Get a bottle that’s filled with liquid out of the refrigerator on a hot and humid day. Place the bottle on the table and leave it there for half an hour. Come back and inspect what’s happening. What do you see?
You see
a bottle that’s wet all over and standing in a pool of water, having condensed
a fair amount of humidity from the atmosphere that’s surrounding it. Can this
phenomenon be hiding the secret to controlling climate change?
Well
then, as you must have guessed, climate change is the subject everybody tackles
these days, including Clifford D. May who usually dabbles in matters that
relate to gun powder than drops of water. So, I too will jump onto the
bandwagon and give away what has lingered in my head for a time.
Clifford
May chose not to contribute new ideas by this discussion. Instead, he rehashed
all that was said previously except for one idea, and he championed both the
methods and installations that have been around for a while. Taking a
contrarian approach, I chose to describe an idea that I know will make some
people see as unworkable, controversial, far out, useless and a waste of time.
But what the heck! Climate change may someday get so nasty that someone who is
endowed with a deep pocket, will decide to try my idea as a last resort, but to
the surprise of everyone, find it both workable and useful.
What’s behind
my idea? It is that the heat we get here on Earth, comes from the sun. A good
way to temper its effect, is to prevent what surrounds us from absorbing it —
something we can do in two ways. The first way is to reflect the sunlight back
into space by covering every construction we build with a light colored paint
and if possible, a reflective material such as aluminum.
The
second way to deal with the heat that’s coming to Earth from the sun, is a lot
more complicated to explain. To understand how it works, we invoke the
phenomenon of the out of the fridge bottle.
More
than anything else, water molecules absorb and retain the heat that comes from
the sun then release it in a way that’s most inconvenient to human beings. For
example, humidity makes us feel sticky in the summer. As to the late fall and
early winter, we feel the blowing wind nip at our skin. But the real culprit is
not the wind. It is the floating water molecules which are extremely cold at
this time of the year, and absorb heat on contact with our skin.
The
problem being humidity in the outside air, we need to build our monuments in
such a way as to have them play the role of the out-of-fridge bottle, condensing
the vaporized water molecules in the air, and turning them into drops of liquid
water that can be disposed of in the gutter. How to do that?
What we need
to do is air condition the buildings but not insulate their outside walls, the
idea being to let the cold that’s produced inside the building find its way to
the outside walls, thus condense the water molecules in the air. Added to the
fact that by their light color, the buildings reflect the sunlight, the cooling
effect brought to the planet with he use of the two methods, will be considerable.
What
remans to explore is how to air condition the buildings. Well, the newest and
best way available at this time is to use the green hydrogen technology. But
what’s that?
That’s a
method by which the sunlight is used to produce electricity. In turn, this is
used to break the water molecules (such as sea water) into their oxygen and
hydrogen components by a process called electrolysis. Being a fuel that can be
used in a gaseous or liquid form, hydrogen proved to be a useful and versatile
fuel. It is called green hydrogen because it remains friendly to the
environment throughout the entire process of its production. It will do much
good when used to air condition the buildings.
And
guess what, my friend, the one method that Clifford May did not see fit to
mention — as remarked earlier when it was pointed out that he rehashed all the
methods used to combat climate change except one — has been the green hydrogen.
What could be the reason?
There is
only one answer to that question. It is that the Arab countries, especially
Egypt, are far ahead in the use and innovation of this technology whereas
Israel, which is Clifford May’s pet project, lags far behind, still sitting in
fact on square one and going nowhere.
Clifford May can blame the President of China Xi Jinping for many things, but when it comes to blaming someone for omitting pertinent truths which are relevant to the survival of the human species, he has only himself to blame.