When I was working, problems would occasionally arise where "fresh ideas" were needed to solve them. For some reason, management called these "fishboning sessions." The idea was to throw out as man ideas as you could on how to solve the problem, and none would be discarded at the session. What really stuck in my mind from all of them was feedback I got at a night class I was taking. One of my fellow students recognized my name from her husband's discussions. "He says that every time they hold a fishboning session, yours are the ideas that everyone wants to throw out afterward because they're useless, and that in the end get implemented because you're right."

A visitor to our church this morning grabbed me after church because he had sat down next to me. He wanted to talk about global warming, and how we needed to find a cure.

I had already stated my opinion in another thread, that the world's militaries expend a lot of useless energy, and generate a lot of Carbon Dioxide.

A few weeks ago at church, someone suggested to me that we need to quit installing furnaces in homes, and instead install the proven technology of heat pumps. It occurred to me that we might more easily "prove" that technology to the public by controlling the temperature of our highways. By burying Pipes and thermocouples in our highways as they are rebuilt, we could circulate water from underground reservoirs, using thermostats to aim for a set temperature. It would allow the planet to radiate heat from underground into the atmosphere, melt snow in the winter, and cool the highways in the summer. There would be less expansion/contraction breakage. Tires would be softened less by cooler highways in the summer.

The topic:

Assuming that global warming is real, and that someone else has to deal with the engineering and financing, do you have an idea of an action that we as humans could take to reduce the planet's temperature?

The topic:

Assuming that global warming is real, and that someone else has to deal with the engineering and financing, do you have an idea of an action that we as humans could take to reduce the planet's temperature?

Soooo, what we're talking about here is something that's within the realm of current or near term technology, right? Well, if we bulldoze the political objections and are willing to drop a couple dozen trillion dollars on infrastructure, nuclear power (for stationary power generation) and fuel cells (for mobile power generation) are the primary solutions. The nukes can be supplemented with "alternative" renewable energy sources, i.e. wind, wave, solar, and geothermal. Now, whether or not these will serve to materially reduce the temperature, I dunno.

For that, the cost is also going to run in the "scores of trillions" of dollars, but technically its simple. Massive in scale, but simple in concept. Build a fleet of next generation space shuttles, and put a carefully calculated really, really, really, really, really, big array of solar collector/power generation panels between the sun and the earth. The panels intercept and collect X amount of the sun's output that would otherwise fall on the earth. In short, put up a sunshade with solar panels. Heck, both my solutions can be used in tandem.

I like that suggestion better than the many and various CO2 sequestration schemes usually offered at this point, as solar blocking can be corrected easily enough as the natural cycle shifts back to rapid cooling as it has done on a smallish scale about every 1500 years (we are due now for that cycle) and on a massive scale every 100,000 years (we are at the top of that cycle too). We may need that little bit of CO2 warming sooner than we think, and flushing the gas would be a mistake if we do. besides, abundant atmospheric carbon dioxide is a stunningly good fertilizer.