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Summary

Solar Islands

  Thoughts on Climate Change Solar Islands   In the Thought on Climate Change overview, I brought up the idea of “solar islands”. A solar island would consist of a large array of solar panels mounted to a floating platform over the ocean. The reason the panels are over the ocean is to get double benefit from the panels. They of course produce electrical energy, but they also produce solar shading. Creating solar islands serves to directly cool the ocean and, therefore, minimize the effect of radiative forcing from CO2 and other greenhouse gases that seem to affect the weather. The concept of solar islands comes from the realization of how much of the earth will need to be covered with solar panels to produce enough energy to meet the energy requirements of the earth’s inhabitants. One estimate is that 191,000 square miles of solar panels would be needed to meet the energy needs of the world [i] . A solar island might have a size of 10 miles by 10 miles which would the...

Thoughts Concerning Climate Change

Background For several years, I’ve read news articles and watched videos by credible people that seem to know quite a lot about the topic of climate change. As I listened to the rhetoric, it seems we have the technology to solve our energy problems without causing self-induced pain and suffering. Note that I am not a scholar in any of these disciplines, I’m merely restating what I’ve read and researched on the internet, but if those sources are actually credible, the solutions are there.  Based on the available evidence, it doesn’t look like we will be getting back the way we came. If, as many would assert, the weather is getting worse because the global temperature is increasing because the CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. And if, humans are adding more CO2 than the earth can absorb because we have been using energy sources that is releasing CO2 that has been held captive for long periods of time, then, the simple solution would seem to be not to use those energy sources that ...