Cooling the planet is an ever-increasing hot topic. As time – and fossil fuel consumption marches on, more and more global bigwigs are stoking the fire for change with respect to global warming. From the two Bills (Clinton and Gates) to the David Suzuki Foundation to the UN, many experts are urging us to take immediate steps to reduce our CO2 emissions and take action on global warming.

 For most of us consumers though, the switch to non-CO2 producing fuels seems abstract at best. In North America the average car still burns gasoline, and the average home is still powered by coal burning generating stations and heated by oil or natural gas.  Most of our goods come from far off places (meat from Australia, electronics from China, shoes from Brazil) and have to be transported by air, water and land before reaching our retail outlets. With our carbon footprint so deeply ingrained into our daily lives, how on earth do we “chill out”?

High in the sky Sci-fi

Many experts in the scientific community asking the same thing have come up with some real sci-fi answers. For example: cooling the planet with orbiting thousand-kilometer giant mirrors or mass clouds containing trillions of tiny spacecraft (transparent sheets two feet in diameter and 1/5,000 of an inch thick). Or perhaps cooling the planet with environmental mega-modifications such as laying a reflective film over the world’s deserts or loading the oceans with iron in order to stimulate aquatic plant growth so more CO2 can be absorbed into the ocean floor when they die.

Seemingly farfetched, these suggestions are based on sound scientific knowledge and can hypothetically show amazing results, (the mass clouds of tiny spacecraft, for example, reducing sufficient sunlight reaching the planet’s surface to offset the warming produced by a doubling of the current levels of atmospheric CO2). However, none to date have been met with any real economic or environmental enthusiasm and many will likely fail any kind of feasibility study.

Back to Earth

Recently, however, researchers at the University of Bristol (UK) have come up with a more homegrown solution – reflective food crops.  

Dr. Andy Ridgwell and colleagues at the University of Bristol suggest we could select and grow specific food crop varieties in order to cool the climate in the same way that we currently cultivate specific plant varieties to maximize food production.

According to Dr. Ridgwell and his team, the effect of this approach could reduce summer-time temperatures by more than 1°C throughout much of central North America and mid-latitude Eurasia. This is significant, as a temperature increase by the same amount can produce a devastating effect on our ability to successfully grow many of our food crops.

“Regional cooling of the climate could be made through selective breeding or genetic modification to optimize crop plant albedo [solar reflectivity]”, says Ridgwell.

Ridgewell emphasizes that unlike growing biofuels, albedo-based crops could be grown without disrupting current food production, either in terms of yield or the types of crops grown. “We propose choosing between different varieties of the same crop species in order to maximize solar reflectivity rather than changing crop type.…” explains Ridgwell.

Food for thought

This new approach will likely spark much debate as large-scale farming is not without it’s own contribution to environmental woes. However, if by modifying the albedo of our current food crops we can potentially offset the carbon footprint equivalent of 195 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere over the next 100 years, then we may well be on to something. The population is growing, our carbon footprint is growing, and our need for food is growing. Maybe a simple remedy is also growing.