You can learn even more about the StratoShield and the science behind it on our video, Climate Science page, Our Answers about Geoengineering and the StratoShield White Paper.
What is the StratoShield?
The StratoShield is one possible way to respond to a climate emergency in which greenhouse warming becomes intolerable. The StratoShield would reverse greenhouse warming by slightly reduc¬ing the amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth. The shield does this by increasing the amount of sulfur aerosols injected into the atmosphere by about 1%, a process that happens naturally whenever volcanoes erupt. The aerosols reflect incoming sunlight back into space. Although the change in sunlight would be imperceptible to human eyes—and probably beneficial for plants—it would have a substantial cooling effect for the part of the Earth under the shield.
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Because these are controversial areas of exploration, we are often misunderstood. We hope these clear statements will help us steer towards more scientific discussion.
1. What is geoengineering?
“Geoengineering” describes how the earth’s systems can be influenced by engineering solutions. There are many historic examples of how humans have used technology to change geological systems. From using fire to drive game to building irrigation for agriculture, seeding clouds during droughts, reversing the Chicago River to building the Hoover dam, the term can encompass all sorts of ideas. Today, options discussed often include large-scale engineering of the environment in order to combat or counteract the adverse effects of human-induced changes in the atmosphere and climate.
2. Why is Intellectual Ventures researching geoengineering technologies?
Intellectual Ventures looks at hard problems facing the world and brainstorms ideas and technologies that can lead to better solutions. Global warming is a very significant problem, but it won’t be solved with old ideas and old technology alone. We believe that the solution to this crisis will involve new ideas and new technologies.
Intellectual Ventures recognizes that the process of bringing new global warming ideas to the surface can be challenging and controversial. But as an invention company, we believe research needs to be done now, rather than after the full complications of global warming are upon us. Read more…
Energy from the sun heats up the surface of the ocean. As that heat irradiates up and fuels storms, they can become ever more dangerous hurricanes. Reducing their destructive potential is possible if we can just cool off the surface of the ocean. Even just one degree centigrade might be the difference between a category 4 or category 5 hurricane. This is a nearly ridiculous notion because of the scale involved. Thousands of square miles of ocean surface might need to be cooled off.
The Salter Sink is a simple idea, with massive potential. Two insights make it very compelling:
Everywhere there is hot water on the surface of the ocean, there is cold water down below.
This makes us think you just need to stir the ocean up a little bit. Of course, that too would take a staggering amount of energy, but…
There is a tremendous amount of energy available – in waves.
Wave energy is often dismissed as impractical to use because it is located far from people (where we need energy). It is also difficult to harness because of the harsh conditions equipment would have to sustain.
The Salter Sink works as a wave powered pump. Waves push hot water into the top of the cylinder, which pumps the water inside down. It comes out the bottom (around 200 meters below) and mixes with colder water. This brings the temperature on the surface down over time. A Salter Sink can move about a gigawatt of thermal energy! It may take thousands of these to protect America’s Gulf region (for example) but we estimate the cost would be much lower than the damage caused by one of these storms.
This concept is delightfully simple and singularly gargantuan. It has captured our imagination here in the lab for a couple years, and we hope lots of other folks will find it interesting as well. This movie illustrates the idea, and we also have a Salter Sink White Paper with more detail.
High quality m4v video.
We’ve been working on some ideas related to climate change, as a kind of backup plan in case human effort to curb emissions don’t succeed fast enough to prevent devastating ecological damage. One of the ideas that has captured our imagination is replicating the way volcanoes have at times brought down the temperature of the planet by erupting sulfur dioxide particles up into the stratosphere. We’ve invented a “hose to the sky” we call the StratoShield, which is a comparatively cost effective way to do this. The invention is profiled in SuperFreakonomics and we’re hoping to have some scientific discussion about its potential.
HD quality m4v.
For the first time we’ve got some technical details to share publicly. Please take a look at this StratoShield White Paper if you’d like to know more.
We are inventors. We look at hard problems facing the world and brainstorm whether new ideas and new technologies could help. Climate and energy are big problem areas with lots of room for improvement.
Global warming needs attention. Nobody yet knows how we will solve these problems. We work on whole spectrum of energy and climate-related inventions. By putting new possibilities on the table, humanity as a whole can make better choices about our future.
We can’t wait until it’s too late. We don’t believe that climate technologies are a substitute for reducing emissions, but we can’t wait to explore such crucial and complex possibilities until we might need them. We are not advocating deployment, we are advocating further exploration.
Please read more about this work on our Climate Science page.
“When you read the actual scientists’ reasoning for how [geoengineering] could work, and might need to work, it’s really hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s idiotic to discount it. Not to say it’s a slam dunk to do it, but idiotic to discount it entirely.”
A great quote from Stephen Dubner in this Guardian interview with him and Steven Levitt. We’re big fans of Freakonomics and delighted to have some of our climate science inventions featured in their upcoming sequel – Superfreakonomics. The new book is already starting to make some headlines even though it’s not due out until October 20.
Another U.K. paper, The Independent, also published a review that mentions our “hose-to-the-sky” concept. This is an idea for pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the planet. The Independent calls it “the outer limits of freakonomics.”
We’ll post a lot more about our climate science projects soon.
As hurricane season gets rolling, we’ve been getting a lot of interest in our hurricane suppression technology, which could be a simple way to reduce the force of these massive storms. These inquiries are the result of press about Bill Gates being one of the (twelve) inventors listed on the patent. We often host “invention sessions” with a wide variety of experts in the same room exploring problems and ideas. In the lab, we call this invention the “Salter Sink” as it originates with ideas of Stephen Salter, who has worked extensively on wave energy. We’ve been working to validate aspects of this idea and research some of the big questions about how well it would work. We’ll continue to do so, and begin sharing some of this work in a few months.
In the mean time, I’d like to point out that we aren’t building this device, and have no plan to. We are exploring ideas to solve the world’s hard problems in energy and climate issues, and need lots of other folks to research them too before they can be considered for deployment.
It might be possible to suppress hurricanes so they aren’t so devastating to people who live in their path. We’ve been inventing in this area along with climate change and alternative energy sources. Today a patent application related to this was published by the USPTO and TechFlash has written a nice piece about this. Some of the questions that came up in the comments there are about whether this type of inventing should be done in the first place. We absolutely believe that we should investigate our options should the environmental change cause severe disruption. This type of technology is not something humankind would try as a “Plan A” or “Plan B.” These inventions are a “Plan C” where humans decide that we have exhausted all of our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies. If our planet is in this severe situation, then our belief is that we should not be starting from scratch at investigating mitigation options.
We’re looking forward to discussing these ideas and will post more about them here later this year.