Lots of small can make a big difference -- that's what won Obama the election, after all. And thank goodness, elections can have consequences.
Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize Winner, and Really Smart Guy, speaking at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, shows that it doesn't necessarily require high tech space umbrellas, seeded clouds, or a decades-away plan for fuel cells, to make a big difference in climate changes. Nor does it necessarily require that we dress in hair shirts or live lives nasty, brutish, and short.
A big difference could be white paint. That's right -- Tom Sawyer's solution.
Steven Chu: paint the world white to fight global warming
From Times Online (UK):
The Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as US Energy Secretary wants to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so they reflect more of the Sun's light and heat to combat global warming, he said today.... By lightening all paved surfaces and roofs to the colour of cement, it would [be like] taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years, he said.... Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 per cent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared to about 20 per cent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed. An increase in the number of pale surfaces would help contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning.... Last year, Dr Rosenfeld and two colleagues from the laboratory, Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, calculated that changing surface colours in 100 of the world's largest cities could save the equivalent of 44 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide -- about as much as global carbon emissions are expected to rise by over the next decade. Professor Chu said: "There's a friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Art Rosenfeld, who's pushing very hard for a geo-engineering we all believe will be completely benign, and that's when you have a flat-top roof building, make it white.
The full article is well worth a read -- he mentions that it might make sense to require (like California does) that all new flat roofs be painted white.
We can do such a simple thing, can't we? No fair snarking about this being whitewash, either.
Small actions can add up: turning off that powerbar that has your cable modem, television, and wireless attached to it when you go to work (why eat energy needlessly?). Not idling your car while you read the paper. Going meatless one day a week. Turning your thermostat to 75 in the summer. Having only one light on per person, per night. Switching to LED or CFL bulbs. Telecommuting one day a week if you can. Timeshifting your commute so you don't have to sit in traffic...
The options go on and on -- and once you start making active choices, it gets easier and easier to keep on making them.
As I've said, if you, dear reader, don't think that carbon levels and global warming aren't the most dangerous thing humanity has faced since the Cold War, you're deeply mistaken. It's not just the seas rising, or the melting glaciers, or the melting icecaps. It's also about the fundamental science of ocean acidification (seawater plus carbon = carbonic acid; overacidification = marine death = no seafood ever again).
We must get our carbon levels back to pre-industrial levels, if we want the coastal and ocean biosystems to survive as we know them.
Surely every small solution is worth starting. In this case, it's really easy. Right, Tom and Huck?