Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

I have been trying to draw some diagrams to explain what I think we should be doing. I will scan these and post them here in the next day or so.
Meanwhile, here is a link to similar minded thinking displayed on Wikipedia.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

• A thing to remember is that none of this is rocket science!
  This is all doable with technology already available and very well understood.   
• As the Wikipedia article shows, this is a 'base load' technology; it will just hum along in the background for ever and a day. This power source will keep insulated ice in a frozen, solid, less-dense-than-seawater, state for hundreds if not thousands of years. 

Notice that the authors of the article are pointing to all the things I have mentioned in the description in the side panel at the right hand side of this blog page

Society for the Reversal of Ocean Acidification & Creation of Ocean Havens

I have never done anything like this before but it is becoming clear to me that the only way to get this project under way is to act as if it is already happening.

The

  Society for the Reversal of Ocean Acidification and Creation of Ocean Havens, 

is hereby proclaimed.

The acronym for that would seem to be SoROACOH which could be pronounced in a manner close to the name of  Sirocco, the dry wind from the Sahara which blows into southern Europe.  Non native speakers of English might want to pronounce the "A" sound as well. Of course anybody who participates might want to improve on the name; such suggestions will be welcome. Note, my daughter Gwyneth vetoed ".. Creation of Ocean Cities"  on the grounds that bogans [= persons with more time than wits on hand] would add a "K" to the end of the initials. She is probably right.

Cheers

The Last Great Global Warming - article in Scientific American Magazine

The July 2011 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

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

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

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

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.