Ways To Save The Planet

Climate change, Green TV, Media Comments (1)

A new documentary series kicked off on the UK Discovery Channel yesterday. ‘Ways to Save the Planet‘ explores what happens when, in the channel’s own words, “what if?” meets “why not?”, as “some of the world’s leading scientists” put the most ambitious geo-engineering ideas to the test in order to tackle global climate change. The programme features a series of large-scale experiments that are the brainchildren of a team of “uncompromising visionaries”.

Wrapping Greenland
Dr  Jason Box, a glaciologist from Ohio State University, wants to prevent glaciers from melting by covering them with reflective geo-textile blankets.

Raining Forests
Scientist Mark Hodges believes he has devised a way to reforest large areas of Earth from the air, by using an aircraft to drop tens of thousands of canisters, each holding a tree seedling.

Brighter Earth
John Latham, an atmospheric physicist based at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and Stephen Salter, an Edinburgh University engineer, believe that by changing the size of water droplets in a cloud they can increase the cloud’s ability to reflect the sun and stop global warming. Their vision is to build a flotilla of ships that will roam the world’s oceans and seed clouds with minute particulates.

Infinite Winds
Fred Ferguson, a Canadian engineer specializing in airships, has designed a revolutionary wind turbine that will use the constant winds that exist at 1,000 feet above sea level to produce energy.

Hungry Oceans
Oceans cover 70 percent of our planet and are one of the most important carbon sinks we have, but the phytoplankton that convert CO2 into living matter are declining – and many scientists believe that Climate Change is the culprit. Dr  Brian von Herzen of The Climate Foundation joins forces with marine biologists at the University of Hawaii and Oregon State University to deploy three wave powered pumps in the North Pacific in an attempt to restore this critical natural mixing effect.

Space Sunshield
Astronomer and professor Roger Angel thinks he can diffract the power of the sun by placing trillions of lenses in space and creating a 100,000-square-mile sunshade, using electromagnetic propulsion to get the lenses into space.

Orbital Power Plant
Former NASA physicist John Mankins has a plan to send thousands of satellites into space, which will gather energy from the sun and then beam the solar energy down to Earth as microwave energy, to be collected by antennae on the ground for conversion into electricity.

Fixing Carbon
Canadian professor David Keith, the 2006 Canadian Geographic “Environmental Scientist of the Year,” is building a prototype of a machine to scrub Co2 from the air. It will suck ambient air in at one end, spray it with sodium hydroxide solution, then expel clean air out of the other end.

Am I the only one whose heart sinks after reading about these half-baked pseudo solutions straight off the pages of Astounding Science Fiction? In the first place, we are already right in the middle of an enormous planetary-scale experiment as our stupidity and greed continues to throw our world’s systems into disarray. Secondly, while there’s a lot of “what if?” here, the only “why not?” questions seem to revolve around whether the transition from the back of a fag packet to the ‘real’ world is a successful one within the restricted parameters of the experiment.

And finally…. as the Discovery Channel itself says: “You’ve heard the dire warnings and seen the detailed slide shows, and you’ve even bought that energy efficient light bulb. You wonder, though, how can small, individual measures like switching to compact flourescent [sic] lightbulbs and using canvas shopping bags in lieu of plastic be enough to save the planet?”

And that’s the problem. We have an impending global catastrophe that was brought about by the combined impact of billions of individual decisions and actions. Where is the incentive for us, as individuals, to modify our behaviour if we are continually presented with large-scale, centralised, hi-tech solutions. The boffins in the basement may have helped to create this mess, but if they’re all beavering away on our behalf to fix it, we don’t have to do anything, right?

Maybe there is a way we can help. Why not play Discovery Channel’s online game ‘Extreme Earth‘?

You have been given the ultimate position of Global Caretaker of Planet Earth. From your control panel you have the power to control the fine balance of the Earth’s physical makeup. Using your knowledge of the causes and effects of global warming, you must make decisions to fix the problems as they occur. The Earth’s future is in the balance – can you meet the challenge?

Yes, that should do the trick.

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Pete Smith @ February 16, 2009