whitening the clouds

Whitening the clouds

Cutting the emissions that cause climate change is vital. But
what if we can’t do it quickly enough to avoid humanitarian
catastrophe? Alan Gadian and colleagues describe an idea
that could help keep the Earth cool and buy us precious time.

I
n The Revenge of Gaia (2009), James Lovelock
argued that catastrophe will happen within
the next 30 years. Severe storms and droughts
will become the norm, carbon offsetting is
a joke, and current efforts to promote ethical
behaviour are a scam. Is he right? Here, we
discuss an alternative approach to dealing with
climate change – geoengineering the clouds so
they become whiter and reflect more sunlight
back into space before it reaches the Earth.
Geoengineering is man-made environmental
change. Since the industrial revolution, people
have been geoengineering the planet – cutting
down rainforests, burning fossil fuels, and
pumping CO2 and other radiative gases into
that warms the Earth. One of these was the lie in its low ecological impacts.
cloud whitening scheme we discuss here. Its only ingredients are seawater and air.
As these techniques could buy us time to The energy to run it would come from the
implement methods to reduce CO2, it would wind and be relatively cheap. It could be easily
be very wise to research their viability, in case and immediately shut down, with conditions
we need them in an emergency. The cloud returning to normal within a few days. It would
whitening scheme has to operate continuously give us precise and rapid control, via satellite
and produces a one-off effect. But its advantages measurements of albedo – how reflective the
The light grey stratocumulus clouds are visible
off the coast of Chile, and were measured
using the NERC BAE 146 and
Dornier 128 aircraft on the
NERC-funded VOCALS
consortium project.

the atmosphere. Environmental temperature

change is now accelerating, not only due to
CO2, but also because of the release of other
gases such as methane.
Some of this comes from agriculture, but
the greater concern is that the Canadian and
Siberian permafrost could thaw, allowing the
methane held in underground gas fields to
escape. Although methane is relatively short-
lived in the atmosphere, it is between 20 and
70 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than
CO2 and could cause a runaway heating effect,
only mitigated by the large amount of latent
heat needed to melt the ice caps.

The philosophy of cloud whitening

So-called geoengineering schemes are designed
to reverse the harm we have already caused
and to provide a breathing space in which to
cut greenhouse gas emissions. But we need to
understand the science behind them, to avoid
the risk of unintended consequences. Several
possible schemes were analysed and discussed
in the Royal Society report Geoengineering the
climate, published in September 2009.
The report recommended research into two
plans aimed at managing the solar radiation

Planet Earth Winter 2009 9

Simulation of the effects of the cloud cooling scheme using the UK Met Office’s HadGAM climate model, using clouds with 375 droplets per cubic centimetre. The purple areas show the strongest cooling effect, with
green areas representing more limited cooling. The overall impact is global cooling of around 8 watts per square metre. Doubling CO2 concentrations from present levels would cause warming of around 3.7 watts per
square metre.

(Reproduced with kind permission of The Royal Society, Latham J et al. 2008, Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low level maritime clouds, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 366, 3969-3987)

As these techniques clouds are – and cloudiness fed back through a

global model. It would be cheap to implement.
in clouds depend largely on the number of
Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). These
could buy us time to And if current small-scale experiments confirm
that the theory works, we could put it into
are tiny particles of matter like dust or soot
that form a seed around which water droplets
implement methods action quickly. can form. Many CCN are produced over the
land. This means land-locked clouds contain
to reduce CO2, it Stratocumulus clouds many hundreds of cloud droplets per cubic
Oceans cover 70 per cent of the globe, and centimetre, while clouds that form over the sea
would be very wise low-level stratocumulus or ‘layer’ clouds cover contain substantially less: typically only a few

to research their 30 per cent of the oceans. These clouds are

very important parts of the atmospheric and
hundred per cubic centimetre. Generally, for a
given total amount of water in a cloud, the more
viability, in case we ocean global heat engine system. In November
2008 a large international field project, based
droplets that are present, the smaller these drops
are. And clouds with smaller droplets tend to be
need them in an in Arica, Chile, with over 200 scientists, five
aircraft and two ships, measured these clouds in
whiter, and hence more reflective.
These clouds are maintained by a complex
emergency. situ and with remote sensing. NERC funded a
consortium project, VOCALS, with scientists
balance of factors. How fast the water droplets
collide and coalesce affects whether they
from four UK universities. The image on the precipitate out to form raindrops, or maintain a
previous page, taken by the Geostationary stable system. There is still a lot we don’t know
Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) about how these processes interact.
during the project, shows the extent of these
clouds. The technology
The water droplets in clouds reflect sunlight John Latham has suggested that by increasing
back into space. The numbers of these droplets the number of droplets in maritime layer

10 Planet Earth Winter 2009


clouds, known as stratocumulus, we could
significantly increase the amount of solar energy
these clouds reflect.
The idea is to inject a fine spray of sea-salt
from the ocean surface into the clouds. The
salt particles would act as CCN, artificially
increasing the number of droplets in the cloud,
and so reducing their size and making the cloud
more reflective – that is, whiter. This would in
turn reflect more sunlight before it reaches the
Earth and so reduce its rate of warming, and
could buy us time – maybe as much as 50 years.
We need further research, including
The idea is to inject a fine spray of sea-salt
from the ocean surface into the clouds.
John McNeill
numerical modelling and field experiments, to
determine the ideal size of the sea-salt CCN.
But preliminary results from climate models
show that a modest increase of CCN in marine
stratocumulus clouds could produce the desired
cooling, and suggest this method would let us
compensate for anything up to a doubling of
atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels.
These initial results from models also suggest
that the biggest cooling from this scheme –
as opposed to injection of sulphate into the
stratosphere, another proposal entirely – would
occur around the poles. This is consistent with
Stephen Salter’s spray ship design.
whitening the clouds
what the theory predicts, and is good news, as
the poles are precisely where cooling is most
needed to stop permafrost from melting. It
uses natural seawater spray and can be turned
off immediately, if it turns out to produce
undesirable consequences.
Scientists, including Stephen Salter of the
University of Edinburgh, have suggested a
design for a fleet of about 2000 wind-powered,
unmanned yachts which incorporate a
sophisticated spray mechanism. The design
would release sea-spray with a diameter of
around 0.8 microns, providing CCN for the
clouds.
We propose to perform detailed research
into the scheme, and to find out whether it is
viable within five years. This research has four
elements. More work is needed on modelling
the physics of clouds; there are still questions
about how big the sea-salt CCN should be and
how the clouds will respond as CCN numbers
increase. We are already collaborating with
top US cloud physicists on this. We also need
further research on climate modelling, and
we need to develop and build Stephen Salter’s
test yachts. Finally, we need small-scale field
experiments in a region of stratocumulus to test
whether the idea works in practice.
Developing a test spray system and
conducting a field experiment to assess the
scheme’s viability will cost around £6 million.
This is an insignificant sum compared with the
cost of doing nothing. In five to ten years, we
could have an answer to Lovelock’s question:
‘Could we have done anything to slow down
the warming and the irreversible change in the
Earth system?’
More information
Dr Alan Gadian is senior research scientist at the
National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), at
the University of Leeds.
Professor Alan Blyth is director of the NCAS Facility
for Ground-based Atmospheric Measurements at the
University of Leeds.
Professor John Latham is an atmospheric physicist at
the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Stephen Salter is professor of engineering design at
the University of Edinburgh.
Laura Stevens is a PhD student at the University of
Leeds.
Further reading
J. Latham, 1990, Control of global warming?
Nature 347
J. Latham et al. 2008, Global temperature
stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of
low level maritime clouds, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 366,
3969-3987
J. Lovelock, 2009, Revenge of Gaia, Penguin
S. Salter, et al. 2008, Sea-going hardware for the
cloud albedo method of reversing global warming,
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2008) 366
Planet Earth Winter 2009 11