Ocean Cities: on the ocean, on the equator - 海上城市 - Kotakota Samudera

The Last Great Global Warming - article in Scientific American Magazine

2011-08-24T01:13:00.000+08:00

The July issue of Scientific American Magazine contains an article describing what is now known about a period of global warming that occurred about 56 million years ago.

During that period:

"in the course of a few thousand years—a mere instant in geologic time—global temperatures rose five degrees Celsius, marking a planetary fever known to scientists as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM.

"Climate zones shifted toward the poles, on land and at sea, forcing plants and animals to migrate, adapt or die. Some of the deepest realms of the ocean became acidified and oxygen-starved, killing off many of the organisms living there. It took nearly 200,000 years for the earth’s natural buffers to bring the fever down."

Image: Illustration by Ron Miller [from the magazine]

The article's author Lee R. Kump describes how the researchers went to the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago within the Arctic circle to retrieve drill core samples saved from earlier exploration work done during commercial mineral exploration. These sediment samples contained material which had been deposited throughout the PETM period and which had since been undisturbed underground until the drillers arrived.

What the deposits revealed, in summary, is that

"Global temperature rose five degrees Celsius 56 million years ago in response to a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That intense gas release was only 10 percent of the rate at which heat-trapping greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere today.

The speed of today’s rise is more troubling than the absolute magnitude, because adjusting to rapid climate change is very difficult."

The fossils in the mineral records indicate that absorption of carbon dioxide by the ocean caused significant acidification which happened then much slower than is happening now. Even so, something like 30 percent of all species of ocean flora and fauna die out.

"[the] evidence suggests the pace of Earth's most abrupt prehistoric warm-up paled in comparison with what we face today. The episode has lessons for our future."

Richard A Feely interview about ocean acidification on ABC Radio National - 'National Interest' program

2011-06-19T23:03:00.000+08:00

If you download the whole edition of the "In the National Interest" program, Richard Feely starts at about 29th minute and goes for about 10mins.

Study of ocean acidification using natural volcanic C02 seeps

2011-05-30T02:31:00.001+08:00

Another study - reported on the Physorg website - predicting the demise of coral reefs; a longer time-frame here: they say the die off may occur at the end of 21st Century
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-ocean-acidification-diversity-resiliency-coral.html

that article's source listed as:
"Losers and winners in coral reefs acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations," Nature Climate Change, June 2011.

More bad news for corals

2011-05-15T17:01:00.000+08:00

An Australian researcher has found that acidification of the ocean gives some seaweeds an edge over their coral neighbours.

"The new study experimentally confirms this hypothesis using two of the most abundant species co-occurring—and competing—on the Great Barrier Reef. The branching coral Acropora intermedia and the brown fleshy seaweed Lobophora papenfussii were placed in tanks exposed to four different carbon dioxide-dosing regimes, simulating the range of historical and projected ocean acidification conditions: pre-industrial, present-day, mid-century and late-century carbon dioxide levels ...

"The new study experimentally confirms this hypothesis using two of the most abundant species co-occurring—and competing—on the Great Barrier Reef. The branching coral Acropora intermedia and the brown fleshy seaweed Lobophora papenfussii were placed in tanks exposed to four different carbon dioxide-dosing regimes, simulating the range of historical and projected ocean acidification conditions: pre-industrial, present-day, mid-century and late-century carbon dioxide levels"

Click the link to see the short article on Seaweb.
Their Source: Diaz-Pulido, G. et al. 2011. High CO2 enhances the competitive strength of seaweeds over corals. Ecology Letters 14(2): 156-162

Upside-down "Hills Hoist" - an idea about growing kelp in equatorial deep ocean

2011-03-28T02:29:00.001+08:00

It occurs to me that one way of providing for the needs of kelp in deep ocean at the equator is to make something like an enormous, upside down, "Hills Hoist" circular clothes line and suspend this from a buoy.

Like the Hills Hoist clothes line [see Hills Products for examples of this] in which the central column can be wound up and down to facilitate easy hanging of cloths on the line, the upside down seaweed growing framework would be capable of being raised up at the start of a growing cycle to allow attachment of kelp and other seaweed seeds, and then lowered to the particular depth favoured by that species. Later the framework would be raised to facility harvesting and the seaweed. The buoys would need to be connected by a network of floating ropes or cables of which some would be linked no doubt to the Ocean Cities ice rafts. In order to keep the seaweed growing frameworks in good condition and not let them get damaged, or keep the kelp on them from being overshadowed by seaweed on other frameworks, some nodes of the network would need to be anchored to the sea floor four kilometres below.

海上城市

2010-12-14T01:33:00.000+08:00

海上城市﹕我想世界上的人們需要建立幾張非常大的泊在海中的冰台。
這幾大冰台可以泊在赤道。上面會帶城市﹐商業地﹐農村﹐ 娛樂地﹐什麼的。冰台
周圍的海水里會作海草場跟魚農場。

Further thoughts on bringing equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being: social and political necessities

2010-12-01T02:33:00.000+08:00

Further thoughts on how to bring equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being.

Initial finance for pumping equipment, compressors, piping, insulation, second-hand nets, cables, building materials, food supplies,   transportation, and so forth, will come from large companies wanting to invest in sequestration so as to ensure their own long term access to carbon credits.

Government of the ice rafts will have to be democratic and also involve citizen/elector equity. Voting must be direct with possibly two aspects of the franchise:
    1/ delegates for equal sized electorates would meet as a parliament and would be elected by means of compulsory, partial preferencial, voting;
    2/ electors themselves would constitute a citizens' house where voting power would be in proportion to the individual's equity in the city.

In effect each ice raft would have to be a type of municipality, a combination of city state, and proprietary company. It will be vitally important to prevent these municipalities spawning [of worse still becoming] entrenched bureaucracies so their constitutions would need to be overtly and unassailably democratic. One good way to bring that about will be to base them first and foremost on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with an emphasis on the essential need for embodiment of compassion, democracy, ethics and scientific method in the laws, policies, and projects the citizens create.

I think it is not possible to overemphasize the importance of democracy in such an endevour. Karl Popper provided us with the theory to explain why democracies can succeed where dictatorships and authoritarian societies fail. The history of the 20th Century and this early stage of the 21st have shown us clearly that what he said is correct: democracy is a prerequisite for security, social stability and economic growth [and not the other way round]. The problems that have turned up and threatened disaster are more or less all the consequences of attempts at subversion of democracy and suppression of the openness it depends on.

How we can save our world and have fun in the process.

2010-11-21T23:26:00.000+08:00

Dear reader, if you run into Sir Richard Branson please ask him to take a look at this. He might find it very interesting.

It would be really good if everybody was interested in fixing up the environmental damage that has been caused by human activities. If that were the case I wouldn't have to write this because dozens of other people, most of them smarter than me no doubt, would have already written this and vast numbers of people would already be beavering away to make it happen.

In my understanding the really big challenge coming our way is acidification of the ocean. The effects to be expected as the PH of the ocean decreases due to the ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being dissolved are that corrals will no longer grow, many kinds of shellfish will die out, and many kinds of bony and cartilaginous fish will die out also. We will all have to learn to eat jelly fish, and squid maybe.

I propose a way to reverse the increase of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean. The method is to sequester the carbon in seaweed, such as kelp.
This can be done as follows.

Kelp can be grown by means of attachment to cables or large nets suspended horizontally beneath the waves and parallel to the surface
It may be possible to grow corral in the same way
The best place to do this is out in the open ocean around the equator because that is where there is most sunlight to provide energy for the algae to grow and near the equator tropical cyclones [hurricanes] do not occur because there is no strong Coriolis wind effect
Nutrients for the kelp can be provided by raising ocean bottom water to the surface. This can be pumped upwards by the same kind of simple and robust technology used for extracting oil from the ground
The ocean bottom water is very cold and therefore can easily be mixed with surface waters to achieve optimum seawater temperatures for the kelp and corrals
The pumps for raising the ocean bottom water will be housed on very large ice rafts which will also provide a potentially vast area for people to establish permanent settlements, and factories for processing kelp, etc, into useful artifacts or chemical feed-stocks for plastic manufacturing
The ice will need to be insulated of course, above, below, and around the sides. This is all doable with current technology. Insulation in many places on the upper surface of the ice will be provided by soil and mulch.
The inhabitants of the ice rafts could grow their own food crops. Oil palms, genetically engineered to be very short in the stem and growing in the soil and mulch for example, could provide another source for income.
The energy for powering the bottom water lift pumps, the refrigeration compressors, and all the other needs will be taken from solar thermal concentration during the day, and at night from the temperature difference between surface water and ocean bottom water.
The motive force will be generated by means of Stirling engines wherein the cold ocean bottom water will provide the heat sink while concentrated solar energy will provide the heat source by day
Ice rafts of this sort could provide living space for many millions of people around the equator
Ice rafts of this sort could also provide a destination for eco-tourism; the possibilities are endless
For example, the equatorial location could also provide a place for certain types of launch facility for shooting small prefabricated steel parts into orbit

Cheers,
Mark Peaty

Solar powered cooking

2009-12-23T00:13:00.001+08:00

Thinking about solar power [AKA diurnal thermo-nuclear]; Maybe one of the most effective things we can do to counteract global warming and ocean acidification is to store heat energy in rocks and bricks to be used for frying, steaming and baking food. The simplest way of doing this will be to use curved mirrors to focus the sun's heat onto hollow pipes. The air inside the pipes needs to be heated to about 250 deg C but that just means the mirror concentrator for each such pipe needs to be about 6 times as wide as the diameter of the pipe. My recommendation is that the collector pipes are held immobile and exactly parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation. This arrangement means that the mirror concentrators only need to move right around the pipe once every 24 hours. [The word "Clockwork" comes to mind.] A Stirling engine can be used to pump/blow the hot air along an insulated delivery pipe [underground for preference], and into the bottom of the insulated rock pile or brick stack. The oven will be whatever shape suits the baking style of the home and will simply be the top part of the insulated brick stack with thick tiles for floor, walls and roof. The door could be hinged, or sliding, or just some kind of insulated metal sheet. As can be seen, none of this is "rocket science" is it! Furthermore, something similar but with different dimensions and lower temperatures could be made for drying the washing instead of using mechanical electric energy guzzling driers like so many urban households do now.

A little skepticism versus the infallibility of personal experience

2009-08-25T00:14:00.000+08:00

Below is a copy of a posting I have recently made [25 Aug '09] to a discussion group [about 'Consciousness] on FaceBook. In that particular thread I am being chided by "Dixie" an exponent of Zen meditation who tells me I am ignorant and deluded, because I don't sit and meditate like she does. I have taken to not denying such charges because, in my gathering dotage, I now see that it is true, at least for several reasonable values of the word 'true' anyway. But I am not happy to simply acquiesce in the assertions of somebody else's world view without challenge. I've been there, done that; there are too many other people who just wanna tell me how to think, for some reason or other. I am loath to just quietly accept the view of a person when they are asserting what amounts to the infallibility of personal experience.
Dixie has just remarked that she doesn't want to continue arguing "because this is not really a discussion any more", and so she is not going to post again, until I can prove that I have meditated as prescribed.

>>>
So Dixie, what you are saying is that your description of things MUST be right, because it IS right. If I ask how you know that it is right, what makes you so sure that it is not "make believe", you say it is because you KNOW that it is right and it could not be wrong.

But then one has to ask: do you mean that as far as you are concerned, it is not possible that you could be mistaken? Please understand that I am not asserting that you are mistaken, simply asking if you can conceive the possibility that your understanding could be wrong.

My reason for seeking this clarification is precisely because I have experienced being wrong in the past, and also experienced being *right*. The being wrong in various ways showed me things about myself, and about how people 'tick'. The being right showed me how there is a way, and there can be times when, MY decision is right, simply right. But it always seems that other people want to describe my world for me using their words, their concepts. They may be well meaning, they might be nice people, but how can I know if they really know what they themselves are talking about?

So this is why I ask, again, in other words: How can you be sure that what you experience in deep meditation is not just a deeper layer of naive realism?

You see, years ago I had an experience in which I knew that "God" had touched me. I didn't need anybody else to confirm that for me, and I still don't. Because of the context in which this occurred, I became a Christian. But that was then. Now I am not a Christian, but I still know that it was God - though I would rather say "Life" - which touched me. I don't need anybody else to interpret my life, my world, for me.

I am looking for people who are willing to engage with our world constructively, and that requires that none of us assumes we have a monopoly on truth.

Thinking new thoughts and daring to be different - the world has a new paradigm.

2009-05-03T19:05:00.000+08:00

For many years now I have been trying to work out what I ought to be doing. I suspect that many people have this as one of their projects, simmering away slowly at the back of their minds, if not at the front. I have come to adopt a collection of ideas, mostly pinched from other people of course but some seem to be my own home-brew. I have accepted for some time that there is a new paradigm a-brewing in the world, but couldn't see the totality.

Recently I became aware once again of the theory underlying Stirling engines [an idea first patented by Rev Robert Stirling, a Scot, in about 1816]. I became aware also of the truly vast number of practical applications of Stirling engines and the fact there is nothing stopping the deployment of these machines in thousands of places around our planet for the purposes of using solar power for generating electricity, desalinating seawater, driving air conditioners, and so forth.

A Stirling engine is simply a device for extracting useful mechanical energy from temperature differences in the environment. You can see for yourself on youtube that properly made Stirling engines can extract usable from the temperature difference between the skin of a person's hand and the air around them!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUQ9qT58omc and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeP5LSfW05w

OK so that is not a huge amount of power and motion, but there is no intrinsic limit to how these machines can be adapted to different locations and circumstances:

Simple collection of hot air under glass/polycarbonate laid over suburban rooftops [a temp diff of at least 20 deg C possible]
ocean floor water at 4 deg C next to tropical/equatorial surface water at about 20 deg C [15+ deg C diff possible night and day but greater possible with solar heating]
all manner of solar tracking mirror concentrators [or Fresnel lenses] can create temperature differences anywhere up to a few hundred degrees.

What this means is that all the protestations about solar power, wind power, and so forth being too expensive, or too inefficient, or too hard to implement, are just bollocks!

I can see now that Mark's law # 4 is indeed true:

When people cooperate and work together then, to the extent that we cooperate, all projects become possible that are in line with the laws of physics.

What this means is that the economists' preconception that 'value is based on scarcity' is an obsolete hangover from the pre-scientific universe.

Now we can see that value is that which enhances the quality of human existence. Value as such is created through human labour and there is NO intrinsic reason why we cannot achieve the emancipation of all people from slavery, poverty, fear, preventable disease, and unjust exploitation.
Why can I be sure of this? Because the paramount truth about us now is that we really are a new species: Homo sapiens scientificus and we are now in a position to take our place amongst all the other species living off the infinite stream of energy supplied each day by the sun. We have to wean ourselves off the milk of Mother Earth, ie stop burning all the liquid fossil hydrocarbons [rock oil] and crispy crunchy coals and lignites.

The burning of such vast amounts of hydrocarbons from out of the ground has put us in danger of potentially overwhelming disaster: climate changes which threaten the agriculture we depend on for food, heating and acidification of the oceans which may destroy all the fish species we depend on for food. But we can do things differently. There is no need for us to continue being stupid. Being "stupid" means to continue doing something which has been shown to be intrinsically self-defeating. We DO NOT have to be so stupid. Each one of us is capable of changing, what it takes is exposure to true information presented in a format we understand by people we trust in a context we can relate to.