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Volume 8, Issue 10 (Suppl)
J Earth Sci Clim Change, an open access
ISSN: 2157-7617
Climate Change 2017
October 19-21, 2017
Page 84
Notes:
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CLIMATE CHANGE
October 19-21, 2017 | Rome, Italy
4
th
World Conference on
Stephen Salter, J Earth Sci Clim Change 2017, 8:10(Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C1-035
Can computer models give a win-win result for marine cloud brightening?
T
he best climate modelers are very careful about putting caveats on their results and admit that there are differences about
the polarity let alone magnitude of some of their predictions. However, models are steadily getting better and at present,
they are the only tool we have to study climate problems. Much of the effort to date has been concentrated on the comparisons
between model results rather than finding the best times and seasons to use geoengineering. This is a bit like testing road
vehicles with the steering locked. The broad consensus is that global warming will increase evaporation from the sea and
so increase precipitation. If geoengineering with stratospheric sulphur is used to completely cancel the temperature rises it
will over-correct the precipitation increases and so produce droughts. In contrast, the model predictions for marine cloud
brightening in the troposphere show increases and reductions of precipitation with a trend for reductions in wet places and
increases in dry ones. The strongest reductions are over the sea and one case shows that a small reduction in precipitation
on land is more than offset by lower evaporation. The effects of marine cloud brightening have a higher frequency response
that stratospheric sulphur. It would be very surprising if it produced exactly the same effect through the year in all places so it
follows that intelligent choice of where and when to use it would be better, or at least less bad, than steady, all-year everywhere
spraying. The paper suggests that it may be possible to improve the usefulness of climate models by borrowing an engineering
idea from telecommunications to get an everywhere to everywhere transfer function. The oceans would be divided into a
number of regions. The model settings for the concentration of condensation nuclei in each region would be altered up and
down in each region with different random sequences each of which would be correlated with model predictions round the
world.
Biography
Stephen Salter is emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh.After anApprenticeship in the aircraft industry he worked on a range of problems
including robotics, renewable energy, desalination, oil hydraulics, mine clearance, explosion suppression and voter-friendly traffic-congestion charging.
S.Salter@ed.ac.ukStephen Salter
University of Edinburgh, Scotland