Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, September 18, 2006

We Need Practical Environmental Solutions! #1: Global Warming

These days, everybody is concerned about the environment and I want to make sure I'm doing my share of being concerned. It seems to me that there are some practical solutions to these problems that people are just overlooking for no good reason. Take your global warming problem.

Let's be honest here. People don't really care if it's a little toastier in the wintertime or a little balmier in the summer. Well, maybe some people care about that, like if they live on the equator. But not most of us. There's only one thing that's really got most of us worried here, and it isn't the delicate interconnectedness of all things. It's the rising tides! That's what we're worried about. Too much water in those ice caps! We don't want to go under.

Well, that's easy enough to fix. Problam isn't Global Warming. The Problem is Global Wetting! The system is too bloated. All we need to do is drain off that excess fluid.

Earth needs to take a leak.

It should be easy enough to design some sort of curved, flexible pipeline from the ocean floor all the way out to the toposphere (or outersphere or uppersphere, or whatever they call it - where the air ends). The combination of the tremendous pressure of the ocean depths, the pull of the vacuum of outer space, and the force of Earth's own rotation (which the pipeline would be perfectly aligned to take advantage of) will create a suck of monumental proportions, drawing off that excess water and allowing us all to live on in comfort, enjoying the warm weather without fear of flooding out our favorite beach resorts.

Of course, the whole operation would be carefully controlled, to ensure that the suction doesn't fly out of control and drain all our water off, leaving us with a desolate, barren, desert planet. Which is what I'm pretty sure happened to Mars.

And to those caution-mongering luddites who would say "but what if we decide we need that water later on?" My reply is simple: "Easy. We just aim it at the moon!" All we have to do is direct that steaming jet of salty wetness at the moon, and let gravity do the rest. In no time at all, we'll have a giant salt water reservoir orbiting the planet.

It's not like we're doing anything else with that thing. And think how pretty it will be! An azure orb, our own beautiful white moon covered with pristine blue waters. "Once in a blue moon" will be just about every night! Talk about a win-win situation.

I've got some other good ideas too! We'll get to those as each crisis becomes more acute.

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