The Other Side Of Global Warming

The latest report on global warming by scientists from around the world was made public today and the results are the most alarming yet. The destructive spiral of warming is even further along than most scientists had suspected. The news is definitely not good.

The world is finally getting on with looking into what can possibly be done to slow down the emission of carbon dioxide, which acts as a greenhouse to radiation from the sun, into the atmosphere. This is what we should have been doing twenty or thirty years ago, but I suppose it's better late than never.

The problem is that even if we could completely stop industrial and automotive emission of CO2 tomorrow, the warming spiral is still underway and would not stop. What we really have to do is to actually pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. I propose attacking the problem from the other end as well. In my book "The Patterns of New Ideas", one of the ideas is "Hundreds of Millions of Trees".

All plants take in CO2 from the air. They then use energy from the sun caught by the plant's leaves to split the CO2 molecule into the atom of carbon and the two atoms of oxygen. The oxygen is then released back into the atmosphere and the plant builds it's structure from the carbon atoms that it has collected in this way. This means that plants, from trees on down, literally appear out of thin air.

Most of the material in a tree does not come out of the ground but from CO2 pulled in from the air. Another side of the problem of global warming that receives little attention is that rampant development has drastically reduced the total number of trees and other plants in the world over the past few decades. The problem is not just cars but also the parking space required for all of these cars.

We have been dumping an ever-increasing volume of CO2 into the atmosphere at the same time we have been removing the trees that could have helped absorb some of this CO2. On the site of the average big box store with it's vast parking lot, there may once have been hundreds of trees. Global warming could possibly be reversed if we could increase the number of trees in the world by maybe 50% and do it soon.

This means planting saplings wherever it is practically possible to do so. When these trees grow to maturity, they will pull CO2 from the atmosphere from which they will build their structures. Another possible part of the solution is hedges. A hedge is attractive as well as a safety feature along busy roads. One or two layers of hedge along a road will "catch" cars that may run off the road and absorb much of the impact. This makes a hedge a better safety feature along a road than any guardrail.