The world is in danger. Well, actually, the world isn’t so much as the things living on it. Global warming is going to kill us all unless we find a way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is the bill that we are being sold. Here are a few of my favorite ways of saving the carbon dioxide exhaling inhabitants of this dangerous world.
Sounds Like a Pipe Dream
James Lovelock came up with the Gaia hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that the Earth self regulates the environment to make it hospitable to the living creatures on it. From Wikipedia:
This theory is based on the idea that the biomass self-regulates the conditions on the planet to make its physical environment (in particular temperature and chemistry of the atmosphere) on the planet more hospitable to the species which constitute its “life”.
“Self-regulates.”
The same James Lovelock says that over 6 billion people are going to die from global warming in the next 100 years. But he has a solution.
He suggests that tubes about 30 feet across and 300 to 600 feet long could be put in the ocean vertically. These tubes would be used to pump water from deep in the ocean to its surface. What does he think this is going to do?
Water pumped up pipes — say, 100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement — would fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom. This would pump down carbon dioxide and produce dimethyl sulphide, the precursor of nuclei that form sunlight-reflecting clouds.
So there you go. A self-regulating eco-system as complex as the Earth just needs a bunch of giant straws to get things back to normal.
Have You Consulted Mr. Crabs?
There is a green organization that plans on dumping iron into the ocean to solve global warming. I am not making this up.
Planktos says that by dumping iron dust into the ocean, it will foster the growth of planton. An increase of plankton is the key to keeping the world from burning up. From Planktos’ website:
Phytoplankton remove half of the world’s atmospheric CO2 and thus produce half the world’s oxygen. Plankton also form the base of the marine food web, feeding all creatures such as krill, anchovies & herring, tuna, salmon & cod, marine mammals, and sea birds.
They say that there has to be an increase in plankton because “Plankton populations have fallen nearly 15% worldwide in the past 30 years, according to pivotal work sponsored by NASA and NOAA.” It makes me wonder why plankton has fallen so much? Luckily, Planktos has an answer:
This decline correlates with a decline in iron-rich dust reaching the oceans, the critical ingredient in plankton photosynthesis. Changing land-coverage patterns, especially in Asia, has reduced the availability of iron-rich dust normally picked up from arid lands and deposited by wind events onto the ocean surface thousands of kilometers away.
Now, wait a minute. It seems to me that a 15% decrease in something that removes “half of the world’s atmospheric CO2” would result in an increase in CO2, and since that 15% decrease is natural, and CO2 drives global warming, couldn’t global warming be natural? I know, don’t ask questions like that. Instead, we should probably be finding out how the oil companies are killing the plankton.
Regardless, Planktos says that by spreading iron dust into the ocean, it will result in an increase in plankton, what is known as a bloom, and then CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere, lowering the temperature around the world.
But will it work? Planktos says yes, of course, but the World Wildlife Foundation has its doubts:
“There are much safer and proven ways of preventing or lowering carbon dioxide levels than dumping iron in the ocean,†said Lara Hansen, chief scientist with the WWF International Climate Change Program. “This kind of experimentation with disregard for marine life and the lives of people who rely on the sea is unacceptable.â€
Planktos is still convinced that dumping iron dust into the ocean is the ticket, Russ George, the CEO of Planktos, says “No amount of iron that humans could add to the ocean could meet with what the Galapagos puts in the ocean.†George is referring to a plankton bloom off Galapogas Island. But that bloom was natural.
Referring to Planktos’ plan, Ken Caldeira, co-author of the section of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that dealt with ocean-carbon capture, said “there’s no practical way to verify” ocean seeding would sequester additional carbon — and even if it did work as Planktos said, “it would exacerbate ocean acidification.”
“It’s far-fetched to claim you help ocean ecosystems by disturbing them.”
Planktos continues to sell carbon credits to fund this plan.
It’s Like a High School Science Project…Only Much Bigger
Volcanic eruptions have a dramatic effect on global temperatures. This is because of the amount of sulfur they blow into the atmosphere. For example, when Mount Pinatubo blew up, the planet cooled for about a year because of all the sulfate particle reflecting sunlight.
Hmmmm. Less sunlight, less heat….
Anyway, a couple of scientists think that they can cool the Earth with a man-made volcano:
Using jet engines, cannons or balloons to get sulfates in the air, humans could reduce the solar heat, and increase current sulfur pollution by only a small percentage, said Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“It’s an issue of the lesser of two evils,” he said.
Scientists at the Center for Atmospheric Research put the idea into a computer climate model. The results aren’t particularly cheap or promising, said NCAR scientist Caspar Ammann. It would take tens of thousands of tons of sulfate to be injected into the air each month, he said.
Wouldn’t the jet engines just put more CO2 into the…nevermind.
When Pinatubo blew, it is estimated that it ejected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and that only cooled the planet .5 degrees for a year. I’m surprised there isn’t a movement to find a way to cause the Yellowstone caldera to erupt, solving the global warming problem for a while and eliminating the United States’s carbon footprint.
A Big Umbrella
When I read this one, I thought of Billy Bob Thorton in “Armageddon” screaming at those guys with the solar sails.
Roger Angel is an astronomer and optics expert at the University of Arizona. His plan would reduce incoming sunlight by 1.8 percent. He wants to create an orbiting sun visor for the planet.
Angel suggests that the shield, covering an area of 4.7 million square kilometers (slightly smaller than the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River), would be best made as a cloud of 16 trillion free-flying circular refractors, each 0.6 meter (2 feet) in diameter. . Each refractor would be about 5 microns thick and weigh 1.2 grams. The refractors would be launched in stacks and then deployed upon reaching the target zone.
16 trillion high-tech pie dishes.
That would mean 20 million launches of stacks of 800,000 refractors from a coil gun 2 kilometers long, 18,000 feet above sea level. That would be 54,794 launches a day if you want in done in a year. If you spread it out over 20 years, that is still over 2700 launches a day, without a breakdown, or even a shutdown for maintenance. Unless, of course, you had two coil guns that were 2 kilometers long 18,000 feet above sea level. What kind of carbon footprint would that make? Plus the electricity needed to make and store 16 trillion disks. It all adds up to a $5,000,000,000,000 tab. That’s $5 trillion. And the shield is good for 50 years, if it works.
Sounds like a sound investment.
How about this solution?
Recognize that global warming is a natural cycle and that the current scare is being used by some to get an upper hand on capitalist economies. Good start. Now, rather than punish the free societies in order to fund the socialist programs in the poor societies, let’s abandon the socialist programs and turn to capitalism. Now there is no need to level the playing field because the field is level.
And, guess what? We can still demand that companies not pollute the planet so much that we can’t live here without growing a third arm in the back or our head. We can still ask them, and then make them if necessary, to be responsible organizations that don’t hurt those around them. But let’s stop with the idea that this is anything more than a natural event in the course of this planet’s history. It’s sillier than some of these solutions.
