Shiny crops for a bright and shiny future?

by Wendy Davidson
Jan 14th 2008 @ 10:02AM

Filed under: Climate Change

I love experimental cooking. Give me a pan, some vegetables, herbs and spices and I'll do my best to whip up something mouth-wateringly delicious. The problem is, it's all too easy to get the balance of flavourings wrong and once you have too much of something, it's very hard to correct it.

I look on the changes to the Earth's climate like a recipe gone haywire. We have messed up royally and now the race is on to limit the damage and restore our climate to something resembling normal. It's hard. All these destructive greenhouse gases, that we fight to reduce with endless protocols and international carbon emission limits and deadlines, just keep on increasing. It's scary. To effectively stop the climate crisis, we need to bring carbon emissions down to zero within the next 2 decades. Or we need to find other ways to restore the balance as fast as we can.

First, those desperate scientists came up with space mirrors to reduce the amount of solar energy zapping our planet. Now, 2 years later, they're talking about shiny trees. Fields of shiny crops, say those in the know, could send more of the sun's heat back into space, and even reverse temperature rises in parts of the world. We could even reduce local day time temperatures by as much as 1.9C. Which might go down well in the Sahara but I'm not too sure about England getting any cooler.

I wonder what's next. Perhaps we could start growing already-tinselled Christmas trees? The mind boggles.

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