## Tuesday, June 29, 2010 ... //

### Painting mountains white to save the world

This news is just amazing. As The Telegraph told us, the World Bank is funding a GBP 135,000 project to paint the Earth white in order to revert some global warming.

Eduardo Gold who has won a "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition in 2009 has already completed two hectars of the mountains.

13 billion hectars of the Earth's land surface are still waiting for him. So far, he has lowered the absolute global mean temperature of the Earth by something like 1/2 x 2/51 x 1/4 x 1/billion = 1 over 150 billion of the current absolute temperature - i.e. by about 1.5 nanokelvins.

Congratulations!

If the painting is going to be this expensive, in order to lower the temperature using this Al Gore Rhythm by 5 Kelvins, we will need GBP 135,000 times three billions which is about 500 trillion pounds - almost a quadrillion of dollars. ;-) This sounds like an insane amount of money but it is actually cheaper than the regulation of CO2 if he manages to paint 70 hectars instead of 2 hectars for the same price.

With this modified counting, we could actually cool the Earth by 5 °C for 30 trillion dollars - and things could actually get much cheaper. So if the mankind ever needs it, they can paint the Earth white. I just don't know why they're realizing this infantile idea now.

However, ours used to be a blue, not a green - and certainly not white - planet! :-) So some people could dislike the modification for aesthetic reasons.