Cooling the Earth

Mohamed Arshad Alli
ITSRG
8/14/09
Environmental Newspaper Article Summary
Cooling the Earth

Two months ago President Obama and a group of international leaders sat down and discuss the warming of the earth. They plan to decrease the earth's temperature by and unbelievable two degrees. As you may know cooling the earth by even one degree at the cores can have major impact to the earth. The world leaders plans to achieve this in two ways. First increase awareness by talking about the weather and always making this problem a priority and second actually do something about the weather.

The second method is referred to as geoengineering. Geoengineering would have been laugh at about ten years ago because it sounds like science fiction. Can scientist really block sunlight with particles in the sky or use science to change mother nature? Today most science fiction are becoming reality. China has already use high tech engineering to stop rain during the past Olympics. What's next? What are the consequences of tampering with mother nature? Questions like these concern skeptics and scares the public as well. Nothing with this sort of technology has not been done yet but it is being considered. Slowly reducing carbon emission while using technology to cool the planet may seem like a great quick solution but it cost billions of dollars, about one hundred billion to be exact. Obama's administration has certainly promised to look at this idea but they are far from giving so much money to this technology.

One solution to lower the earth's temperature is already on paper. A group of scientists published a report showing the use of aerosol particles to reflect solar radiation into space. It can cost eight to thirty billion a year to fire these particles into the air to keep the planet cooled while we lower carbon emission. The problem with this is that scientist doesn't know the side effect it would have. A solution it to test on a small scale first or to only use the technology on a small scale, the perfect target for a small scale test is the Arctic.

Another solution that may carry more hope is to spray seawater mist upwards to the clouds. The clouds would become more bright and reflect more sunlight. This method is much lower in cost and the technology may possibly be built into ships already traveling across the sea. The cost is around nine billion dollars. Skeptics says that these engineering projects could be impossible because of its large scale of uncertainty. Politician are scare to promote these projects because they don't want to be blame for the next hurricane or drought.

However, there is still hope for this ground breaking task. One that may be the safest and cheapest. It's simply extracting the carbon dioxide form the atmosphere. Some scientist have already found ways to do this.

All in all, when push comes to shove and the day after tomorrow is the forecast we need to make a decision fast to save our planet. Most likely we will use a geoengineering technology and we'll just have to wait for the effects.

Source
JOHN TIERNEY, JOHN. "The New York Times Log In." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Web. 14 Aug. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11tier.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print

>.

Questions and Answers

What problems are presented in the article?
-The problem is the finding the safest and most economical solution to the heating of the earth.
What is the main point of the article?
-The article presents different methods of geoengineering to cooling the entire planet by two degrees. The first two is two throw particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun heated rays back into space and the third and final is to extract the CO2 directly from the air.
What is your final impression on the main points?
- I believe that geoengineering is a great idea and these methods should be tested and applied.
Is a solution presented to the problem?
-Yes they are the three methods that are present but none of them are in effect due to political issues.