Water helps close an electrical circuit at the scale of a planet.
The hydrological cycle lifts water into the atmosphere, where convection, supercooled droplets, ice crystals and graupel help electrify storms. This exhibition follows that moving water into the measured electrical connection between Earth, electrified clouds and the ionosphere — and then separates that science from Schauberger's planetary “bio-condenser” interpretation.
The global atmospheric electric circuit is established geophysics. A leaky capacitor is a useful analogy for the conductive Earth and ionosphere separated by weakly conducting air, while thunderstorms and electrified shower clouds supply generator current. Schauberger's conclusion resembles that circuit; his proposed stack of +4 °C water layers does not. The resemblance and the mechanism must be judged separately.
The global atmospheric electric circuit
In clean fair-weather conditions, the near-surface electric field is commonly of order 100–150 volts per metre and points downward, though weather, aerosols, terrain and structures can change it greatly. The conductive ionosphere is maintained at roughly +250,000 volts relative to the conductive surface. Between them lies weakly conducting air. The result behaves approximately like a leaky spherical capacitor, with a small continuous current through the atmosphere.
Thunderstorms charge the battery
Modern estimates vary with definitions and observing method. Global-circuit models commonly use roughly 1,000 active thunderstorms, while satellite measurements place the worldwide lightning-flash rate near 45–50 flashes per second. In mixed-phase clouds, collisions among ice crystals, graupel and supercooled droplets transfer charge; smaller ice is often lofted positive and graupel often falls negative, although polarity can reverse with temperature and liquid-water content. Electrified shower clouds also contribute current even without dramatic lightning.
Fair weather is the return path
In clear air, cosmic rays and natural radioactivity maintain small ions, so the atmosphere is not a perfect insulator. The fair-weather conduction current is only about 1–3 picoamperes per square metre, yet integrates to roughly 1–2 kA globally. Under clean fair-weather conditions, a person at the surface is standing within the broad return path of that circuit.
The Carnegie curve
Measurements made aboard the research vessel Carnegie, far from many local disturbances, revealed a universal-time daily rhythm in fair-weather potential gradient, with a broad maximum near 19:00 UT. Its relationship to the global distribution of electrified-cloud activity strongly supports the Carnegie curve as a signature of the planetary circuit, although local weather, pollution and aerosols can obscure it at individual sites.
Schumann resonances
The cavity between the conductive ground and ionosphere behaves as a resonator, excited mainly by lightning-generated electromagnetic waves. Its fundamental mode is near 7.8 Hz, with variable higher modes shaped by ionospheric conditions. This measured geophysical resonance does not by itself establish a therapeutic, consciousness-altering or other health effect.
His version: the terrestrial bio-condenser
Schauberger arrives at a capacitor image by a different road. Coats's presentation begins with liquid water's relative permittivity — near 80 around room temperature, but dependent on temperature and frequency — and the fact that atmospheric temperature reverses trend across several layers. Coats then calculates supposed altitudes where the air would pass through +4 °C. Those values are a feature of his reconstruction, not stable measured atmospheric boundaries.
Coats connects tropospheric clouds, polar stratospheric clouds and noctilucent ice clouds into supposed “plates” of pure water arranged around +4 °C levels. The atmosphere does not contain continuous liquid-water films at those heights. Noctilucent clouds, for example, are sparse ice crystals near 80–85 km in extremely cold, tenuous air. Applying bulk liquid water's permittivity to water vapor or sparse ice clouds is not valid.
The leaky-capacitor analogy is useful
But the measured circuit has different components.
The plates are in the wrong place
Right answer, wrong derivation.
The comparison is valuable precisely because the resemblance is limited. A charged Earth–ionosphere system is measured; continuous +4 °C water plates are not. Water and ice participate in storm electrification, but they do not form the circuit in the way Coats proposes. Judge the destination and the route separately: a familiar conclusion does not validate the argument used to reach it, and a failed mechanism does not erase every useful observation around it.
Storms, ozone and the vapour budget
The chapter closes by reconnecting atmospheric electricity to the water cycle. Coats gives historical evaporation figures of about 333,000 km³ per year from oceans and 62,000 km³ from land; modern assessments are higher and carry substantial dataset uncertainty, but agree that oceans supply the large majority of global evaporation. Land evapotranspiration — including plant transpiration — is regionally important. Forests can influence moisture recycling and downwind rainfall, but no single land cover controls global climate by itself.
Schauberger also proposed that ozone associated with thunderstorms replenishes the protective stratospheric layer. Modern atmospheric chemistry draws a different boundary: lightning produces nitrogen oxides and alters ozone mainly in the troposphere and upper-troposphere/lower-stratosphere region. It is not recognized as a meaningful source of global stratospheric ozone, which is formed principally through ultraviolet photochemistry.
The global electric circuit, fair-weather field of order 100–150 V/m, Earth–ionosphere potential near 250 kV, picoampere-per-square-metre return current, Carnegie curve and Schumann resonances are all measured geophysics. Thunderstorms and electrified shower clouds are major generators. Lightning chemistry creates nitrogen oxides that influence tropospheric ozone. Oceans provide most global evaporation; evapotranspiration is a major land flux.
Forest evapotranspiration, atmospheric moisture recycling and some downwind rainfall effects are well supported, while the specific “biotic pump” pressure mechanism remains debated and land-cover responses vary by region and scale. Water vapor is the atmosphere's strongest natural greenhouse contributor and acts as a rapid positive feedback; long-lived gases such as CO₂ provide persistent forcing that drives much of the modern increase.
That thunderstorm chemistry meaningfully replenishes the global stratospheric ozone layer; that +4 °C strata form water-based condenser plates in the upper atmosphere; or that a broad decline in worldwide thunderstorm frequency can be inferred from local impressions. These are distinct testable claims, and the evidence cited here does not support them.
Coats presents this as Schauberger's explanation of lightning. Modern storm electrification is more complex, involving mixed-phase ice collisions, convection, precipitation and electric discharge.
Callum Coats's secondary presentation · Living Energies, ch. 6