Fake trees key to halting global warming

According to a weird piece at The Times Online, global warming is now such a threat that out only salvation may be geo-engineering.

The plan, “Geo-engineering on a planetary scale” is unique and consists creating artificial trees that can absorb carbon dioxide, or reflect sunlight away from the Earth. It’s troublesome that it’s come to this in my opinion, but if we don’t take care of the planet, this may be our only option.

According to the Times article, “the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is preparing a report on the feasibility of geo-engineering” among other artificial plans. Some of these ideas include…

• Manually extracting carbon from the atmosphere – but that might be too slow so the other option would be somehow reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet. .
• Another idea is to make clouds brighter which totally sounds like some spaceman movie to me, but supposedly it’s an option. If this could happen, brighter clouds would reflect more sunlight.
• Fake trees are also in the works. Plantations of fast-growing trees would be turned into “biochar”. “Plants grow by extracting CO2 from the air and converting it to wood, so the idea would be to turn the wood into charcoal, using giant ovens. Then it would be buried so the carbon could never be released back into the air.“

The flip side, of course is that other experts feel that geo-engineer-ing risks might make people even more lazy about environmental issues, and people overall would be less concerned with creating a true carbon-neutral economy.

I’m gonna second that notion. If fake trees, and tricking clouds is so necessary than obviously we’re not doing enough, and can you image teaching our kids this? “Hey kids, no worries about the earth, we can fake it!” Great.

What do you think?

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about global warming, read the following; Is Global Warming True? Does the Truth Even Matter?

[image via stock.xchng]