The first idea, named Marine Stratiform Cloud Enhancement, is supposed to reflect the sun rays by making artificial clouds. Unmanned, wind powered boats will be spraying sea water into our atmosphere. These man-made clouds will be able to reflect up to 10% more of the suns rays than the natural clouds. However, this method is extremely inefficient; one would need about 1000 sea vessel to get the job done. Another disadvantage is that it is very risky to make more clouds, as we do not know what the side effects would be. The increase of clouds would probably also increase the amount of storms. As the clouds would reduce the brightness and heat provided by the sun, the plants would have difficulties growing. This would mean that we would have less crops growing in the world, which would worsen the world hunger.
Another idea is having giant reflectors in space. These reflectors will mirror or divert some of the suns rays away from earth. As we already have several space stations and thousand of man-made objects flying around in space, this idea does not seem totally unrealistic. Trillions of mirrors would have to be fired into space to make a 100,000 mile large sun shield. This would cost at least 17 trillion dollars and it would take decades to get all the parts of the shield up into space and fixed together. In addition to those cost, the mirror pieces would have to be replaced every 50 years. Considering all the disadvantages, this method also seems highly inefficient. Opponents of this project argue that one could use all that money to fight the problem at its root, the emission of greenhouse gases.
The previous two ideas were trying to let less of the sun rays get to the Earth, so that our earth gets less warmed up. However they both don’t do anything against the CO2 produced, which means that CO2 will still be trapping to much heat in our atmosphere. The next project aims to reduce the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere by replanting deforested areas. This would be done by dropping seeds from a plane. The seeds would be in special capsules that will benefit the trees growth. The seeds will not be simply dropped out of a plane, instead their will be a whole new bombing system that will allow the seeds to be equally separated over a large area; each seed having enough space from each other to grow. The trees will take CO2 from our atmosphere and release Oxygen. Only trees that take in a lot of CO2 and release a lot of Oxygen will be used, such as mangroves. However it will take a long time for the trees to grow to their full size and the area will take much longer, if at all, to turn into a forest. If the areas don’t turn into a forest with wild life, they are basically tree farms.
Another way to have less CO2 in the atmosphere is to not produce any CO2 anymore. This would mean that we not be allowed to burn any fossil fuels, instead we would use solar energy. To have enough solar energy for the whole world, scientists have come up with the idea of having a huge solar panel station up in space. The energy would then be beamed to a station on earth. This method does not only seem very unrealistic, it also has several disadvantages. One of them being: who would own it? This would definitely cause trouble, if not a war, as probably every country will want it and none of the countries will want to be dependent on the other. The project would cost huge amounts of money and isn’t something that would be built in near future.
Iron Fertilization, however, is being tested already now. This method reduces the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere by increasing the amount of plankton in the ocean. Plankton, like any other plants, takes in CO2 and release Oxygen. The Iron added into the upper ocean stimulates the plankton’s bloom. Scientists hope that by increasing the amount of plankton in our ocean, they will be able to compensate the world’s CO2 output. However, this method does have a downside, when the plankton die they release CO2, which equals out CO2 that they had taken from the atmosphere earlier. This makes this method utterly pointless.
The final geo-engineering concept aims to reduce the worlds CO2 output, by replacing the usage of fossil fuels with wind power. Scientists have came up with the idea of having huge helium filled wind turbines. As they are filled with Helium they will float like balloons high in the sky, which allows them to capture much more wind than if they would be placed on the ground. One Turbine would produce enough energy for 600 houses. The wind turbines would release no CO2, which means they would not be harmful to the environment in anyway, including the greenhouse effect
In conclusion, most of the methods mentioned are not developed enough. We will not be seeing these methods in near future, as they are simply not realistic enough to actually work or they are not efficient enough. I think that we should not be spending lots of money on getting rid of the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere or the global warming up, instead we should put this money into research on an alternative of CO2 outputs, fossil fuels. This way we would not have the problem of having to much CO2 in our atmosphere, and thus no greenhouse effect. Based on this conclusion, I think that the tree replanting method and the Helium filled wind turbines are the best solutions, but they are not perfect. There is still a lot to be done until we have a CO2 free world.
Sources:
"Global Warming." Oracle ThinkQuest Library. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215471/global_warming.htm>.
Except from the first paragraph the only source I used was the movie we watched in class. I don’t know the name of the movie.
