Mirrors In Space To Help The Climate

January 28, 2007 · Filed Under News 

According to a report from The BBC, China “is failing to make progress on improving and protecting the environment” and a study produced by the country’s “academics and government experts, ranked the country 100th out of 118 countries surveyed”. In the same week when George Bush has finally seized the climate change nettle and Tony Blair suggesting to world leaders that the Kyoto Agreement should extend to all the major countries, including India and China, it does seem that finally the issues surrounding climate change are starting to hit home in the corridor’s of power.

Dealing with climate change, however, has been discussed in abundance in scientific and technological corridors and The Sunday Mirror and The Telegraph today report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are suggesting putting giant mirrors in orbit around the the earth “to bounce sunlight back into space”. According to the report, 1% of reflected sunlight could make up for for 400 years of man-made emissions into the atmosphere (although the report doesn’t say how long the reflection would need to be active for, nor what affect it would have on the climate).

The IPCC (and climate change) are expected to hit the headlines next week when they release a report on the current state of the earth, the affect of climate change and predictions for the future. According to a report in The Australian the next 10 years are crucial in man’s attempts to reverse (or reduce) the affects of climate change.

Commenting on the same report, Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail offers an alternative view to the climate change threat. The comments in the article are of the non-sensationalist kind and question whether the headlines for climate change are the extreme ends of the doomsday scenarios as suggested in the docu-movie An Inconvenient Truth and often highlighted in the press. The article is interesting, as are the thirty comments (both for and against) after the article. Furthermore, the article highlights the one major problem regarding climate change - there is not one definitive hymn sheet that government’s, scientist’s and journalist’s are able to sing from, and this continues to lead to public confusion about the climatic situation.

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