Oil and NASA's mission statement change

MarkVitrone wrote 17 Aug 2006 : 09:01:26: ". . . With rapid expansion of human populations and the use of so much dark colored materials, loss of farmlands, etc has the albedo changed sufficiently to allow more solar radiation to be absorbed then before . . . ?", and answered Yes to this question.

My answer to the question is Yes for some desert regions made fertile, such as in Israel and those irrigated crop circles of so many semi arid places, but a strong "No" for what were originally Green wilderness areas, like most of world. Forest albedo is low, even grassland albedo is low compared to most human development.

So LB's orbital reflectors might be most useful in those alternative uses. I'd put my money on aluminized mylar also, and flimsy structures, to minimise mass and take advantage of weightlessness in orbit.

In my 20 Aug 2006 : 21:59:57 post, 6th para, I wrote: "It has been suggested that mesons would be able to catalyse Cold Fusion reactions by greatly reducing Coulomb (electrical repulsion) barriers between Deuterium atoms via replacement of orbital electrons."

A good set of ~40 references, mostly to progress towards utilisating this phenomenon in Cold Fusion research can be found by Googling on: "cold fusion" catalyse meson

There is a very good reason forests and wetlands can absorb more solar energy and still be cool compared to desert land. And desert land does reflect more radiation than wetland or forest does. The reason is wetland and forest absorb solar energy and store it as biomass. These areas also cool by evaporation which can't happen in desert areas. So, it seems quite a simple way to cool the climate is by growing more plants-don't you think? Is the need to construct huge space based mirrors more ego than anything else?-like building real tall buildings.

Hey I just wanted to stretch the material out on the land itself. It is cheap and prisoners can do it, we can get Sheriff Joe on it. Jim, planting trees and plants is a great way to counter GW, since plants transpire water into the atmosphere which absorbs energy. It is for this reason that forests are cooler. The fact that they are hungry for CO2 is also a plus. We don't have to look to space for the construction project though.

Mark Vitrone

Jim wrote 21 Aug 2006 : 19:09:12: ". . . There is a very good reason forests and wetlands [are dark. It's because they] can absorb more solar energy and still be cool compared to desert land. And desert land does reflect more radiation than wetland or forest does. The reason is wetland and forest absorb solar energy and store it as biomass. These areas also cool by evaporation which can't happen in desert areas. So, it seems quite a simple way to cool the climate [and store carbon] is by growing more plants . . ."

So the fact that forests are generally darkest, as well as most beautiful and so on, means that they should be preferred over other uses whenever possible. And this applies to multi-use forest as much as preserved wilderness forest. Indeed perhaps more to them because in today's socio-politically complex world, multi-use forests seem to be better protected from wildfire than wilderness forests.

It seems that quality forest management would include purposeful burnings to mimic the natural cycle of fire and regrowth. Native americans used girding to thin the trees and maintain the forests. Forest Management is a key to multiuse forests.

Mark Vitrone