I’m an old man and started worrying about Climate Change many years ago.
Most solutions to climate change assume that controlling this monster will be a long slow process. But the speed of climate change – especially in its terrifying forms of burning forests and enormous floods – has shocked the world, and brought fear and despair to us all – especially young people, who are likely to have to live with the results. Many even wonder whether they should have children…
Some excellent improvements have been promoted while trying to find the answer to Global Warming – renewable energy, sustainable transport and building – but they haven’t even tried to provide a quick targeted means of getting rid of the heat!
So why do I think I can offer a real solution to Climate Change? Partly, I have the time (I’m retired)… Partly, I have spent much of my working life thinking-about, worrying-about and otherwise arranging the movement of heat in a small family-owned business, working to make bath-sponges! Our products needed close control of heat – it was a bit like baking…
If the temperature was too low, the sponge didn’t form and you had a sloppy mess…
If it was too hot, the sponge shrivelled up and looked like overbaked tomato…
Either way, a lot of expensive work-hours, machine-time, raw materials, electricity and gas had been wasted, a customer had to be placated in an embarrassing phone call, email or fax (this was a few decades ago) and there was less money in the bank. So we had a strong incentive to resolve heat-problems fast!
Also, because we were a small company, and not cash-rich, we had to make sure that any improvements could be put to work quickly…
On this basis, my co-director Paul, our co-workers and I had to learn about the manipulation of heat in the manufacturing process.
We also had to control heat in the factory where we were all working. In the area where the work took place we used radiant heaters. But over a period we learned that the heat seemed to be sucked away to the cold corners.
(I now know that this was an illusion – in fact the heat was flowing within the air due its own energy rather than being sucked). If you are keen to know about how this works, please follow the links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer
At first I thought, ‘other people will resolve this problem, and find Global Warming solutions soon’. But as time went by, I became more and more worried. Paul and I were used to analysing problems and designing machines, so I started to think ‘perhaps I can design solutions to Climate Change myself – after all, Global Warming is only a much bigger version of the smaller climate control solutions we have faced in the factory. After all, air and water are both fluids, and they follow the same rules’.
Then I remembered an experiment which Paul and I carried out in the factory. We had a very demanding customer for whom we were developing a new type of foam.
We had prepared a special batch of liquid material at a temperature of nearly 100 degrees Celsius. He expected us to be able to make samples of the foam the next day. But I discovered, very uncomfortably, that cooling the liquid would normally take a week…
At the time it was quite common to warm the water for a paddling pool by leaving a long hose full of cold water stretched out in the sunlight. We decided to reverse this process: we placed a bar over the open top of the tank and looped 100 metres of hose around the bar, so that almost all the hose was submerged in the very hot liquid. We connected the hose to the ordinary cold water tap and turned it on. Result! The water came out of the hose steaming, and the liquid in the tank was cold the next day. We had transferred the heat from the liquid in the tank to the water in the hose… and we were able to make foam the next day!
This is the principle which will cool the world!
However, my first attempts to think this out were frustrating and slow. I started by asking myself – if Global Warming and Climate Change are so damaging, where is the problem most harmful to human and animal life? It is always easier to start on a smaller scale…
My answer was – all over the Earth’s surface, but especially in the lowest 200 meters / 600 feet of the atmosphere, where most people live.
I also remembered that if you look at a picture of Mount Fuji, or the Alps, the snow is on the top, because the top is colder than the bottom. I thought, could this bring the answer to Climate Change?
Gradually I learnt the science of atmospheric temperature, and the rule (slightly simplified here) that for every 100 meters you go up, the temperature goes down by 1 degree C.(If you have a car with an external thermometer, you can check this for yourself by watching the readings as you drive up- and down-hill).
So I thought, could this be like the factory, where the cold corners seemed to suck the heat from the hot centre? Can the answer to Global Warming possibly be, to suck the heat upwards to a point where it no longer harms us, and from which it can’t return? (scientifically called: adiabatic cooling).
I spent many hours and days looking at data collected from ‘Radiosondes’ over the years. (If you are interested in following my thought-processes here, I suggest you look at the brilliant work done by the University of Wyoming on https://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html). I studied heat-transfer materials, rejected solids such as copper, and decided to rely on heat’s easy movement through air and/or water.
Remembering the old saying “Hot Air Rises”, I made several designs.
First of the Global Warming solutions was a structure which I call the ‘Armadillo™’.
The flow of air starts at or slightly above ground level.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:23fde29e-2daf-3fe0-b910-2979970efc7d
Why did I choose this name? Because I see the conical outside – a very strong shape to withstand storms, and protect the vulnerable central structure – as covered with scales, like the animal…
Next, I developed it into the Fontana™. This is a more sophisticated version, which uses a powerful centrifugal fan to power and control the upward flow of air. It has the advantage that it can be controlled, either by a local operator or by a larger-scale system.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:9ec704c3-51f3-3de3-92d1-2f7664d265c0
Both use an underground water-distribution system:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:e13d472d-9ba0-3ef8-adf3-85dd80fcf5b5
This spreads the water condensed from the moist air under the soil, so that it will be absorbed quickly by the roots of plants nearby, without being lost to evaporation or run-off.
Both are basically chimneys surrounded by heat-insulating material with controllable air-inlets at ground level, and grids to prevent birds from being drawn in. The low-level air is almost always warmer and moister – and at a higher pressure – than the upper air into which it flows.
When the warm air reaches the exit, it flows upwards into the surrounding air – which is at a lower pressure. This means that the freshly-introduced air high-pressure air expands into the low-pressure upper air which surrounds it, suction is created at the top, and an upward draft starts to draw, like the hot air from a fire being drawn up a chimney.
As the heat is sucked up the chimney in the air, moisture too is brought to a higher level. The upper sections (HeatLossVessels™) contain highly-conductive copper fins which project through the insulating layer into the cold outer air, which are chilled by contact with the outer air, and which can be cooled further by a brilliant technology called ‘Peltier Cooling’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect#Peltier_effect).
Since that first design, many further developments have occurred to me.
Firstly, it seemed to me essential to address the problems of countries on sea-shores – many of them in poorer countries.
Using basically the same principle, I designed the ‘OceanCoolingSystem™’
Armadillo™
The first of the solutions to climate change was the ‘Armadillo™’.
The ‘ArmadilloThe Armadillo™’ is basically a chimney surrounded by heat-insulating material with a controllable air inlet at ground level, and a grid to prevent birds from being sucked in. As (almost) always, the low-level air is warmer and moister than the upper air into which it flows, and an upward draft is created.
Not only is the heat sucked up the chimney in the air – moisture too is brought to a cooler level, where it can condense, becoming a controllable flow of water. If you are interested in this design, you can see it here:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:23fde29e-2daf-3fe0-b910-2979970efc7d
Why the name? Because I see the conical outside – a very strong shape to withstand storms and protect the vulnerable central structure – as covered with scales, like the animal…
Fontana™
Next, the Fontana™ is the more sophisticated of the two solutions to climate change, which uses a powerful centrifugal fan to power and control the upward flow of air.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:9ec704c3-51f3-3de3-92d1-2f7664d265c0
Both use an underground distribution system
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:e13d472d-9ba0-3ef8-adf3-85dd80fcf5b5
to spread the water condensed from the moist air under the soil, so that it will be absorbed quickly by the roots of plants nearby, without being lost to evaporation or run-off.
Leave a Reply