I’m so tired of the partisan bickering over global warming. The left is convinced that humans are the cause of global warming, and the right refuses to even consider humans as a reason. But, pretty much everyone who actually looks at the data agrees that no matter what the cause is, the surface temperature of the planet is on the rise. We are storing more energy on the surface then we have in the past, and it is a likely cause of the heavy weather we have recently been experiencing. When the insurance industry (Who are not prone to worry about things that don’t cost money) is nervous about something, I think we all have reason to take notice.
Ignoring the impact of climate change on other species, there is still a substantial and real argument for dealing with global warming (human caused or not) based purely on it’s impact on us. The total or partial loss of coastal cities to raising ocean levels, combined with destructive weather and other, less predictable problems all add up to a huge economic problem.
I suspect the reluctance of the right to consider humans as a cause has it’s root in a desire to not change human habits. While I personally consider this to be like an ostrich sticking its head into the sand, it does lead one to an inevitable conclusion: No matter how bad the consequences, a large number of people will stubbornly stick to doing things how they have always done things. If this is the case, we have to consider new solutions. Solutions that don’t involve people having to change how they live. Any solution that relies on everyone agreeing to not do something, even if it is to prevent armageddon, will inevitably convince a large block of people to *do* that thing (or at the very least, it won’t convince them to stop). Because of this aspect of human nature, I have a new proposal to deal with global warming.
Instead of asking people to change how they live, we need to look to engineering solutions that lower the amount of retained heat on the planet’s surface. An engineering solution has a number of requirements, among which (but not limited to) are:
- Cost effective: The cost of saving coastal cities from innudation needs to at the very minimum be lower the cost of rebuilding all of our coastal infrastructure. This does give us a lot of play room on cost, but one needs to keep in mind, even if it’s cheaper then rebuilding all of our coastal cities, a 3 trillion dollar plan will never fly. The cheaper the better.
- Adjustable: Any solution needs to account for the possibility of future changes, and thus needs to be able to accept a larger or smaller heat load. We don’t want to cause human engineered global cooling after all.
- Low impact: Any plan that involves a megascale engineering project that as a side effect kills all the fish on the planet will likely not fly. Beyond that, the further economic impacts of something that destabilizes whole chunks of the ecosystem could affect requirement #1.
I’m sure there are more, but those are the first ones that come to mind. I have at least one proposal that I believe meets all of these requirements, and has some side benefits as well.
The Devon Jones Proposal to mitigate the impact of global warming:
I propose we build a solar sail. A large, thin, reflective sheet about the size of Texas that we put in space. This sail needs to be able to alter it’s size to accommodate heat load changes on the planet (thus blocking out a larger or smaller percentage of the sun’s energy). This large reflective sheet should focus the sun’s rays on a central point, where we place a generator. Tailing down towards the earth’s surface from the generator we would place an electromagnetic tether that can be used to control the orbit of the solar sail, and keep it from crashing back down into the planet (because we not only have to deal with orbital decay, but also the pressure from the photons that cause the sail to be pushed into the planet). There is a lot of space junk in orbit, which would tear holes in the sail, so I suggest that we build the sail with panels of a size that are convenient to replace after they have lost 50% of their reflective capacity.
This has a lot of benefits:
- Low Cost: This can probably be constructed and put into orbit for less then the new proposed moon missions.
- Easy to Engineer: All of these are technologies we have now. Nothing new needs to be created.
- Power in Orbit: This gives us an orbital power station. The power needed to keep this in orbit should be low enough that there is a net production of power from the sail. Orbital power generation has all sorts of nifty benefits.
So, tell me, what are the holes?
