Having the Weather Over For Breakfast

After pumping oodles of carboniferous compounds into the upper atmosphere, stratosphere, troposphere, globosphere, carbonosphere and othersphere, the denizens of the planet earth are apparently due for an extended swelter. It's science! Or at least, it's what the newspapers tell us is science. Climate change, it's called - the idea is that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, rather than locking heat out. I'm a tad doubtful about becoming the victim of a hypothesis that makes predictions about events that happen over thousands of years and millions of kilometres, and have a margin for error that would extend into the next ice age, but scientist I'm not.

Still, if we've put the planet in the condition that it is now, it seems to me that we can put it back. It's like cleaning up your room, only on a slightly more globalistic scale, with a smidgen of terraforming and a smattering of explosions. In short, I think that with a little can-do attitude and ingenuity, people can change the environment to have it any way they want!

So with that in mind, I would like to submit for your perusal and criticism SEVEN MODEST PROPOSALS FOR WAYS IN WHICH WE CAN TACKLE GLOBAL WARMING. This is by no means a definitive list, but it will do for a start. Hopefully, a science-person will pick up on these suggestions, and we can start working on one of them!

1. BOMBS! If carbon-dioxide traps heat INTO the atmosphere, we just need to find something that traps heat OUT of the atmosphere. Simple, really. Apparently, there are elements and compounds which will do this quite nicely. I remember reading in Ian Plimer's history of the planet earth that volcanic eruptions tend to cause global cooling because of the vast amounts of sulphur they spew into the atmosphere.

So. All we need to do is plant a couple of MILLION TONNES of sulphur bombs in the atmosphere, set them all off at once, and - voila - instant cooling!

Of course, with atmospheric engineering on this scale, things might get a little cool a little too quickly. But that's simple; all we need to do then is fly another couple of million tonnes of carbon dioxide bombs into the atmosphere and blow THEM up, too! We repeat the whole process, altering sulphur bombs with carbon dioxide bombs until we reach a happy, temperate medium. Simple!

2. MIRRORS! The ice caps at the north and south pole currently reflect a good deal of heat away from the earth. This effect could, with a little imagination, surely be extended. All we need to do is to construct a couple of millions of miles of mirrors! We have tonnes of space out there in the Australian desert that aren't being used, and there's plenty of Saharas and Nevadas and so forth that we would be able to use as well! We wouldn't have to worry about them being too heavy. After all, we could just make the mirrors, like, very thin.

3. We could deliberately target a comet at the earth. In the past, large comets have collided with the planet, raising vast plumes of dust which apparently have caused a net cooling effect. Well, what nature can do to the planet by accident, we can surely do - on PURPOSE! We just need to make a comet the right size, and make sure everyone gets out of the way for all those earthquakes and tidal waves and stuff.

4. Put the entire world in a gigantic refrigerator. Of course, in powering the refrigerator, we run the risk of burning off a heck of a lot of coal power and producing more carbon dioxide emissions, but we could simply power the refrigerator by geothermal means, hooking it up to the earth's core. It wouldn't be that difficult, we could just run a refrigerator element through all those mirrors that we put up in 2).

5. Alternatively, if we don't want to make a refrigerator THAT big, we could simply make a refrigerator that's thousands of miles long rather than millions. We'd then use it to turn chunks of the ocean into gigantic ice cubes, and then plant those ice cubes in places where we really need them. Like, say, the Australian desert. I'm sure they could do with some ice cubes about now! Or we could cart those ice cubes out to the north and south pole and set them up there, supplementing the mirror effect those places have on the sun.

6. Set up a GIGANTIC umbrella in space - we could string it up to the moon or something. Then we could use it to block out the sun when things get too hot. You know, just like a Sunday picnic!

7. Alter the orbit of the planet Earth so it's juuuust that much further away from the sun, and juuuuust that much cooler. This could be achieved by, say, everybody going to stand on one side of the Earth and jumping at the same time. Maybe we could all go and jump on America, because nobody seems to like those guys. (Except for me! Hey, guys, we still seeing one another in February? That's alright then ...)

So there you go, science-people! Seven simple solutions to global warming. If you're going to go with the 'umbrella in space' idea, well, I'm up for a trip to the moon! So who's going to take me up on it?