How to Save the Bahamas and Maybe the World as Well
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas. That event brought home the consequences of global warming — rising seas and more frequent and violent hurricanes. So, should we focus our efforts on stop-gap measures to help the survivors rebuild or relocate? Or is there something we can do to make such events less likely and less severe?
I’m reminded of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. At the beginning, an increase of a few degrees in the ocean temperature leads to changes in the Gulf Stream and ironically to a new ice age — the opposite of global warming. That ice age is likely to last a long time because the ice will reflect sunlight, making the world even colder. My immediate thought was that they could have colored the ice, so it would absorb rather than reflect sunlight. That would cause the ice to melt.
Now, in the case of the Bahamas, we need to lower the temperature of the ocean. Of course, there are efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, but those require cooperation among many governments and millions of well-meaning individuals. And it would take a long time for those efforts to have a significant effect.
Might there be a way to reflect the light of the sun better than the surface of the ocean does?
Imagine thin inexpensive highly-reflective material, such as mylar, stretched across frames of hollow plastic tubing. Deploy hundreds or thousands of these units, floating on the ocean surface to the west and south of the Bahamas, each anchored by cable to the ocean floor. They can rise in response to strong wind and waves, but stay in place. The distribution of the units could be random. The aim is to reflect enough sunlight to lower the temperature of the ocean by a few degrees in the local area. Units could be added or removed to fine-tune the effect. The hope would be that the temperature differential of the water would alter the path or reduce the intensity of storms heading toward the Bahamas.
If that proved effective, a similar approach could be tried on a larger scale, to help reverse global warming.
