This essay gives the reader a new perspective on how global warming effects the earth. Then it describes a solution that would work but wouldn’t be possible to create. So first off let’s talk a little bit about how the sun plays an effect on global warming. The sun sends down light rays to the earth as solar radiation. These rays can do one of two things. The rays can come down to the earth and reflect back out to space off of surfaces that have a high albedo value. Albedo is basically the amount of energy that a surface can reflect. In the case of our planet, one of the reasons that the north pole doesn’t melt when exposed to the sun is because white surfaces have a high albedo reading, allowing a lot of the sun rays to bounce back and never be absorbed into the ground. Another thing that has a high albedo reading are clouds. Like the snowy plains of the North Pole, clouds are white and since white is a reflective color, it bounces back the rays into space. The other thing that happens to these rays is that they get trapped in the atmosphere, which happens in a range of ways. One way is that when the rays come down, the heat they produce is absorbed by darker objects. Another way is the gases that are in our atmosphere hold the heat produced by the air.
This is where the crazy invention comes in.
So, as said earlier, objects have an albedo reading. The higher the reading the more reflective it is. The crazy invention would be this: create giant white rings around the earth. The rings would not completely cover the earth and there would actually only be two rings. The rings would about 50 kilometers off the earth’s surface. This is because the atmospheric pressure is low at this point so it would help with the sustainability of the rings. The important part is that the part of the rings facing away from the planet is white. This would allow a lot of light to bounce back away from the earth. The other side of the rings could be black to absorb any light that would bounce back from the earth’s surface. These rings would be named “Cloud Rings”, due to the fact that it would have a similar effect to the earth as clouds. Both the rings and clouds send light back to outer space since it is a white surface. The thing about clouds, though, is that it traps some light rays on the earth too because it is white all over. Since the bottom of a cloud is white, it would send the sun rays back to earth if it is being reflected off of earth somehow. How the rings are superior is that the bottoms, or the parts facing the earth, are black which means that it would absorb the heat and not send it back to earth. The only reason the rings are so high up is because of airplanes and flight patterns. Also, I don’t know if giant rings in our atmosphere would create problems to the already weakening jet stream. So ultimately the invention would be two giant rings that spin around earth and reflect sun rays back into outer space.
