First, I am craming these two ideas on one page because freewebs only gives me 5 pages. So, the origional Thoughts section is located below.
I thought that this was a very important subject as I was just in Montana and riding thorough Glacier National Park and realized that I couldn't see any Glaciers! Well I could go on and on about global warming proof and its effects but that has been done many times over elsewhere.
The other thing I noticed at the airport was that there were many people reading books but not writing them. In context, many people repeat and read the same stuff without coming up with their own ideas. I have been complaining about global warming for years but havent done anything about it.
One thing that I did come up with many years ago is that most of the plans for GW (hummm, GW Bush.......) involve reducing our carbon dioxide output. However these plans only slow down GW and not reverse it. What we need is a process that results in a net negitive production of CO2. I imagined a big factory say, on the South Pole (because Santa lives on the North Pole) cranking away, breaking up those CO2 molecules and piling it up. Well I couldn't imagine how this machine would work but I liked the idea.
Recently I was doing some association as I did many years ago with the Gatorade commercials. Gatorade claimed that it put back into your body everything that it sweated out. Well then, what does that make Gatorade? Flavored sweat! And, to this day I refuse to drink it. So in thinking about GW, I was lead to one of those DUHH moments where there is a simple soloution that I cant beleive someone else had not thought of it before (at least I had not heard of it before, and for the record, today is December 6th 2006). This I think can possibly be my great acheivement and gift to mankind (someone lock this guy up!).
Q - What is the problem?
A - The temprature of the Earth is rising.
Q - Why?
A - Because, for the most part, we are pumping the greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere.
Q - Where did the CO2 come from?
A - Fossil Fuels
Q - What are Fossil Fuels?
A - Mostly, dead plants that are squished up, decomposed, and are now mainly just carbon.
Q - Where did those plants get the carbon from?
A - The atmosphere......
Hold on. Theres a hole in the bucked dear Liza. So the Earths problem is that we are putting Carbon Dioxide back into the atmosphere by burning the plants that took it out in the first place when the earth was tropically hot?????
I was thinking that this must be the case but between the last paragraph and this one I did a search so I was not totaly off the mark. Here is a quote from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html Professer Kirk Maasch -
"Through a million year period, the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is affected by four fluxes: flux of carbon due to (1) metamorphic degassing, (2) weathering of organic carbon, (3) weathering of silicates, (4) burial of organic carbon. Degassing reactions associated with volcanic activity and the combining of organic carbon with oxygen release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Conversely, the burial of organic matter removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
Also in that article he talks about how if there were no CO2 in the atmosphere we would be at an average temperature of below freezing. So, the earth belches up volcanic carbon dioxide, making the Earth hot. The plants thrive on this and grow some get buried (most will decompose which is why this takes such a long time) taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere. When enough is gone, the Earth gets cold, Glaciers grow, killing the plants and reflect more sunlight out to space untill gradually the CO2 builds up again, melting the Ice caps and letting the plants grow again and so on, and so on, and so on.
Using that as a model, I have my fantastic carbon making machine and no one even had to invent it. TREES. Of couse I was toaly off on the location. The Poles are not good for growing trees.
Finaly! Here is the Plan. It won't be an easy plan for us to stick to because it will mean higher taxes but, technologically it is easily within our abilities. Every family (or single person) and every buisness will be taxed the amount it will cost to grow and bury the amount of trees that equal their yearly output of CO2. Then the government will grow the best mixture of fast growing low nutrent trees that equal that output. When the trees get to a stage where it will be faster to grow new trees in their space rather than letting them grow more, they will be harvested and buried in such a way that most of the Carbon stays in the ground.
Of course it will require all nations on earth to cooperate. Otherwise, China will just burn more coal since we are cleaning the air.....
Why is Venus a furnace but the Earth is nice???? Because we have plants to remove the CO2. This is a VERY powerfull and proven process. Lets put it to work. A lot of our taxes go towards the military. If the world would put that money into CO2 reduction, the problem will go away.
Now I am not 100% positive that I am the first person to come up with that plan as I have not checked everywhere but, I am pretty sure I am the first person to come up with the slogan -
HUG A TREE, THEN BURY IT!
This is an origional complete theory that I have come up with on my own. The collective has been refered to some people I have spoken with as the "Borg". This is completley different. The Star Trek Borg are portraied with all members knowing the same thing. This is more like the Overmind in A.C. Clarks book Childhoods End (read this book!), where each piece is only a small part of the whole and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Just like we are on a whole different level from our brain cells.