Big Projects Combat Climate Change

"Oddly, few modern educational systems spend much time teaching systematically about the future," David Christian writes in his book, Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. A teach-in, modeled on the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, did inspire the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. What those students learned in the past half century is: environmental converts relapse. Efforts to promote fossil fuel alternatives, recycling, foregoing plastic, and organic farming have produced only marginal results.

     While enlightened solutions to environmental mischief need to continue, ideas for major projects required to combat the effects of unchanged behavior on global warming also need to begin. Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry expects temperatures of 115 degrees Fahrenheit to be five times more likely by 2050 than they were when extreme temperatures spiked in 2000. In 2016 and 2017, Kuwait and Iran began competing to break the highest reliably recorded temperature.

     

     Do work and education have to take place in the heat of the day? For religious reasons, business already is conducted at night in Muslim countries during Ramadan. Research shows teens need more sleep than they get when their bodies want to stay up until 11 pm or later and schools expect them to arrive at 7:30 am or 8. In Las Vegas, I understand some students already attend classes at night. While living in Jamaica, Noel Coward wrote a song based on his observations.

At twelve noon the natives swoon

and no further work is done.

But Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. 

     Working and learning during hotter climate changing days will require more and more air conditioning to keep people from dying from the heat and rats and insects from devouring and contaminating harvested food. To reduce the greenhouse gases and ozone pollution that air conditioning generates requires the difficult tasks of developing less toxic refrigerants and reducing the need for electricity. It would be much easier and faster to move the time for work and study to a cooler time of the day.

     Trees are recognized as climate change saviors. They produce shade, reduce pollution, and sop up greenhouse gases. China is planting a tree wall to protect Beijing from sand/dust storms from the Gobi Desert. To produce these benefits, trees (as well as crops) need a system for channeling excess monsoon water their way.

     Try asking kids who are building with blocks or computers to design a system to carry too much water from hurricanes and monsoons to drought areas. Why not locate pieces of aluminum pipe in various parts of the world that governments can fit together like LEGOs to make temporary pipes that channel overflowing lakes and rivers to forests and crop land suffering from drought? In Origin Story, Christian writes about moments in history when "Goldilocks conditions" are just right, like Baby Bear's porridge, for transitions in evolutionary change. Often these moments are "aha" insights when someone combines things that already exist in a new way.

     In an earlier post, "Gone Fishin'," I reported on the long floating plastic boom designed to collect plastic and other debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as "the blob" between California and Hawaii that forms the warm water that seems to nourish the warm, dry winters dehydrating forests along the northwest coast of North America. Could this plastic garbage be melted for use in 3D printers? Maybe it could provide insulation and furniture for the 3D houses printed for the world's 68.5 million refugees now living in makeshift camps. (See more about "building" 3D houses at the earlier post, "Necessity: Introduce Students to New Technologies.")

     Invite kids who are not bound by what is and what always has been to think about ways to solve the new challenges climate change does and will continue to present. How can solar and wind energy be stored and distributed? What can be done to reduce the amount of stuff ending up in methane-generating dumps? Students who love science fiction also might look into the solar geoengineering ideas that involve improving the ability of clouds to block or reflect sun rays. Insect control without dangerous chemicals, endangered animals, shipping and public transportation, drought-resistant crops and farming methods, all need big new plans for the best future. 

      

   

Teens Find Drought and Zika Remedies

Entering contests and writing to potential mentors not only can help individual students jump start their own careers but these proactive efforts also can help humanity. Dr. Hongjun Song, the mentor who received a letter from the student involved in Zika virus research, observed: "Unencumbered by previous experience, high school students aren't afraid of failure and are freer to try things than graduate students or postdocs."

Help for drought-starved crops

Kiara Nirghin, the 16-year-old South African girl who won the grand prize in Google's Science Fair (googlesciencefair.com), reasoned that a superabsorbent polymer (SAP) used in diapers could help soil retain more water when drought threatens crops. To avoid the pricey, less eco-friendly acrylic acid chemicals used in current SAPs, Ms. Nirghin tried creating a SAP by applying UV light and heat to avocado and orange peels. When sprinkled on fields, her polymer, which holds 300 times its weight in liquid, provides water for crops that would otherwise die from drought.
(Kiara Nirghin is among the world's 30 most influential teens TIME magazine lists at time.com/teens2016.)

Help for studying the Zika virus

At the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, engineers developed a $2 genetic test to detect the Zika virus immediately by using color-changing dye in a device about the size of a soda can. The process requires no electricity or extensive technical training.
     Chris Hadiono, whose parents are U.S. immigrants from Indonesia, was a high school intern at Dr. Hongjun Song's neurology lab at John Hopkins University, when he developed a bioreactor device used to determine how the Zika virus causes the abnormal brain development which results in the small heads of newborn babies, i.e. microcephly, and many more problems.
     Using 3D printing instructions from a YouTube tutorial, Hadiono created a machine with gears that keep 12 "mini-brains" floating and growing in wells, each filled with about one teaspoon of nutrient rich liquid, by constantly stirring the liquid in all the wells at the same time.
     Before Hadiono's contribution, the neural tissue of human brains, "mini-brains," already could be produced by turning human skin cells (3D printers also can create human tissue and bone) into stem cells which could be turned into the neural stem cells that became human neural brain tissue resembling the human cerebral cortex affected by the Zika virus. And a magnetic bar could continuously stir a rich nutrient broth-like medium, or liquid, that enabled "mini-brains" to float and grow in all directions. The problem was the big device required too much costly medium and could only be used once to accommodate a few experiments at a time. With Hadiono's bioreactor device, at a much lower cost, researchers can see how the Zika virus infects and kills neural stem cells in 12 different parts of a human's cerebral cortex at the same time..  With the work of another teen, maybe prevention and a cure for microcephly will not be far behind.

Winners and Losers as the Climate Changes

Heat, drought, smog, and car and power plant emissions motivate a search for ways to deal with the climate changes they are causing.

      Cosmetic experts, for example, have found plants that purify the skin from pollutants and protect it from sun damage. Moringa seeds from trees that purify water where they grow in Africa and Asia are the secret ingredients in Vichy's Purete Thermale, a cleansing gel that removes pollution's impurities from the skin.

     Leila Janah wondered how women in Uganda managed to have lovely, unwrinkled skin despite their country's sun-soaked environment. She discovered their secret was a rare strain of African nilotica shea nuts with an extra concentration of healthy fatty acids that they purchased in a market in Gulu, Uganda. Inspired by this find, she developed a high-end beauty cream line, LXMI, named for the Hindu goddess of beauty and prosperity. Her creams contain not only organic cold-pressed butter from Gulu's shea nuts but also antioxidant fighting Ndali vanilla and Nile-grown hibiscus flowers known to plump and smooth the skin. Perhaps best of all, because LXMI is a high-priced brand that will be sold at Sephora, Janah is able to pay a dignified living wage to the women who harvest the raw materials in her creams.

      Drought has launched many a scheme, including an ill-advised one to drag an iceberg south, to provide water for farmers who are said to account for 69% of the water used around the world. Pimpri Sandas in India is among the world's villages that are watering their crops with unfiltered rainwater collected in tanks on billboards designed by Kinetic. Once a tank is full, water sensor technology sends a text message to a mobile phone that alerts a tanker to pick up and deliver the water. In India, Vodafone, owner of the billboards, funds the entire process. Other businesses, such as Hindustan Unilever and Reliance Industries, have constructed dams and ponds to help communities conserve water.

     What do frustrated farmers do when their crops die from drought and they go deeper into debt year after year? They move to cities where the UN estimates two-thirds of the world's population will live by 2050. This coming migration emphasizes the importance of the growing urban farming movement which, unfortunately, can produce too little and be too expensive for many displaced farmers. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the option of producing crops closer to where they are consumed. This process reduces pollution from trucking, a health benefit as well as a way to reduce climate warming carbon emissions. And urban farms also absorb rainwater and prevent sewer overflow from polluting rivers and lakes.

     City farms can be as simple as outside planter boxes or black pond liners filled with soil. A variety of crops can be planted to determine which are best suited for local conditions, including natural rainfall rather than irrigation. More complicated urban farms rely on greenhouses, earthworms, compost, and recycled water, that is, aquaponics (for more details, see the earlier post, "Exotic Farming."), where filtered water from tanks of edible fish water crops. In some cases, computers monitor water levels, nutrient concentration, and ideal temperatures for different crops.

     Overall, efforts to increase yields by planting crops that can withstand changes in traditional heat and rain conditions have not been promising. While cross-breeding created hybrid maize seeds that mature over shorter periods and use water more efficiently, sales are expensive and not widespread. Hybrid seeds have to be purchased each year rather than grown from the seeds of earlier crops, and since fake and falsely labeled seeds have been sold as drought-resistant, the new seeds gained a reputation as unreliable.