The Solution To Global Warming

Let's review my solution to global warming.

Remember that there is a simple solution to global warming. This doesn't mean that it will be easy, but it is fairly simple.

Global Warming is caused by carbon dioxide, CO2, in the air and the search is on for the development of a physical process to actively reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but this is what all the plants on earth are already doing. What the world is basically doing now is taking the oil that formed from prehistoric plants and burning it in car engines, and other machines, to get the solar energy that was absorbed when these plants lived and releasing that energy to drive the car.

When those plants of long ago were growing, they pulled CO2 out of the air and used the energy of the sunlight to split the one carbon atom from the two oxygen atoms. The oxygen was released back into the atmosphere while the carbon atom went to build the plant's structure.

Unfortunately when the oil, the fossilized remains of these plants, is refined into gasoline and is burned in car engines, oxygen is taken out of the air and combined with carbon atoms from the gasoline to recreate the CO2 molecules that were broken up in the plants during prehistoric times.

Thus, by burning fossil fuels we are putting all that CO2 that has been underground and out of the atmosphere for so long, back into the atmosphere. The result is global warming because CO2 acts like a greenhouse in the earth's atmosphere.

Normally, the sun radiates energy to the earth, which absorbs it but re-radiates some of it back into space at a different wavelength. CO2 in the atmosphere does not affect the incoming radiation but it blocks the radiation that is being re-radiated by the earth back into space. So, the earth gets warmer.

Since we have released much of the carbon that was being held underground for millions of years back into the atmosphere, why not simply reverse that process? Plants operate on a cycle in terms of carbon and carbon dioxide, CO2. As the plant grows, it pulls carbon out of the air to build it's structure, as described above.

When the plant dies and decays, oxygen in the air combines with the carbon in the plant to return CO2 to the atmosphere. Since atmospheric oxygen is ordinarily diatomic, consisting of two atoms together, we get the two atoms of oxygen combining with one of carbon.

Why don't we recreate the burial of billions of tons of carbon underground and out of the atmosphere? What if all the grass that was mowed every summer was used to make a large-scale product, such as asphalt, so that it could not decay and return it's carbon to the atmosphere? The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would decrease.

There is all kinds of regulations about recycling garbage, why not do the same with mown grass and other plant matter? All that we have to do is make something out of grass clippings so that they do not decay. We have done a pretty good job of finding all manner of uses for discarded automobile tires.

Even if this was done on all the lawns on federal or local government properties in the U.S., Canada and, Europe, it may virtually solve global warming by permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere. This is a simplistic solution but the way to solve this may well be low-tech and labor-intensive instead of high-tech. 

LIGHTNING AND TRAFFIC LIGHTS 

Do you know what the ultimate in energy is? We often see it when there is a storm. It is lightning.

There is a tremendous amount of energy in a lightning bolt. Currents of air knocks some of the electrons out of atomic orbitals of atoms in the air. A lightning bolt is between the cloud and the ground, or between two clouds. It is a flow of negatively charged electrons to correct a charge imbalance.

Why can't we harness the power of lightning? I have been wondering about this since I was a child. If we can harness the lateral movement of the air, by windmills, then why can't we harness the vertical movement of the air, by lightning?

It is not difficult to get lightning to strike, a metal tower that gives it the route of least resistance to the ground is all that is needed. The saying that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" has no truth to it whatsoever. Although lightning sometimes goes from the cloud to the ground, and sometimes vice versa.

To harness it's tremendous power we would need a heavy duty capacitor structure that would temporarily store the electrical energy. Then the current would pass through a chemical vat that would act as a chargeable battery. The electrical energy of the lightning bolt would then be stored as chemical energy, and released at will as useful power.

The capacitor and the battery would decrease the conductivity of the metal tower to the ground. It would be necessary for it to still be by far the path of least resistance for the lightning bolt to get to ground. 

This structure would have to be wired in preparation for the lightning to be either from cloud to ground, or vice versa. A one way bolt of lightning is direct current. One way that it could be turned into alternating current is to have two batteries, one for each direction of the bolt, and alternate release of current between the two.

There is no reason for us not to be harnessing the tremendous power in lightning.

Another issue is traffic lights. Have you ever thought about the vast amount of energy that is wasted while idling at traffic lights? Not to mention time and how it is adding to global warming.

There is so much discussion about "smart" technology nowadays. Traffic Lights are about as dumb as a technology as there is. A hammer is smarter than a traffic light because at least a hammer isn't wasteful. How many times have you seen ten cars waiting at a red light while there are no cars on the green light? 

Traffic lights are an example of what I refer to as being "technically forward but system backward". A technology is set up on a basic system. We keep making technical progress but then years later we are still using the primitive original system on which the technology was based, and this is what is holding the whole technology back. Another example is the primitive ASCII system of computer encoding.