Many weather reporting outlets are still hesitant to discuss connections between intensifying extreme weather events and global warming. But one 24-hour station is not. The “Dirty Weather Report,” the latest project from Al Gore and the team at the Climate Reality Project, will air tonight and take viewers around the world on a 24-hour trip to examine how humans are warming the planet and “dirtying” the weather.
The day-long event comes as climate change emerges as a more serious political topic in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
The streaming live program of “24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report” airs at 8pm EST tonight through 8pm EST Thursday. You can watch it here.
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Hurricane Sandy abetted by sea level rise peaked America’s interest in the climate problem.
The rationale response is to implement the only clean energy option that counteracts these problems.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion moves sea surface heat that propels hurricanes to deeper water, which being colder has a lower thermal coefficient of expansion and converts ocean heat to productive mechanical energy.
In September 2007, Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed the construction of ocean pumps to pump water up from below the thermocline to “fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom”.[34] The basic idea was to accelerate the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean by increasing primary production and enhancing the export of organic carbon (as marine snow) to the deep ocean. A scheme similar to that proposed by Lovelock and Rapley is already being independently developed by a commercial company.[35]
The proposal attracted widespread media attention[36][37][38][39] and criticism.[40][41][42] Commenting on the proposal, Corinne Le Quéré, a University of East Anglia researcher, said “It doesn’t make sense. There is absolutely no evidence that geoengineering options work or even go in the right direction. I’m astonished that they published this. Before any geoengineering is put to work a massive amount of research is needed – research which will take 20 to 30 years”.[36] Other researchers have claimed that “this scheme would bring water with high natural pCO2 levels (associated with the nutrients) back to the surface, potentially causing exhalation of CO2″.[42] Lovelock subsequently said that his proposal was intended to stimulate interest and research would be the next step http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock#Geoengineering
Using a heat pipe instead of a cold water pipe means you move 8 cubic meters of a working fluid/sec as opposed to 400 cubic meters of water. This movement is in a closed system thus there is no entrainment or impingement of marine life and no release of CO2. The size of the pipe can be as small as 1 meter in diameter as opposed to 14.5 for conventional approaches thus cost is greatly reduced as well as parasitic losses of the system. Water at 25C has a higher thermal coefficient of expansion than water at 4C in the deep. You dump 20 times as much heat as power produced with the cold pipe and this heat is diluted in the deep which is 300 times the volume of the surface. You therefore reduce the thermal expansion of the oceans.
If you need more may I suggest http://www3.telus.net/gwmitigationmethod/You%20Tube.htm
p.s. The heat that is dumped to the depths by the heat pipe generates convection an upwelling which brings nutrients required by phytoplankton, the base of the ocean foodchain and the lungs of the planet, up to the surface. The thermal stratification that is cutting phytoplankton off from the nutrients they require is also reduced.
Excellent article, http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/Waiting+nature+adapt+greed/7531768/story.html