Orbiting Vaporizer Joe

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Throughout history (indeed long before it) humans and animals and all of nature prospered in the relatively infrequent periods of global warming. The present Holocene warm period has enabled the rise of civilization -- and the evolution of climate scientists who are allowed to spend gobs of public money on global warming studies.

For millions of years the normal Earth climate has been an ice-age, with brief respites during interglacial periods. The temperatures of the ~100,000 year cold periods have typically been ~5C, while the warm periods of ~10,000 years duration had peak temperatures ~15C. During the cold periods glaciers covered much of the Earth and nature suffered dreadfully. Left to itself, it is hard to see how anything internal to the Earth could ever break the stable grip of the multimillion year ice-age.

Today we are doubly blessed due to the additional warming we are receiving from the solar activity. The important question is: how long will this nice warm period last?

The fragile-Earth theory has been floating around fertilizing research grants since publication of Silent Spring (1962) and The Population Bomb (1968). The Gaia genius (James Lovelock) is back in the news predicting “We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out. A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million.” Never mind that the earth has not been hot enough to be so dangerous for millions of years or that the UN climate guys are only predicting 3C rise over the next century. Never mind that what mankind really needs to fear is ice, not fire.

On the time scale of centuries, the best predictor of the future climate is the past climate. Before Christ was born there was a 500 year period of cold weather (BC700-200) when the Romans wrote of a frozen Tiber River, the Egyptians built dams to deal with the declining level of the Nile and glaciers advanced in Northern Europe. Then during the Roman Warming from 200BC to 600AD, Ptolmey wrote of year round precipitation, North Africa was wet enough to grow vast amounts of grain and central Asia experienced strong population growth. Christ was born, Christianity grew and the Roman Empire flourished. Warm = Good.

A major climate catastrophe ushered in the Dark Ages around AD440. Snow fell during the summer in Southern Europe and the trees stopped growing. John of Ephesus wrote the sun became dark and the darkness lasted for 19 months. In AD800 the Black Sea froze. Savage storms swept the world. Following the climate driven famines, plague devastated Europe. The bubonic plague killed 25 million people. Barbarian tribes from the East attacked Western Europe. Cold = bad.

During the Medieval Warming from AD900 to 1300, the Vikings colonized Greenland, wheat was grown on the Scandinavian Peninsula and wine grapes were grown in England and Newfoundland. Europe’s population grew 50% as food production increased. Overseas trade flourished. Chinese wealth peaked around AD1100 and then declined. Churches and castles were built in Europe by laborers who were not needed on the farms and thousands of temples were built in Southeast Asia. Warm = good.

During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850, the winter temperature variability was as much as 50% more than during the 20th century. The climate was unpredictable. Storm surges drowned 300 thousand people in Holland and Germany. Glaciers advanced into Europe. In 1315, grain failed to ripen across Europe and there was widespread starvation. And then it got worse. Epidemics of typhoid, tuberculosis and diphtheria broke out. The Norse settlements in Greenland died. Food shortages killed millions in Europe and in China. Cold = bad.

Since 1850 we have lived in the warm phase of the 1500 year climate cycle. The global temperature now is about 1C warmer than in 1850 and about 3C warmer than the coldest time of the last cold phase (around 1650). Judging by the oft repeated history, we will warm another degree or so before starting to cool again in a couple hundred years. We need to enjoy the warmth while it lasts.

Increased sunlight and moisture, a longer growing season, and increased CO2 fertilization have meant substantially greater food production that will continue as the warming continues. We will have to export some of the increased Siberian and Canadian wheat crop to sub-Saharan Africa but that is easily doable in a global economy. Severe weather, driven globally by differentials between Polar and Equatorial temperatures, will decline. Storm surges, however, need to be managed better as sea levels rise. Hint to the New Orleans city planners.

Thus, whether you want to believe the IPCC predictions (3C temperature rise and 1-3 feet sea level rise by 2100) or the historical record (1C and 3-6 inches) mankind in the 21st century will benefit greatly from the climate change, with the proviso that we will need to manage food distribution and storm surges better.

Many generations from now the cold will return and those descendents of ours will have to deal with reduced crop yields and more severe weather. By then technology advances will make those challenges tractable. And so it will go, on a 1500 year cycle, until some few thousand years in the future when the ice age returns. Global temperatures will plummet by ~15C, with high latitudes getting ~40C colder. Canada and the Northern US (as well as Northern Europe, Russia, Argentina, etc) will be covered by ice sheets. People and food production will be squeezed closer to the equator. California and the Great plains will suffer centuries-long drought. Keeping warm will be one critical issue, getting enough food and water for 6 billion people to live will be another.

The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world's major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population. If we hope to avert this icy death, “we must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating.” (Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “On the Cause of Ice-Ages,” 1999)

The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor and we have plenty of water in the oceans. What we need is a mechanism to get the water into the upper atmosphere in vapor form. The picture at the top shows an admittedly simplified solution consisting of a vaporizer in synchronous Earth orbit connected by a longish hose (not shown) to the ocean surface. The Orbiting Vaporizers will need to be equipped with husky pumps to draw the water up to the reservoirs.

Fred Hoyle estimates we will need on the order of 10 to the 17th power kilograms of water in the stratosphere to create a powerful greenhouse effect that would last for many months. Roughly we need to pump that much water vapor over a year in order to delay the ice age. The amount of water per hour per Orbiting Vaporizer is easy to calculate. What do you think about that? (Ps. My Orbiting Vaporizer is called Joe, after the vaporizer we used with the children. Calling it Joe made it kid friendly.)