Time for Reflection

Richard Seltzer
2 min readApr 21, 2022

Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon

Have you ever been to a football game where the audience holds up cards that together spell a phrase or compose a picture? Imagine a much larger group of people forming a picture that can be seen from satellites. Imagine that the people are holding large panels of cardboard and one side is covered with highly reflective material, like aluminum foil. And they hold it, bright side up, horizontal at noon on a sunny day. Imagine a million or more people doing that at noon their local time.

The act itself, the demonstration, is an act of protest and solidarity against the deterioration of the Earth’s climate. It’s a statement of unity, visible from satellites, perhaps even from the moon.

Remember the physical mechanism behind the movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which sunlight, rather than being absorbed by ground and plant life, is reflected by snow and ice, rapidly cooling the Earth and bringing on an ice age.

Measure the temperature of the atmosphere before and after such demonstrations to determine if there is a measurable change in temperature. A temperature change could serve as proof of concept for a project to combat global warming by placing reflective panels on rooftops and across desert areas, designed to change angle and direction in response to the position of the sun.

Imagine using slats instead of panels (like venetian blinds) that could generate electricity. Such an approach might mitigate or even reverse global warming in a controllable way, at the same time generating electric power which would reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon

List of Richard’s other jokes, stories, poems and essays.

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Richard Seltzer

His recent books include Echoes from the Attic, Grandad Jokes, Lizard of Oz, Shakespeare'sTwin Sister, To Gether Tales. and Parallel Lives, seltzerbooks.com