Читать книгу Answers to World Problems - Butch Biendara - Страница 3

FIXING WORLD PROBLEMS

Global warming and the related weather problems have long reaching effects on nearly everyone worldwide that are hard to quantify. I’d like to challenge that old saying that says “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it” with a proposal for a cost effective, long range plan to work at reducing the effects of global warming, at least on how it effects north America.

The shifting changes of greater winter snowstorms, more and bigger tornadoes and hurricanes cause death and costly destruction across the Americas from the northern parts of South America on up to the Atlantic Canada province of Labrador. It is just the start of the powerful negative effects of weather going wilder and it will likely continue to get worse if something isn’t done to change it.

The damages from severe storms might arguably be one of the largest financial burdens facing the world. And it appears to be a continually growing problem each year. Terms sometimes used in the past, speak of a 100-year storm, but the greater concern now, might be the 1,000-year storm, something never before seen by modern man and beyond the scale of any current measurements.

The January 2012 edition of TIME magazine reported on the growth of mega storms costing a billion dollars or more in damage. It found that the US had just one super storm per year in the 1980s. That grew to where the first decade of the new century had an average of five per year, rising to 7.5 per year in 2009 & 2010 and the 2011 high of 12 storms costing over a billion dollars. The combined total cost of the damage done by those mega storms is up to $54 billion and the total is not yet fully counted.

In 2012 Super-storm Sandy, the largest Atlantic system on record, damaged or destroyed at least 650,000 homes and 250,500 insured vehicles, killed 159 people and caused $65 billion in damage.

It should be noted that 2013 was an unusually quiet year for big Atlantic hurricanes. That topic and it’s related cause will be covered later in this paper.

Lets not waste time debating what might be the cause, natural or man made changes, but rather recognize that it is happening and we can do something about it.

Trying to build “last-line” defenses against the unlimited power of storms that hit the shores and inland areas is way too unreasonable for most people. A few wealthy homeowners along the gulf coast have built homes of reinforced concrete hoping to stand against the next big hurricane. But that’s not a likely reasonable plan for most who are not so rich, so let’s take a different approach to see how we can stop the huge storms from ever starting up in the first place.

Regardless of the source, the increase in carbon dioxide is considered to be a major factor in the increase in worldwide temperature. The carbon dioxide that gets absorbed into the oceans causes a change in the PH of water to the point of making life difficult for some species of plants and animals. Various means have been tried to reduce the output of carbon dioxide from power plants and some attempts have been made to force the carbon dioxide into underground areas with only a little success. But in late 2013 Norway has decided to scrap it’s multi-million dollar attempt to sequester CO₂ underground when the costs kept climbing and any chance of success seemed to be far away. This paper provides a far better, more natural and effective means of removing carbon dioxide form the atmosphere.

Another element of this paper is the potential to increase food production for the millions of third world populations while increasing the arable land on what is now barren desert.

POWER SOURCE

First and foremost, we must acknowledge that the power behind all weather patterns is the sun. In it’s simplest form, it is the nearly unlimited light and heat directed at one half of the entire world 24 hours a day. The effects are less at the poles where the sun shines on the earth in a flat angle coming through a lot of atmosphere before striking the earth surface. And it is most intense near the equator where is comes down nearly vertically to the earth surface through a minimal layer of atmospheric cover.

Some preposterous ideas at trying to negate the energy falling on the earth’s surface have suggested sending huge loads of shiny flakes of metal into the top levels of the atmosphere to deflect incoming sunshine. Throwing more junk into space is too huge of a risk to be of any effect. And the unknown consequences are how to fix that cure if it doesn’t work out as planned.

THE SUN’S IMPACT ON EARTH

Other effects to be considered are how the sun’s energy effects the weather on the different earth surfaces that it hits, water, land, wet, dry, forest, desert or some combination of those.

Sunlight hitting a smooth water surface at a low angle can have most of the light reflected by the shiny mirror-like surface. When it comes down almost vertical at the equator, it can penetrate fairly deep into the water.

When the sun hits solid ground and there is no water to allow for any vegetation growth, the sunshine falling on barren ground will heat the surface to some extreme temperatures. Think of walking barefoot on asphalt pavement on a bright sunny summer afternoon anywhere in the USA. Some soils will slowly transfer a small amount of the sun’s energy deeper into the soil as spring warmth slowly warms farmland for summer’s crops. But the ground temperature six to eight feet underground stays approximately 55 degrees year round for most of the USA. The hard freezes of winter never cool the ground any colder or deeper nor does the heat of summer warm it any deeper or to a higher temperature. And if the soil is very dry, the small open voids between the soil particles act as insulators and stop the temperature transfer at much shallower depths. Walking barefoot on undisturbed, dry, beach sand at noon can be extremely hot and quickly burn your feet, but if you shuffle your feet just a few inches below the surface, it is much cooler.

Another factor on how the sun’s energy affects the earth is altitude with the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas near to the tropic of Cancer on the same latitude of the Sahara Desert, south Texas or the tip of Florida. With the increase in altitude air gets thinner and although mountaintops are closer to the sun, the warming effect is far less. Low tropical areas get hot while high mountains are colder and at very high altitudes it gets very cold.

The result of lots of sunshine on barren dry ground causes the earth’s surface to heat up and then transfer that latent heat into the air above. Barren ground is an energy transfer machine, far different than the case of water or “land covered with vegetation”.

Sunshine that falls on vegetation with an adequate water supply will see the sun’s energy used by the plants to grow and thus consume much of the sun’s energy in the photosynthesis process to convert water and trace minerals from the soil along with the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide into growing a crop or a forest, weather it’s the stunted firs in the northern tundra, Iowa’s cornfields or the dense tropical forests near the equator in Africa, South America and India.

SURFACE MODIFICATIONS

Other issues that increase the effects of global warming, besides the burning of fossil fuels to power the industry supporting our modern lifestyles, is the clearing of tropical rainforests for the timber growing there, and to clear land for crops to support more people. Impoverished people of primitive areas have no worldwide or long-term picture, but can be easily persuaded to cut down timber that can be sold for an immediate tangible income. Without knowledge of modern agriculture’s sustainable plantings, the simple but historic method of ‘slash-and-burn’ clearing of new lands to plant crops after the previous plots have lost their growing potential, continues to be the way of life for many.

North America is not that much farther north than the Sahara Desert, yet we enjoy a much less intense heat of summer. Some of that can be explained by the fact that the majority of the USA is covered in cropland during the heat of summer. The hot summer sun still has great energy that is converted to the lush growth of hay, corn, wheat and other crops. It is the sun’s energy that converts soil minerals, and moisture, along with carbon from the air, into enormous amounts of food for people and animals. One might say that the crops are solar collectors that put out a solid storable product instead of electricity.

THE POWER BEHIND OUR PROBLEM

The costliest and most damaging weather that hits the USA is the growing fierceness of winter snows, the spring and summer tornadoes and later fall hurricanes with their extremely high wind speeds and related rainfall. Looking at where those storms start and how they grow takes us east across the Atlantic Ocean to the vast barren land of northern Africa.

The composite image below is of the outline of the USA superimposed on the image of North Africa with both at the same scale. It shows that the vast Sahara desert and the related barren parts of a dozen countries are larger than the entire continental USA. It is this enormous ‘furnace’ that gets immeasurable energy from the sun hitting the dry surface and bouncing back to heat the air that is then sent by the earth’s natural trade winds west across the Atlantic and hits the USA.