Global warming is on the minds of a lot of people. Some people tell us it is bad science and there is no global warming, but they don’t supply any reasons for all the melting ice except to tell us it really isn’t there. It just so happens global warming is a very complicated subject. As many places get hotter, because the temperature of the earth is increasing, there are places which seem to be very cold and these are the places the anti-global warming people point to. Remember I told you global warming was a very complex issue and now I am going to tell you one of the reasons why. There is a link between global warming and freezing air. When the ocean heats up, which it is doing and melting ice in the arctic this releases warm air which then destabilizes the air in the arctic and sends this freezing air out in cold freezing blasts into the atmosphere where it eventually hits areas on earth. This air is not enough to stop the global warming, but it supplies ammunition to those who deny global warming is taking place. It is amazing how heat can be responsible for cold isn’t it? The question is what happens when the ice is gone and there is no more cold air to release? I don’t think I want to be around to see that.

If this was a century ago or a time before that, I would have to say we could never stop global warming, but we have become tech savvy. Several ideas have been put forward which demonstrate ways to cool off the planet or at least slow down the warming trend if not stop it completely. They require caution if used, but on their fact they present hope. In case you think this is a crazy idea let me tell you who is proposing it. It is no less than researchers from Stanford University a much respected institution. The method is known as radiative cooling. We are talking about a very big reduction in temperature for the uncooled air, as much as 42.2 degrees Celsius which is a difference of almost 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists say devices known as thermal emitters can be used to get rid of the heat. They have to be set to a certain frequency to allow them to send the air into the atmosphere and require a clear sky, but they work wonderfully. The devices are expensive and scaling them up to be able to cool the entire earth may be beyond our capabilities at the moment.

Another idea which is making the rounds has to do with clouds. How many times have we seen the sky full of clouds, maybe so many they covered the sun? Some people don’t want these clouds to go to waste and believe they could become at least part of a way if not all to solve global warming. Some scientists want to spray salt water into the clouds over the ocean, because they think this will make them fuller and make them even whiter causing them to reflect sunshine away from the earth. I don’t want to put this idea down, but recent studies have shown the impact of clouds on reducing temperatures has been over-estimated. This does not mean there may be another way to use clouds more effectively. One way may be to fill them not with water, but with something much more reflective in the form of a powder or something similar. If the contents of clouds could act as tiny mirrors this may be enough to at least slow down global warming.

Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s environment. This would be done to counteract a change in the climate. It is a dangerous thing to do, because it could have unforeseen results. One of the reasons we found it could affect the climate is we watched events like eruptions in the past and noted their effect on the environment. An example of this was the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. It dumped tremendous amounts of sulphur into our atmosphere. The sulphur brought the overall temperature of the Earth down by .5 degrees Centigrade over the next two year period. While this certainly was not enough, it demonstrated large scale dumps into the atmosphere could affect the temperature of the earth and gave us something to think about when combating global warming. The idea of dumps while possibly lowering the temperature doesn’t take into account reducing the cause of the problem in the first place.

Graphene keeps coming up in the news and it turns out it might be able to be used to help combat global warming. First let me tell you again exactly what Graphene is. Graphene is a material consisting of bonded carbon atoms in sheets from one atom thick. The sheets are so thin they are hard to see. It was never thought to be an electrocatalyst, but that has changed. Scientists have found they can dope graphene with nitrogen and this allows it to convert CO2 into fuel. If we can drain the CO2 from the atmosphere we can then convert it to fuel allowing something useful to come from it while we help reduce global warming, because the CO2 in the atmosphere keeps the heat in our atmosphere. The fuels which are created are ethylene and ethanol. Scientists know they can do this, but don’t understand exactly why this conversion to fuel works.

When we look at our neighbor Mars we see a desolate planet. We are learning it was not always this way and the current scientific thinking is there is a strong possibility it may have contained life. One thing I find interesting about the planet is it has needs opposite of the earth’s needs. Mars needs global warming. There has been talk pumping greenhouse gases into it meager atmosphere someday to heat the place up along with other gases to build an atmosphere more like that on earth. Too bad there isn’t a way to transfer our greenhouse gases to the Martian atmosphere, it would be like killing two birds with one stone.

It is important we not just drain the atmosphere of greenhouse gases without stopping the root cause of the problem. If we don’t do this it will mean industry will take advantage and dump much more into our air and if we complain they will just say it doesn’t matter, because we can clean it up. We breathe the air and everything bad in it affects us, we have to remember that.