Monday, October 29, 2007

The Flat Side Of Global Warming

Russell Seitz, proprietor of the ADAMANT weblog goes on excursion, stopping at albedo* and skipping past semi-gloss.
*Not a commentary on Pulitzer and Grammy nominee Al Gore's global warming income.
...Light or dark, black or shiny, dim or glaring - these are words that describe the surfaces of things, not their massive interiors (again, not the former veep.-ed.), and what things weigh has little to do with how sunlight or radiant warmth interacts with their surfaces, or their interfaces with air or water. It is a capital error , economic and dimensional, for analysts to overlook the fact that two-dimensional solutions generally entail using-- or avoiding the use -- of far less mass of fuel or material than climate control policies aimed exclusively at the mass of the atmosphere in three dimensions.

...In case you're wondering, a gallon of flat white paint of excellent quality , costing $20 at retail, can cover ~80 square meters. At 25 cents a square meter, that's one thousandth the cost of solar cells, and were everyone to commence painting their patch at the rate of one square meter per day , in a little over five year's we'd quite run out of land to paint. Though, like Flatland, this is not offered as a How To Guide...

I like his light touch viz. the shadow world "... it is hard to weigh a shadow..." as the shadow is the two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional (but expanding) world.
Although I think I could follow Euler angles I'm thankful he didn't go all Lobachevskian on us.
Esp. as my current topology is leanin' Riemann.