A New Spin on Climate Engineering  

TreeHugger has a post on a proposal for mitigating climate change using a form of biomimicry from Pax Scientific's Jay Harman (which I admit makes little sense to me) - A New Spin on Climate Engineering.

Jay Harman's idea of using spiral dynamics to create spinning, vortex-shaped impellers that serve as heat sinks and buy us time to avert climate changes with a clean energy economy is not new. We've chronicled Harman's biomimicry-inspired inventions before. And geoengineering's promise has yet to be realized in combating warming temperatures. Yet Pax Scientific, a company Harman helped found, is now proposing to carry out a one-year study, says a special issue of Ode, to figure out exactly how much anthropogenic warming might be offset by Harman's brand of atmospheric engineering, and at what cost.

Pax Scientific is proposing to carry out a one-year study that would use atmospheric modeling, energy scaling, and modeling of vortices to see if Harman's theory that a vortex impeller could be used to mix the atmosphere, bringing it back into balance, and providing some cooling will work.

Computer modeling had already confirmed, according to Ode, that a 747 aircraft engine could create a vortex that could redistribute energy in a sky space 6 miles by 31 miles.

Of course, there are some unknowns and dangers, the first being how to keep the vortex under some semblance of control, as if it cut loose from its source, it could wreak havoc. Harman proporses setting up a nearby vortex to cancel out the first.

This is the last in a series of stories printed in The Plain Dealer this year as part of "The Year of the River," a recognition of the Cuyahoga River's return to health 40 years after it infamously caught fire. This story looks to new hope for bringing life to the industrial mouth of the river.

Maybe biomimicry can finish saving the Cuyahoga.

The new, nature-inspired engineering could be the source of environmental improvements to the river that runs through Cleveland -- especially in the biologically challenged, steel-lined shipping channel.

That someday is already dawning, some key river advocates say.

Biomimicry is the fast-growing field in which engineers, artists and designers are drawing more and more from natural examples of successful adaptations to solve human problems.