Photo by John Bruckman
4. Flood Death Valley
It is estimated that in a century, sea levels could rise as high as 28 inches. Some scientists are proposing a plan to lower those levels by flooding desert areas with water. It makes sense – if the ice caps melted causing water levels to rise by 67 feet, draining the seas into dry land would prevent them from naturally flooding populated areas. What dry land you say? Well, areas such as the Urfan Depression and Death Valley have been discussed – as they are below sea level, they could potentially hold millions of gallons of water.
The only problem? If all the ice caps melted, this plan would only lower the sea level by 2.5 feet – and it would be a massive undertaking to say the least.
5. Give the Earth a Solar Shield
This list wouldn’t be complete without one crazy idea that takes place in space. Theorized by Professor Roger Angel, the plan would see the construction of a massive 100,000 square mile ‘solar shield’ made from trillions of lenses. This would help to deflect the sun’s rays (by 2%) and keep the Earth cooler.
What’s the catch? Well, seeing that it takes years to plan a shuttle mission, this project is practically impossible. Oh, and it would cost $350 trillion – 12 times the global national income.
It looks like our fate is in the hands of the politicians for now.
In a similar way, a peruvian NGO is already painting the peruvian Andes glaciers with a special ecological paint based in white lime: https://www.facebook.com/glaciares.peru
It is likely that a change in communication between the mediterranean and Atlantic can cause a change in Atlantic climate, but I doubt this could affect significantly and more positively the Canada climate (?freezing) than other areas (and negatively). What’s about effects on the local climate and environmental? Nobody can predict enough accurately the small and large scale effects of such a risky project, and nobody in current and future generations will like to pay for (bad)consequencies.
Then, lowering the mediterranean level by 200m thanks to evaporation only would take several years with lower energy production at a time the demand of energy is high… Then the dam will be ageing or obsolete…
Finally, closing mediterrannean and using it to evaporate the atlantic water fed for energy production, would make it a sink for salt. Why creating new inlands if they are dead (or costly to desalt)?