Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Monday, August 14, 2006

  Global Warming - Solved!

I've had a lot on my mind lately, and I took some time off to celebrate day 0 of the Mayan calendar (and also my personal day 0) to clear my head.

While reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" - where Al Gore's latest work is environmentalism "lite", Jared hits you with 50 tons of silent Easter Island statue and then piles on an ahu- and being grumpy about his general attitude towards technology (hey Jared - how could those government programs achieve their goals without the new technologies they pay for?) I spent some time trying to think out of the box.

That kind of pushed me into a corner - what can we do about climate change that doesn't involve (much) technology...

OK, I came up with an answer. It's not one that a normal environmentalist might come to, so, here it is.

Ready?

What we need is more volcanos spewing sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.

Really.

The Mt St Helens explosion lowered global temperatures by .1c, and El Chichon lowered global temperatures by nearly 5 times as much. The relationship between major volcanic eruptions and global cooling is well established.

As Diamond repeatedly notes, volcanos' rich ejecta are good for the soil. Aside from local loss of life and tsunamis and the like, the world is refleshed by the periodic eruption of volcanos.

So, obviously, in order to halt global warming, and refresh the world's topsoil - we need more active volcanos!

There are certainly a lot of dormant volcanos in the world, quite a few of which are located far from human habitation (and quite a few that are not - as noted above, some volcanism results in very good soil for farming)

So how do we get more volcanos?

Easy.

Use up some of these otherwise useless atomic bombs. I wave hands here, as I don't know how many bombs would be required to trigger a volcanic eruption in an older volcano - perhaps someone else has done the calculation - I'll look it up in the morning.

There you have it - global warming - solved! and as a side benefit, our supply of nuclear weapons declines - and our sunsets will be ever more beautiful for decades to come.

Why worry?

For my next trick, I will defend our expanding the use of nuclear power vs getting involved in more war in the Middle East.

I wish I knew why I didn't get along so well with greens. I mean, I'm just trying to help....
 
David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


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On the Columbia - Why I care about space
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