Well. The interface here seems to be broken. I can't bold, italicise, underline, or cross out words. I can't switch between html and plain text. The draft button has mysteriously vanished. These have sort of discouraged me from writing anything for the past few days. Today, however, I realised that I had to study something incredibly boring and deal with some other things. The urge to procrastinate thus increased, and so here I am.
It has recently come to my attention that some of my ideas for handling the global warming problem weren't too far off from being plausible. If you think about it, it seems logical, anyway. The main theory that explains the great extinction at the end of the Triassic describes a rock hitting the earth, kicking up dust, and so blocking out the sun. A similar idea has been presented regarding the fate of the world considering the possibility North Korea deciding to expand their nuclear testing zone. What I'm trying to say is that all these things resulted in a drastic drop in temperature.
Before I illustrate my point, I think it would be prudent to clear up a number of things regarding global warming. Many people claim that the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases produced by mankind has so far been negligible in comparison to the amount produced by natural events. Looking at the numbers alone, this is actually true. Most people, however, do not go on to mention that the natural world has its own capacity to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Huge amounts of CO2 are released by volcanic eruptions and the like, but thankfully, our flora are capable of negating this. They are so capable, that they are even able to remove about half of the man-produced CO2 on top of the natural levels. It really is just this remaining portion that isn't being taken out of the air that is giving us the problem.
Now, with the increments in population and industry, among other things, greenhouse gas emissions have also been rising. This started showing significantly in the early 1900s... I believe. Global temperatures did rise, up until around the 1940s, where instead of a continued increase, a plateau was observed that lasted up till around 1970. This was a strange thing, as it wasn't as if there was a significant lack of progress in industrial expansion.
After some reading, I have learned that the greenhouse gas content of our atmosphere is obviously not the sole determining factor for global temperatures. Industries used to produce not just greenhouse gases, but also pollutants like CFCs, sulphides, and just regular old dust. These things actually have the property of blotting out the sun, reflecting heat back into space. A significant amount of weapons testing was going on at the time, and that undoubtedly would have kicked up a fair sum of dust and soot into the sky. These would all have contributed to a cooling effect.
By the 1970s, pollutants were recognised as being dangerous, and industries were revolutionised to become 'cleaner'. What this basically meant was that we were no longer churning out smog and dangerous aerosols. The incidence of lung cancer probably fell sharply at this point. If I am not wrong, people stopped doing above-ground nuclear tests, too. I don't really know about that, actually. However, the global temperatures began to rise once more.
So, back to what I was talking about earlier. We know that particles in the sky blot out the sun and reduce the heat transferred to our planet. I am sure there exists a substance that could be released into the sky in appropriate amounts, that could act as a sort of sun-screen for the Earth. Of course, we'll have to consider the nature of this substance. It'll have to be such that it won't harm the environment any more than our current activities are. It'll definitely have to be non-toxic; It would be a disaster if the entire world's population died while trying to rectify a mistake.
Rectify a mistake. That's what I see it as. In genes, an insertion mutation is reverted by a deletion. In living organisms, homeostatic systems exist to deal with change. The Earth has its own homeostatic system, but we'd all be dead by the time it has finished working.
Let's just hope that no one messes up and turns the world into post-Matrix Earth.
He looks kinda like A. Low.
-Joe
