relief from warming effects at large.
We can give ourselves time.
This can be done!
There is much more work to be done. We’ve done the initial work in analyzing the potential, we’ve done preliminary simulations, and some preliminary basic engineering and design work (for those who are interested, you can refer to our “Sea Mixer” page for some of the relevant engineering details). But there is nothing “new” that is required. The relevant details are perfectly within the capability of a world-class shipbuilder, and the engineering details have been worked through to a sufficient detail that there should be no major surprises.
It may take between 6 and 11 Sea Mixers to fully mitigate all hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, and quite a few more to mitigate the typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and the cyclones in the Indian Ocean. It may take between 30 and 60 of them to cool the Southward ocean currents enough to cool the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to forestall the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier.
We provide a more complete and more technical (and less brief) presentation of the concept that includes many more details on our main page for those who wish to learn more. It’s complicated – as is the nature of the challenge – and much of the discussion is at a higher level.
But this is something that CAN be done on a timeline that is POSSIBLE at a cost that is less than 1/1000th (three orders of magnitude lower than) the cost of inaction (before considering the human costs of millions of displaced climate refugees)! At the core lies a choice: we can choose to commit ourselves to being the victim of past inaction, and suffer the worst consequences of climate change while we condemn those who did nothing before… and leave that same legacy to those who follow us. Or we can commit ourselves to forging ahead, and seeking to blunt the worst damages of this unwelcome inheritance, and protect ourselves as best we can.
If you wish to help, start by continuing the conversation with friends. Ask questions – it’s likely many questions are answered on other pages here. Share this page and encourage those you share it with to ask questions. Start conversations. Share it, blog it, vlog it, tic-toc it… bring it up at the water cooler if you still go into an office. Start conversations.
There have been many years, far too many years, where we have not had much hope in terms of climate change: Just an annual ritual of worsening conditions, worsening projections, and way too little movement on emissions. At least with TCG, we can have more time.