A physicist at Harvard has an idea for fighting climate change that is pretty radical, in every sense of the word. He wants to pump massive amounts of microbubbles into the world’s oceans, increasing their reflectivity and cooling their temperatures.
Professor Russell Seitz proposed his idea at a recent geoengineering conference. The tiny bubbles essentially act as “mirrors made of air,” reflecting the sunlight and keeping oceans cool. Early simulations showed that bubbles could potentially cool the Earth by up to 3 degrees Celsius.
But don’t put your robe on just yet—there’s still plenty of obstacles before the Atlantic Ocean becomes the Atlantic Jacuzzi. The formidable task of actually getting the bubbles into the oceans is largely unexplored. Seitz has suggested deploying the bubbles with boats, pumping a mixture of water and compressed air into their wakes, but if the water has too few particles the bubbles pop before they do any reflecting.
To truly mount the massive effort that reversing climate change will require, we’ll need to come up with ideas that capture the public imagination, and Seitz’s bubble bath proposal at least has that going for it. Geoengineering has never seemed like such a refreshing option. [Science via Slashdot]
Image credit Jim’s Outside Photos
Jim
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 1:20 PMThis has to be a joke right?
For starters there is no concrete proof that Global Warming actually exists.
Considering that we are overdue for an Ice Age so I would imagine we by rights should be warming up due to a natural course of events happening. Now we are going to interfere with this process, so what will be the outcome of this be?
Let the planet do it’s thing.