Often times when talking about climate change, the same ideas are floated around. And while most of these ideas are great, it is effective to think outside the box and think of ways that might seem a little crazy at first, but could do wonders to combat climate change.
Here are 8 crazy sounding but not so crazy ideas to fight climate change:
1. Put reflective blankets on Greenland.
Climate change has made Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers melt at an alarming rate. This means, among other things, that Earth is losing one of its most powerful reflective surfaces. This is a very dangerous thing. The melting rate has led glaciologist Jason Box to suggest that covering the country of Greenland in white blankets would help slow down climate change by keeping Greenland one of Earth’s most powerful reflective surfaces.
2. Force-feed plankton blooms.
Plankton are some of the best organisms when it comes to absorbing carbon dioxide, and producing oxygen for the World. Because of this, some scientists suggest that by placing big wave-powered pumps in the Pacific Ocean that would force the nutrient rich water in the colder regions to mix with the warmer regions and basically act like a feedlot for the large plankton blooms there.
3. Drop Tree Bombs
This idea has some credibility because it successfully regenerated mangrove forests after Hurricanes Katrine and Rita. Some geo-engineers think that we can generate almost instant forests by dropping these bombs that produce seedlings as soon as they hit the ground.
4. ‘Plant” fake trees that absorb carbon.
This proportions was proposed by Global Research Technologies. These are artificial trees that act like real trees in which they remove carbon dioxide from the air. The proportions stated that they would be planted on heavily congested highways. Interesting enough, the proportion states that the trapped carbon dioxide is sold sold to soda makers for their uses of carbonation.
5. Create man made volcanoes
This very controversial idea was first proposed by the book SuperFreakonomics. It proposes that we mimic the ash spewing atmospheric cooling effects that a massive volcanic eruptions have. We could do this by attaching several miles of garden hose to a helium balloon and pumping sulfer dioxide into the upper atmosphere. This would block some sunlight and therefore cool off the planet.
6. Giant orbital sun shield
Some scientists have thought of shooting huge mirrors into space to reflect the sun’s rays. The mirrors could potentially be as large as the country of Greenland and would basically act as a shield blocking about 2 percent of the sun’s light. However, there has yet to be proposed idea on how to get these giant mirrors into space.
7. Cloud making ships.
Research has shown that puffy white low hanging clouds reflect quite a bit of sunlight. This finding caused scientist to want to make more of these clouds. The best way to do that would be to spray seawater high into the sky using special ships. John Latham, one of the leading people of this concept states that it will take about 1,500 ships to do the job correctly.
8. Raise garlic eating cattle
Cows and other livestock produce millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere each year. Because methane is such a deadly greenhouse gas, some scientist have proposed to feed these livestock a bunch of garlic. This is because garlic is able to kill the methane producing stomach bacteria which makes cow flatulence so deadly.
These ideas are all very much works in progress and some of them are more crazy than others. However, if people keep ignoring climate change and the problems with the environment, we might not have much of a choice but the put some of these ideas into action.
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By:Garrett Sanders
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