Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
It seems the UK government is investing £50 million in a scheme to dim the Sun. The stated goal is to combat global warming. Various methods have been proposed, but the main idea is to somehow reflect sunlight back and away from Earth to cool the planet. What could go wrong, you may ask? Well, all possible catastrophic scenarios aside (including the possibility of some affected country taking exception to some other country changing its weather or indeed, the weather of the whole Earth, without anyone’s permission), what about the future of solar energy? One in every twenty buildings in the UK has solar panels on it. That’s a pretty big investment already, especially for a country not known for having too many sunny days. Do they really want less sunshine? I don’t understand how we convert to solar energy to save the planet and also dim the Sun to save the planet. I guess I don’t understand the hubris of people who think they can “save” the planet. I recycle mainly because the town council says I must in order to get my trash taken away each week. They sell quite a lot of that recycling to China. And even with all of us recycling everything possible, only about 21% of what is collected actually gets recycled for reuse. Only 5% of plastic gets recycled. But we tell people to wash out their cans and plastic bottles (which wastes water) and then we fill the air with the exhaust of huge trucks that we send out to collect them, only to find that most of them end up in that floating island of garbage in the ocean. I'm not saying we shouldn't conserve. I'm not saying we shouldn't recycle. All I am saying is that this climate thing is a little more complicated than we might believe. Maybe we should think this through before doing something extreme without knowing all the consequences? |