Month: July 2022

The warming planet needs to be cooled down. People are fleeing from the desert regions because they just can’t deal with the heat anymore. Heatwaves predicted for the 2050 wash over Europe in 2022. Meanwhile a real solution is available : Increase Albedo. In hot cities like Phoenix, Arizona in the US this is done already. Streets are painted with lighter paint. It shaves 10 degrees of the daytime temperatures!

“The atmospheric and ocean circulation processes that redistribute energy are the same for CO2 radiative forcing and albedo change” (source)

In the literature you can read the above, so albedo change and CO2 radiative forcing (and Methan forcing) are the same. In other words increase Albedo and you neutralize CO2 radiative forcing. This is exactly what we need. I am still trying to find out what the real real truth is on this, so how local albedo changes affect temperature of the entire ‘atmospheric column’. This needs to be simulated using real world data, and if you can help with that let me know at info@greencheck.nl.

Meanwhile it seems sensible to start a global campaign for increasing albedo in cities but also on farmland. Crops can suddenly survive if they are in an area that sheds a large percentage of the solar radiation, instead of turning it all into local heat. I have experimentented and it is possible to make biodegradable (metal free!) high albedo materials. We don’t need glass mirrors or silver covered mountains.

The oceans are a challenge, because they are absolutely vast. But they also produce the materials we need to increase albedo. It is just more difficult to do anything there. We need to find methods and experiment.

A global Albedo Challenge would be a good idea, because every Joule we shed to space is one that does not warm our atmosphere. The sooner we have global awareness of this option to keep temperatures reasonable, the better. We need to cooperate to achieve it, we need to find methods and ways (there are many) and need to know where we’re at. It is also about food security, water preservation, Albedo is a real way to cope with both the challenges and the final threat of climate change.

I will be developing the AlbedoEnhancement.com webpage, looking for support on this, there will be a global overview of albedo, and a way to share information on increasing albedo as well as a knowledge base.

If you have suggestions or want to help out let me know via info@greencheck.nl!

The face of climate action is often female, we see Greta Thunberg and other young women advocate for action, scolding the leaders of the world, trying to rally the public into action. The more social side of the right wing parties is often so popular with women that it becomes somewhat intimidating. Left wing and social parties often have women as leaders and climate as one of the main concerns. There is something going on that is more than a growing equality in roles and responsibilities though.

Even local women are always happy to help with kids and animals and gardening if they can. Of course that is what we see. I think the truth is also visible. The majority of women does not care and aspires to a life that is safe and secure, partly because they are shown it is possible, partly because they know they are vulnerable.

The women in the picture above are a mix of girls without anything on their name, students, maybe some professionals. They can all not help but be part of the economic system that is destroying the planet. Where to get a megaphone without it, where to find the carton and pencil to make a sign. This seems like the most lame retort from a pro-fossil advocate, but it is also a true challenge for people that want change, especially women. They still have to fight for rights, after having fought for the right to vote, to be educated, to have abortions. The reason for this is that some men look that the situation and conclude “women did not create this world, women did not invent it, women are a guest in it” and such men often find women that will accommodate to their beliefs.

The above shows how women are making headway into political roles, but we should not kid ourselves in what type of society this happens : It is in the well organized fossil fuel economic societies, or the rare rural societies that do not need too much fossil fuel (but those are considered undeveloped). The irony is of course that women have a role to play, and politics is not a role anyone should be playing if you look back on our evolution and history. A politician should be a decision maker that lives his decisions, but these days a politician is the one that most cleverly can aquire the influence over decisions, no matter what they are. Banks, fossil, the economy does not care about them, because they know people only fight over riches, and the fossil/banking sector provides those.

My point above is that women in ‘positions of power’ are anti-climate because ‘power’ is anti-climate. Even the women in Africal asking for climate justice belong to the money hungry kind, the women that attend a twitter talk about the Great Green Wall are after the billions that are promissed for it. A big payout to Africa for climate will flow right back to industries in Europe, the US, China and pollute the atmosphere because the money will buy fossil fuels to make whatever will help the africans.

Laura above wants to go to the COP27 meeting, to ask for climate justice. This is great, because 1. If you don’t give it all that happens is more asking. 2. If you do give it it drives the dependence on fossil fuels and means work for western companies. Much of the 3d world development aid given over the decades flowed back to western companies. It was a largely ignored subsidy. sometimes simply theft. I wrote about 200.000 Euro going to a charity that provided solar cooking systems, which where priced at 25 Euro per piece and consisted of some aluminium foil laminated carton (purchasable for about .25 Euro?).

What women want

As a man I don’t profess to know exactly what women want, but I will make a guess :

1. Security
2. Sovereignty over their body
3. Food, water, shelter
4. A constructive role in society

My point in this post is that in the west women get this by complying with the economy, no matter how climate active they are. The threat of men is constantly exaggerated (I suspect an islamic influence). You can barely look at a women in a store anymore because they are told men are all rapists. Wokeness is part of it, and it works because a woman can just cancel everything that does not provide her with the top 4 items above. Like in the islamic world the growing frustration among men for being punished for the crimes of a few makes them more single minded. There is no conversation possible in the end, both sexes live separate lives.

Another version is the domesticated man. Where the man is completely ‘owned’ by his desire for a peaceful life. This means the women is the boss around the house, the men dresses like Homer Simpson, and basically doesn’t care about anything anymore. In that situation the women also have what they want, and that is where their ambition stops.

What women need to do

I am a man, so I should not try to tell women what to do. This is the problem of analysis. Women simply shut men up if the opinion doesn’t suit them or it exposes them as comfort seeking frauds. The position of a women is so precarious in many places that any success is clung onto, and morality is jettisoned. This often means climate concerns are out the window as well. The most important point to make is perhaps that any division is artificial. Men and women have had roles in society, love has been mutual and helping each other has been the norm. It is the fossil banking economy that put men and women on an island, and oil rich countries happen to already have an ideology that works very well with that separation : the faith of islam.

So :

1. Women need to find men to cooperate with
2. Women need to realize the 4 points above -without using the fossil/banking economy-
3. Women need to put local first and fight to get rid of interference.
4. Women need to support technical education and making products out of innovations. They need to drive results. “What do I want to see? More cheap solar!”
5. Increasing independence from the fossil/banking economy must be the ongoing effort, so don’t seek money, seek ownership.
6. Implementing real climate solutions would be almost automatic, but should be concerted with other groups of men and women that are independent. This is both Extraeconomic and Roboeconomic.

The economy will help nobody that attempts the above, and laws are against people that try it. Many people have done it though, the sad aspect is that it is not easy to achieve significant results outside the economy, fossil fuels and the whole system of manufacturing of it are just so powerful. To use it one needs to use only solar, wind, wave, geothermal energy. Then the economic system turns into the Roboeconomic system, becomes more benign to the planet, and can provide the 4 items women want (according to me) without dragging life on Earth to its grave.

There is already a strong network of women active in climate action, but they need to read this blogpost and get real about their ambitions. If they get together and accept my arrogant manly analysis, they might turn into a more effective group..

Its not easy to imagine a way to shield Earth of the accumulating heat from the Sun. We have seen a serious acceleration of warming and its not clear if this will result in more radiative cooling, in other words if this is stabilized at this moment. The problem is that heat accumulates in the oceans, it builds up because the atmosphere above it reflects radiation back (because CO2 absorbs it) which would otherwise have escaped to space.

It is not entirely clear what our options are, whether Albedo increase is a real solution and in case it is in what way. We basically have no good models yet of actual effects, only ballpark estimations. A fundamental truth is that all radiation that does not reach our atmosphere will not warm it. So how can we ‘regulate’ that?

Spaceflakes

The idea is pretty simple, first of all you don’t try to stop all the light everywhere, but only around the equator. After all we are seeing hot temperatures because of desert heat blowing to the North. This is the heat of equatorial deserts. If we can reduce the insolation (solar power) around the equator that is a plus. How? By lauching reflective flakes into space.

The flakes can be metal but it is possible to make highly reflective material using polymers, which are also lighter and easier to come by (less energy intensive to make). Next step is to launch them into an orbit around the equator, at a respectable altitude. We use a starship for that, but a Falcon 9 can probably also achieve some results. A third alternative is to make flakes on the Moon or elsewhere, the advantage being that launching them into an Earth orbit is easier.

Non metalic flakes will not block radio signals

The flakes will simply float at 17.000 km/hour around Earth (That would be geostationary) or smarter still move around Earth along with the Sun, a so called Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) this minimizes the material needed. It will be like there’s a dark spot in the center of the Sun, but really it will be hard to notice because the sun is still very bright.

The flakes will be in some orbit around Earth, and will slowly fall down. To keep them up there we can deploy lasers or directed sunlight, so that somewhere along the equator there is a station that will hit them from below, pumping them to a slightly higher orbit. It can be a good idea to make the top white (or silver) and the bottom black, so that the bottom absorbs any radiation and sends at least 50% out to space. The top will send most radiation back to space.

Flakes can be added and because it will take some time to see any effect their amount can be precisely determined. After a while they fall back into the atmosphere, so no harm done!

For ages fishermen in Indonesia have build off shore rafts that fish could find shade and protection from sea birds under (also from hunters from down below). They get blown away by storms, then replaced again. The designs are still very primitive. You can see more videos here.

There’s two ways to view them, one is that they help deplete the oceans of fish, by making them easy to catch. The fishermen still need to go out 30 miles or so, this is expensive (because they use fuel not solar electric or sailing boats). Indonesia is actually stimulating the creation of Rumpons, here 1000 of them, but its not clear if this is good for fish stocks.

Because the ocean is warming due to more CO2 in our atmosphere, and this in turn means the air is not cooled causing highr temperatures, there is a need to increase the Albedo of the oceans. Of course they are vast, its not easy to make any change to the global climate, and this is a good thing. It seems that simply blocking the sun from getting into the ocean is a good way to keep it a bit cooler. It does radiate a lot, and normally it absorbs nearly all solar heat that hits it.

Sealife can really thrive if it gas somehting to hold on to. Coastal sealife is much more diverse both because of the nutrient rich water usually upwelling from the deeper ocean and because of the many nooks and crannies life can cling on to and hid in. The open ocean doesn’t have these things which is why it can really be quite dead. We can change that.

Today is not a great day, because the fossil/banking system has managed to get my parliament to agree to join #CETA which means more cashflow for banks and fossil, more suffering and needless transportation of animals, more emissions, more ecological damage and less chance of survival for humanity. Temperatures rise to 27 degrees and will get much higher as Earth’s ability to shed heat from the sun has halved since 2005 (source). The loss of polar albedo and addition of water vapor in the atmosphere where not included in many older models.

Still it is important to share ideas if they can be useful. Albedo is one of those ideas. Send heat back into space. The same paper above concludes that although radiation is stronger when Earth warms, suggesting more heat is lost, it does not mean we are going to be cooler. Some noobs present it as such, try to be climate deniers and fudgers by claiming that higher temperatures mean higher radiation and more cooling. But everyone has had a pan on the stove, when its cold it doesn’t radiate much, when it gets hotter you start to feel it. Does it get colder as the pan radiates more? Hell no. Weak nonsense. Our planet is heating up fast.

Albedo is sending radiation, light or infra red, back up from the Earth, hopefully into space.

The radiation band that is not absobed by the atmosphere, so called outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), is like a window to space. If you send radiation in that frequency window it does not come back. Now I wrote about light albedo, and the radiation of warm surfaces that have been under the sun, at night. But any source of OLR pointed to the sky will radiate to space. So if you can convert energy in the weather system of Earth into OLR, you can chuck it out to space! This includes wind and wave energy.

The way to do this is simply to convert wind or wave energy to heat in say a vertical cilinder. Then you make sure the top of the cilinder is open, and the heat is concentrated in it. The heat will radiate up, into space, and out of Earths system. There are many ways to implement this idea, even if it is a bit complex, especially compared with increasing ocean albedo which is super low. So for any practical purpose it makes no sense to build a wind or wave albedo device to rid Earths system of energy. \

One could imagine storm brake systems in the shape of big turbines that will turn in the wind of a storm, generate incredible heat in the nacelle which creates a beam of bright light upwards into space. This will reduce the energy in the storm, but it may also heat up any rain and wind above it.

The world is trapped in our money system that is based on fossil fuel credit, and the people that live of it are not going to let us escape if they can help it. Their arrogance and lack of empathy, egotism is what keeps a system going that is now rapidly cutting our chances for survival. We need a herculean effort to change our fate. We need to start now.

Most of us seek happiness in life, its even in the US constitution, we read :

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

Sadly its quite enigmantic how to achieve happiness. Some say its doing what you love or you can only expect to be happy some of the time or you can’t be happy without also being miserable. I think a person can be happy most of the time, but only if he organizes his life by a specific strategy, which I will propose in this post.

Happiness can be a trap, a bubble, with dire consequences for others

I am not saying that organizing your life for happiness is optimal for society or anyone else but you. This is the challenge, we need to risk losing some happiness at times to find it in a different way, maximizing total happiness. It is possible a group of people is not able to all be happy while being together.

What is the way I think we should look at achieving happiness? It lies in analyzing your behavior, how often it is succesfull and what needs it satisfies. Of course you can’t be happy if you neglect to address a basic need in your activities.

We cycle through the same behaviors every day, week, month

So the way to analyse it is to look at things you do often, and make behavioral units of them. So activities are ‘working’, ‘cooking’, ‘sleeping’, ‘reading a book’, ‘talking to family’ etc. They can be more detailed if you do them often, but detail is not a good sign. More units in your life (statistically) means less happiness. The next question to ask is “How often are these behavioral units a succes, how often do they fail”. Which really tells you if you are struggling with life.

Simply said the more behavioral units if ordered by frequency of occurrence that are highly successful the happier you will be. If the they also satisfy all you needs then you are even more likely to be happy.

You can draw a graph of the activities you perform in your life, in time, and the likelihood they succeed. They loop back on themselves if you say “I buy groceries” then “I cook” a couple of times then you have to buy groceries again. But then you also need to earn money to buy groceries, which is another branch of the graph. How well is that going?

A simple graph means a happy life

For most people part of the graph works, but a lot of it is open ended. People that just satisfy their needs, not being too critical of how its done, can be happy more easily, say a couple that stays together in a boring job being pretty mediocre, is actually likely to be pretty happy -if- that is all they care about. If their mind wants things to be different, they could be miserable. For some people a boring life means succes, for others it means failure. That should however show up in the graph.

Cutting loose ends off the graph makes it simpler

The people saying “keep it simple, you will be more happy” are right : The less complex the graph is the more likely the activities in them will be a success, as you are doing it more often. This is a very Japanese way of living, where you hone a couple of skills and just don’t do anything else.

Religions often provide regularly occurring rituals that although they don’t satisfy any real need, give you a sense you are succeeding

Meditation, focus on the now, also works to make the graph more simple, or to get more out of success for specific activities. Of course meditation itself is something you can’t fail at really, unless there’s some priests that needs to make a living off your inaptitude.

Adding more useful succesful activities builds a better graph

The constitutional right to be in ‘persuit of happiness’ is somewhat misleading. If you are looking for happiness you are probably not satisfied and you probably do not have recurring behavior that covers all the existential bases. But your mind can redefine itself as an explorer, a person who’s activity is ‘to discover and meet challenges’ and defined this way you can be hitting the bulls eye every day, and have an exciting and happy life.

A seeker can be happy if he accepts his nature, he will be unhappy if he rejects it

Our brain seeks happiness but without any specific objective. It just tries to be efficient because it has a limited supply of energy, it tries to keep us alive and safe by inhibiting damaging behavior. It tells us what it needs, and makes us interested in anything that may lead to what it needs. Happiness is what happens if it manages to meet its needs without to much effort, and there’s no reason for it to assume it can get much better. This in turn is why most people become boring : It’s a sign of success. But if it makes you unhappy, you need to step into the unknown. Pick a few new activities, or eliminate some you are used to. Or.. accept a happy simple life.

The world is trying to move to a less carbon intensive way to power itself. CO2 emissions, methane leaks, NOx emissions are all undesirable, unhealthy and above all in the process of pushing us into a hothouse climate scenario. The proper response to this is to find ways to generate (mainly) electricity that ideally does not produce CO2. One of them is nuclear energy, and because of that the nuclear lobby gets a lot of support from citizen that try to think along the lines of emissions minimization.

But the problem in the short term is not really CO2 or Methane, although a serious cut in Methane emissions will cool the planet. The problem is the heat, the temperature maxima, the effect on soil moisture. We need to fight the heat as we reduce CO2. It may become so dramatic that the heat prevents us from growing food or biomass because we don’t focus on managing it directly, but spend energy on transitioning to low emission technology. Nature always laughs last though, so a serious famine will reduce emissions, while preventing one won’t.

If you consider Earth like a steel drum that is out in the sun, heating up inside, then you can consider a heat generating power plant as a heat source inside the drum, that will raise temperatures even more. Considering that its already too hot inside the drum this is not what we want. How do energy sources compare in this respect?

Coal/Gas powered powerplants

These power plants exploit chemical energy stored in carbon or hydrocarbons. The oxygen in our atmosphere wants to combine with the hydrogen and carbon, from which it was split by photosynthesis millions of years ago, ending up stored deep underground. The flame of your stove, the engine of your car, the powerplant all heat up air eventually. This adds to heat ‘inside the drum’. Not good.

Nuclear power

Nuclear power is derived from splitting atoms of Uranium. They do decay naturally, but in a nuclear plant they are bombarded with slow neutrons which speeds up this process. The heat is used to heat steam and drive turbines much like in coal and gas plants. The heat comes from inside the drum. If you decide to power the planet with nuclear you do cut CO2, but the existing CO2 is not reduced fast enough to have a temperature effect. You are however adding a lot of heat ‘inside the drum’. Not good.

Wind Energy

Wind turbines use air pressure differentials in our atmosphere, that cause wind, the wind pushes the blades. Some of that friction is turned into energy, some of it into heat. But the air was already moving ‘inside the drum’. It is not adding to the heat inside, even if the electricity from the turbine is used in a stove. It does not add heat. Good.

Solar Energy

Solar energy can be solar thermal (heat collected from the sun) or electricty (photovoltaics). You could imagine this as a patch on the outside of the drum. The sun shines on it. A photovoltaic or solar thermal panel gets hot because the conversion into electricity is not very efficient, and a thermal panel is supposed to get hot. In fact you can make a solar thermal panel that reaches 500 Celsius if you just prevent convection losses. There is no heat added from any other source than the Sun though, so this is good.

But there’s another aspect to these panels, and that is they radiate heat. A photovoltaic panel heats up until it can radiate and convect (heat up the air which then rises) all the heat it receives. It should be quite a termal column above a solar power plant of rising hot air. A lot of heat is also radiated in the infrared spectrum, which is good, because light in the mid IR can reach space (doesn’t heat up the atmosphere). So someone has to do the exact math to determine if a solar (thermal or PV) power plant doesn’t actually cool Earth because it prevents heat from lingering in our atmosphere. We associate Albedo with white surfaces, but black surfaces are better radiators, especially when we don’t allow them to heat the surrounding air.

I think we may want to revisit the design of solar panels, to perhaps add copper film to the front of the panel, so that it reflects a lot of heat radiation (which it doesn’t convert into electricity anyway) directly back to space. Its a simple improvement that (if practical) can help cool Earth.

Geothermal

Geothermal heat is from inside the drum. It normally doesn’t heat the atmosphere, but because we drill for it and get it to the surface now it does.

Wave/Tidal

Wave and tidal energy derive from movement of water due the wind or the orbit of our Moon. Water has huge mass, it lends itself to conversion into electricity well, but it has such power that the installations to harvest it can be expensive (although if you consider the tidal dam in St. Malo, France has been operational since 1963, it can be very cost effective). It does not add heat inside the drum, the energy was already there as kinetic/potential energy of water.

Best options

To keep it cool wind, tidal and solar energy seem the best options, and solar PV can even be optimized to shed as much heat as it can because its not used anyway (but one has to see what the efficiency is without interventions). Nuclear, coal, gas, geothermal are adding heat, heat we don’t need!