Читать книгу Answers to World Problems - Butch Biendara - Страница 4

It has been said that the entire energy needs of USA could be met with the solar energy that falls on an area of just a one hundred miles square. That 10,000 square mile area needed to capture all of the USA energy needs, is just 0.3 % (zero, point 3% or a fraction of 1 / 312th) of the continental USA or less than 10% of Nevada’s 109,826 square miles of area. For another perspective, the panhandle of Texas is about 160 miles by 130 miles, which would show up as a small spot a bit below and left of center in the image above and is twice the size needed for that mystical solar collection area. While it has been suggested that the US pursue a path to harness that solar energy, the construction of the plant, the collection and distribution of the energy can be dealt with in another paper and the concept is included here just to show how much solar energy falls on any defined area of the earth’s surface.

This composite map shows that the small ‘Texas Panhandle’ spot, that would represent the 100 mile square plot of land meeting all of the USA power needs, is dwarfed in the north Africa desert that is over 200 times larger, and hotter with its location that is closer to the equator. That’s over 200 times the total energy use of the USA that is spun off to send that latent solar energy “POWER” on its destructive path toward the USA.

How does the sunshine in the Sahara and its increase in global warming bring the destructive weather to the USA?

HOW USA STORMS GROW

Start with the hot dry air rising off millions of square miles of barren lands of the Sahara Desert, first by direct reflection and continuing through each night with the radiation of the stored heat that was absorbed in the rocks and sand during the day. It continues with the action of the northern hemisphere’s prevailing winds that circle the globe near the equator blowing from east to the west as the early sailors learned to follow the Trade Winds that carried them west from the east shore of Africa to the New World.

As the hot air passes over the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean, a huge amount of water evaporates from the warm ocean and begins to rise. Strange as it may seem, water vapor is lighter than air. It is the steam rising from a pot of boiling water, or the clouds of moisture floating high in the sky that shows up as a reading on a barometer of lower atmospheric pressure or lighter air.

When the water vapor rises to mix with the air, the water vapor displaces the other gas molecules to mix up a lighter atmospheric combination and just as water in a basin starts to spin on its own when you pull the plug of a sink, the rising mass of lighter moist air starts to spin as it lifts higher into the atmosphere.

For a good understanding of the relationship of Africa and the USA, the image below shows a global view including both continents. It shows the relationship of North Africa, the Atlantic Ocean and the USA along with the equator and the tropic of cancer, that north latitude that gets direct overhead sun at the middle of summer. That Tropic of Cancer, the highest direct overhead reach of the mid summer sun, while still south of the continental USA, runs right through the center of the Sahara desert. In that latitude, the sun has a direct straight overhead shot at baking the dry desert sands.

The heated air from north Africa, picks up water as it passes over the Atlantic, to then drop it’s moisture and expend the acquired energy as it is deflected by the South American continent to go west and north up through the Caribbean and the gulf of Mexico.

To illustrate and comprehend the enormous energy involved, hurricane Katrina, a recent large hurricane, but not the largest one, dropped about four, (4) billion tons of rain on the US. That amount of water in one compact container would measure a cube two miles on each side. That’s just an indicator of the power of the sun transmitted into hot air over North Africa lifting moisture from the Atlantic and moving it west. The energy of the winds generated by those gargantuan updrafts is a whole lot more.

Hurricanes don’t have a precise progress of development and travel path. Some small storms dump their rain and energy in the Atlantic to die out before reaching any land. Even those that do hit land have varying levels of energy. And the paths of storms can hit land in the northern parts of south America or veer north while at sea and hit as far north as Canada or safely loose their energy over the cooler waters off shore of the USA. The bad ones are the ones that bring that huge package of the suns’ energy and the Atlantic’s moisture for a direct hit on Central America or the continental USA.

I noted earlier that the year of 2013 had an unexpectedly light hurricane season. The reason was some unusually high temperatures in the Sahara. That may sound contradictory but the increased heat there made for unusually strong desert dust storms the blew all the way across the Atlantic. They were so big and dense that they showed up on satellite photos. Traces of that Sahara dust were found as far west as the central states of the USA and colored the clouds over the states near the Canadian border. That enormous dust storm blocked some of the sun on the Atlantic Ocean and reduced the rate of heat gain and evaporation that generates hurricanes.

2013 also had an unusually lower polar ice melt than preceding years and much less than anticipated for the year. Could this again be due to the global warming of the Sahara that raised major dust storms that blocked out some of the sun’s fierceness and reduced the storms that might have driven more warm air to the polar regions?

Those Sahara dust storms may be a means where nature plays some part in mitigating the season’s hurricanes, but is the enormous pollution that comes along with them really a positive solution to the problem?

The sun is the source of the power but it is the evaporation from the oceans that caries that power along in the low pressure storm systems moving from place to place. The turbulence of the tons of water rising through the atmosphere brings the winds that move the weather. Hurricanes die out over land or colder water.

The illustration below is a simple sketch from a NOOA flier on how the Atlantic hurricanes grow and move westward.

THE SOLUTION

An old proverb says “To solve your future problems, you must make your enemy’s children your friends”. Lets look to where the storms are born as babies, for a solution to stop them before they ever get started.

There is no man-made structure that can hold back the furious rage of weather storms driven by the power of the sun. Even though a thousand ‘consultants’ will say ‘yes’ to your every question, and then charge for the extended unforeseen contingencies. Once the sun’s energy has been put into motion, that power is beyond any solution devised by mankind.

Rather than trying to stop the energy of those enormous storms or to defuse that energy to some harmless end result, the answer is to stop the gigantic energy of the tropical sun from ever building the mobile energy force that sends a devastating storm to the USA.

It’s not a quick and easy solution, but rather a practical and doable solution that can be done in increments by any and all interested parties.

Quite simply - plant a forest that covers the Sahara Desert and ideally all of North Africa.

Given that the size of the North African desert area is larger than the continental USA, it might seem to be an insurmountable task to plant a forest in the desert. In the two hundred year history of the USA, the land has been transformed in a great number of ways and in a much shorter time the US population has shifted from the productive plains to the coastal areas. It is not an instant fix and will take some time. However, if you break the problem down to workable units, a man can eat an elephant in bite-sized pieces.

The reason that north Africa is a desert and not a tropical forest is that in spite of the abundant sunshine, there is not currently any significant water to allow for plant growth the can make productive use of the immense amount of solar energy falling on the ground. The southern part of the continent of Africa has the Atlantic to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east to bring moisture from winds blowing either direction. But northern Africa has its weather coming from the vast continent of Asia’s vast desert regions.

There are geological signs of ancient major rivers flowing and petroglyphs showing jungle animals that someone saw there a long time ago. There are still some small areas with small amounts of rainfall and groundwater as shown at the red spot near the top of the first composite image. At that location, about 70 miles from the coast and at an elevation of 500 feet, a small watercourse flows from the hills to water some fields a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long before it disappears into the desert sand.

While the land may appear barren now, one advantage of the long period of not growing anything, is that there has been little plant growth to draw nutrients from the soil. The slow natural breakdown of minerals has had no plants to draw it out or any major rainfall to wash it away. With just the right amount of water the desert could burst into bloom again. It has happened over many miles of what was barren desert in the southwestern states of the USA where dams and canals brought water from the mountains to irrigate thousands of acres of lush crops.

So where might the proposed huge amount of new water for the Sahara come from?

There is the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and the Red Sea to the east. It is salt water and a long way from the center of the Sahara. Now the question changes to methods of transportation and desalination, two readily workable procedures

MITIGATION MEASURES

Tied into this issue is that global governments recognize that their industrial production regularly produces toxic or polluting elements and that there may be a price to be paid to mitigate those problems. To do the mitigation at the site of the production plant may require a total destruction of the plant and a reconstruction cost that is more than the productive business can survive. The USA is all ready using the “Cap and Trade” policy of allowing a polluting production plant to continue in operation by ‘buying’ clean air credits in some other means. In California, polluting industries that can’t be cleaned up without a reconstruction of the entire plant, can pay to buy up older ‘gross polluting’ cars and get the equivalent amount of air pollution reduction.

Lets take that idea to a higher level and think globally. If entire nations can direct funding from their polluting industries to a worldwide program of cleaner air, it doesn’t take too much arm-twisting to have those ‘Cap and Trade’ funds directed to improving other parts of the world, like North Africa. The fines or penalties of polluting industries can be directed to companies that can devise and produce wind driven pumps and solar powered distillation devices to bring salt water from the four sides of North Africa, inland to the barren areas where some of the barren land can be used to collect the solar energy to distill the water, and the surrounding areas with better soil can become productive with the use of the new fresh water source.

To begin testing to perfect the process, a preferred site would have a high hill near a shoreline where windmill ‘farms’ would pump seawater up the hills to storage reservoirs. The water then flows by gravity to the next reservoir at a farther inland location and slightly lower elevation than the first windmill pump.

More windmill ‘farms’ would again pump the water to another higher reservoir. A big plus is that much of the area of the Sahara desert is less than 1,000 above sea level. The image below shows that although there are a few higher interior mountains, much of the area near the coastlines and even at times very far inland, is simply barren low desert. As such there are no high barriers to need huge pumps such as the Edmonston Pumping Plant where water is pumped 1,926 ft up over the Tehachapi mountain pass to bring northern California water to southern California.

OPERATIONS STAFF

Obviously there will be some need to operate, maintain and repair the equipment and to plant and harvest what is grown in these newly irrigated lands. That brings in another social element whereby the vast crowds of migrant workers with limited education and skills from Africa, India and southeast Asia would be glad to find a place to have an ongoing job and enjoy the option to grow some crops for their food.

With a simple design and construction of the solar stills, the regular job of cleaning the salt residue from distillation is a job not requiring rocket science skills. My rough ‘first-cut’ concept for the distillation device is a shallow black plastic pan about six feet on each major side-to-side dimension, in the shape of a collection of hexagons. The reason for the hexagons is to allow for seven subdivisions of one inner hexagon surrounded by six interlocking hexagons, each about two feet in size. The sides of the small internal hexagons would provide the strength and structure to make the panels stable.

Each individual small hexagon would have an open vertical tube in its center to be a support for the center of the cell’s lightweight clear cover / solar distillation panel. That open tube would also be the means to collect the moisture from the inner slopes of each hexagon’s cover. The perimeter of each small hexagon would be a double wall with the space between the two walls formed as a small trough running between the two perimeter walls that would slope down to one lowest spot where a tube would collect the distilled water and drain it out the bottom. Note the blue circles at the junctions of hexagons where just three drains would collect the water from the outer perimeters of all seven hexagons. The ten drains would be collected into a manifold to drain either into some container or plumbed into waterlines for distribution elsewhere.

It would have a very low, pyramid-shaped top cover made of a clear plastic also shaped into seven hexagons. The cover need not be very heavy but possibly be just paper thin relying on the bottom pan for it’s support. Rather than having the tops be the full height of a pyramid, they would truncate at half the height to have the top half inverted into a depressed cone shape. The bottom surface of the cover would collect distilled water into the center drain tube and the outer perimeter collection channels.

An alternative cover design could have the top cover be full height and thereby eliminate the drains in the center of each small hexagon to have just the three perimeter drains collect all of the water.

Each panel has 21 square feet of surface area and they would be made of a strong, lightweight material that a man or two could handle for transport and leveling with no machinery. They need to support the 55 pounds that a half-inch layer of water would weigh. With a simple float controlled refilling valve they would always be refilled with salt water.

These solar pans could be set up as rooftops where a group of them would provide shade and shelter for a living space under them. A nice feature of the multi-hexagon shape is that additional panels fit together nicely to form a larger continuous panel. Or in non-farmed areas even on rocky ground or steep hillsides, they would be leveled with dirt, rocks or sticks, and anchored down by simple means any peasant could understand. Salt water would flow into the pan’s bottom tray where the sun then evaporates it and the vapor collects on the inside of the cover to flow to the edges where a separate channel carries the fresh water to a corner where it drains into an external collection pot. Periodically, after many refills and evaporation cycles, the remaining salt residue would build up to very salty brine, and attention is needed to remove the cover and clean the bottom pan. The salt brine can then be left in open air pools to completely dry for a recoverable sea-salt by-product with its own commercial value. And another environmental benefit is that with the waste water pools of heavily salted water setting out to dry completely, there is some small reduction in air temperature and an increase in air humidity, both are improvements to the local desert weather.

With endless wind to power the pumps, endless sun to distill the saltwater and grow crops, refugee or impoverished groups could set up communities on the former barren land to grow their own productive crops and to plant and grow trees as well. With wide interests and choices, experimentation will find what type of trees grows best in any particular soil and is most productive. It will not be an instant corporate success but rather a slowly progressing experiment to bring people with limited skills into productive roles to feed themselves and grow the exportable crops and logs that they will eventually harvest.

BROAD WORKING FRONT

The coastal ‘shoreline’ of North Africa which is the Atlantic to the west and south and the Mediterranean to the north runs to about 5,000 miles long. Skipping the few places where rivers currently flow to the sea and port towns have grown and agriculture in now underway, it still leaves an immense span of shoreline to begin pushing back the desert wasteland. Surveys will locate the areas of better soils most suitable for planting along with the better areas for locations of windmills and laying pipelines. There is room for potentially thousands of systems to be developed on experimental basis.

SOCIAL - CULTURAL ISSUES

Will there be problems? Of course there will be unforeseen social or cultural issues to be solved. Any time there is something of value at another place, there is a move to capture that value by those who have less. Greed is the driving force behind most efforts. But the vast empty barren lands of northern Africa can allow for the many cultures and societies to move away from conflicts and starvation to distant lands where they can form communities as they find their best fit.

Is that a migration of peoples to be concerned about? It might be somewhat similar to the migrations of early humans out of Africa, the other migrations of peoples east and west, or the migration of the people of Europe moving on to the New World of the Americas.

Yes there will be problems to deal with but the enormous space to be developed can allow for vast numbers of people to develop an otherwise barren land into a viable productive paradise.

BACK TO GLOBAL WARMING

And to return to the beginning point where we started with the topic of global warming, in a few hundred years the solar furnace of North Africa will have been turned down by the ‘harvesting’ of that solar energy to grow productive food and forests. Thus the solar engine that stores up energy and crosses the Atlantic to pull moisture aloft and builds the huge storms that spend that energy to cause so much destruction in the USA will be tamed in a productive way before they grow into a monster.

REDUCED CARBON DIOXIDE

As the formerly barren land develops into cropland and forest, the growth slowly extracts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a natural process. Pulling that huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will in itself help to reduce global warming.

THE ULTIMATE FIX?

In a hundred years, there may be new issues to resolve, if the desert is covered with forests and farms to satisfy the millions of new residents. When we are taming the solar tiger that sends killing storms to the USA we will be blessed if we can only get halfway to that goal by the end of this century.