The Virgin Earth Challenge - A solution

The Virgin Earth Challenge – Global Warming – Greenhouse gases.

Overview.

Any solution to the removal of a percentage of the greenhouse gases which reflect infra- red heat back to the earth’s surface will require international co-operation and funding. However this is most unlikely to eventuate because the nations with the resources to implement the solution do not want to reduce global warming – they want to get at the oil in the Arctic and global warming makes this possible.

Instability in the Middle East coupled with China’s grab for African resources leaves the US, Canada, Europe and Russia all eagerly waiting for all the ice to melt.

The cost of reducing global warming is far less than the cost of patching up the global financial casino fiasco but will never be spent. The oil oligopoly will pay thousands of scientists and lobbyists to denigrate the proposal and find ways to ensure it is never implemented.

This paper is being published so that the people of the world will know that there is a solution which does not entail pouring chemicals in the oceans nor filling the atmosphere with garbage.

The failure to implement will be the last great crime against the planet before most of its inhabitants are killed by floods, famines and radiation.

Solution parameters.

Clearly the first great consequence of global warming will be, and is, the melting of the earths fresh water reservoirs of ice.

For each degree increase of average global temperature the temperature at the Poles increases by 2.5 degrees. It took a mere 7-8 degrees Celsius increase to bring the last Ice Age to an end and restore Europe to a temperate climate.

From this it is clear that we need to reduce the volume of heat reflective gases (so called greenhouse gases) at the poles to maintain the ice sheets and prevent ocean level rises. These gases were mostly not produced in the regions but drifted there. Lately though, with permafrost thaw we will see increasing outflows of methane which is currently locked in the permafrost. Methane is a far more heat reflective gas than our favorite CO2.

It would seem that all approaches to the problem seek to take the Co2 and put it somewhere else and this is essentially a non sequitur since the truth is it will take decades to reduce emission output, therefore an alternative approach is needed.

The only way to effectively remove a proportion of these heat reflective gases is by molecular dissociation i.e. to break the molecules into their component atoms. This is not a difficult task as work at the Australian National University shows. Given appropriate equipment a CO2 molecule can be dissociated by the energy of a mere 50 Electron Volts, resulting in the separated component atoms. Higher energy will create some sub-atomic particles.

The technologies are already available and only require some scaling, which, if addressed by all competent states, could be achieved in a short time frame.

The solution.

The solution is to position on both Arctic and Antarctic circles, ten degrees of longitude apart, High Altitude Airships (see Boeing et al.) in a stationary position, that is 72 systems in total. These HAA will carry solar radiation converting lasers (being developed in Japan for the US military) firing femto-second pulses in the IR spectrum into the gas band. Operating at above 60,000 feet and firing on an arc they pose no danger to air traffic or satellites.

The output of this system will be the dissociation of CO2, Methane and the ozone depleting gases whilst creating additional ozone. The power of the lasers may be adjusted to create sub-atomic particles instead of raw carbon atoms. This activity would not deal with soot and heavy aerosols from coal combustion and jet aircraft but will compensate for the Nox released from the jets by the production of ozone.

Most of the HAA units in the Antarctic will need support ships, whereas in the Arctic most may be land based.

Based on cost estimates of $US 500,000 per kilogram of payload for an HAA the airships will cost about $100 million each for a 2,000 kilogram payload, and the lasers probably the same giving $200 million each set plus $100 million for the ground/sea units, that is $2.16 billion. An error of 3 orders of magnitude in costing would only be three times the first hand out to Wall Street, which will end up in many trillions. That is about $3,000.00 per head of world population.