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My father-in-law is a fan of the site and loves discussing article topics with me. A couple of months back, we wound up discussing methods of tinkering with the environment and brought up the ridiculous notion of setting off nuclear weapons to counter global warming. I blogged about this a while ago. Anyway, my father-in-law recommended another strategy: set off some volcanoes.
10 Planet Hacking Schemes — No. 2: Robot Ships
by Robert Lamb | May 21, 2009
Remember space mirrors and reflective crops from last week? The principle is the same, only instead of using plants or shiny satellites to bounce solar radiation back out into space, we’re using the natural reflective barrier of cloud cover.
HowStuffWorks has an article on cloud seeding as a means of promoting rain, but this is slightly different. The goal isn’t to make it rain but to fatten up reflective cloud cover (which, of course, leads to rain). According to BBC News, with a 3 percent increase reflectivity, we could make a serious dent in the global warming brought on by increased CO2 production.
The snazziest proposed method of doing this involves the use of automated robot fleets. The brainchild of professors John Latham and Stephen Salter, each ship would busy itself solely with the task of spraying particalized seawater up into the air to form low-level cloud cover.
For our next planet hacking scheme, we’re taking geoengineering right back into the ocean. I know what you’re thinking. What’s next, right? Giant robotic squid that suck CO2 in with their tentacles of green fury? Some wonder chemical that makes the ocean more reflective? While I promise that the next entry will have robots in it, this entry is all about growing a ton of whale food in the sea.
So thus far we’ve looked at a number of land- and air-based planet hacking schemes to counter global warming. But what about the ocean? As I promised Friday, we’re hitting the seven seas for the next couple of entries. First up: carbonate addition.
Last week, we plowed through five proposed methods of hacking the planet to counter the effects of global warming, and this week we have five more on our plate, again ranging from the seemingly mundane to the stuff of science fiction. I’ll leave you to decide where today’s entry ranks: a giant microwave called “Black Phantom.”
Have you ever overcooked a potato in a normal microwave? Well, according to the 80beats blog at Discover Magazine, Carbonscape‘s Black Phantom is essentially designed to carry out the same process, except it can cook enough wood to create an entire ton of biochar (also known as terra petra and agrichar) a day.
Can humans break the planet’s climate? Global warming proponents insist that we can. And if so, does that mean we can fix it, too? Forget conservation and clean energy! Science got us into this mess, and science can darn well get us out. In the nine days ahead, we’re going to touch on some crazy-sounding ideas. For day one, however, we’re going to start low-tech with a no-brainer: Plant a whole bunch of trees.
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