Boiling the ocean is not recommended.

“Boil the Ocean”, is a business meme that means to undertake an impossible task or project or to make a job or project unnecessarily difficult.

Some put global warming mitigation in the realm of the impossible.

These are the adapters, who seek to reduce the negative effects of climate change and to take advantage of every opportunity it might present.

There is plenty of evidence in support of this position considering all efforts to date to contain emissions have flopped.   

But in the words of Upton Sinclair, the American writer, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California come to mind with respect to the difficulty of the problem,  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

There are plenty of salaries dependent on not understanding how to solve the problem of global warming. Which oddly enough requires boiling.

Just not of water.

The idiom, “Boil the Ocean”, is attributed to Will Rogers, the American humorist, who suggested boiling the ocean was the only way to deal with World War I’s German U-boats.

“I think if you heated up the Atlantic ocean, the submarines would turn pink and rise to the surface where you could easily capture them,” he said.

And in response to a question from a man in his audience who asked,  “But how do you boil an ocean?”  Rogers responded, “I’ve given you the solution. It’s up to you to work out the details.”

A recent study suggests, our neighboring planet, Venus, may have had a liquid surface for billions of years. Before UV radiation broke the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen that has escaped to space. With the result the current atmosphere of Venus is made up almost completely of carbon dioxide that has produced a greenhouse blanket that has warmed the surface to a temperature of 464 degrees Celsius.

The Washington Post reports the current heat dome over the American Southeast has led to ocean surface temperatures of between 32 and 35 degrees Celsius in the Florida Keys.

This is remote from the boiling temperature of water. But the transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes of physics. With the result, as Tom Murphy, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, notes in his book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, given the steady energy growth of 2.3% America has experienced since 1650, the Earth’s surface temperature will be 100 degrees Celsius in 450 years per the following graphic.

And in fact ocean water can be boiled today at room temperature under a vacuum, which is the principle behind “Open Cycle Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion”. 

Warm surface water is introduced through a valve in a low pressure compartment and flash evaporated. The vapor drives a generator and is condensed by the cold seawater pumped up from below. The condensed water can be collected and because it is fresh water, used for various purposes per the following graphic.

But this design as well as all conventional ocean thermal energy conversion approaches is at least half as efficient as Thermodynamic Geoengineering, which uses both warm and cold water contiguous to the evaporator and condenser, doesn’t dump cold water near the ocean surface, uses pipe that are one order in diameter smaller, thus reducing the entire cost of the system, pumps 1/200^th of the fluids, and reduces the parasitic pumping losses of these fluids by a third. Per the following graphic.

Thermodynamic Geoengineering operates on the same principle as a heat pump. Both transfer thermal energy between two locations.

Heat flows naturally from places of higher temperature to locations with lower temperatures but in the oceans, which are the repository of 93% of the heat of warming, hot warm water is more buoyant than cold water. To cool the surface therefore, which is the requirement for climate mitigation, surface water has to be pumped against buoyancy deeper, or it has to be diluted by cold water pumped up to the surface. Which in either instance consumes energy.

Like a heat pump, though, Thermodynamic Geoengineering moves heat through the phases of a low-boiling-point working fluid. But in the case of Thermodynamic Geoengineering this is a free ride. Furthermore the hotter the ocean surface gets, the more energy and more efficient is Thermodynamic Geoengineering.  

A  evaporator at the surface boils the working fluid, producing a pressure that allows the vapor to flow into the deep, cold, water where the vapor condenses to a liquid that is pumped back to the surface to complete the cycle.

    These vapor flows can be interrupted by a heat engine that can convert the vapor into electrical energy with a loss of only about 4.8% in pumping losses returning the condenser working fluid back to the surface. Or In other words, almost 12 times much energy is produced by the system as is consumed internally by the pumps.

Heat pumps typically use about five times less energy in the cooling mode than in their heating mode because in cold weather there isn’t as much heat that can be absorbed from outside the system.

Thermodynamic Geoengineering is also a highly efficient way of cooling the surface. In part because there is a lot  more cold water in the oceans than hot water. Which in the latter case is the principle hazard of climate change.

Using this resource  to the best advantage by using it to boil a working fluid like ammonia or carbon dioxide,  can mitigate every consequence of climate change, and can provide all the energy necessary to provide all of the planets cooling and heating needs as well as the fuel every hard to decarbonize sector of the economy requires.

There are a lot more salaries dependent on understanding the basic physics of global warming than there are in the extractive and production side of the fossil fuel industry, which is flush with the technical expertise that is transferable to producing a sustainable economy and planet.

Instead of making the job of defeating climate change unnecessarily difficult, it is long past time we starting taking the easy route too planetary salvation dictated by the laws of thermodynamics.