The Quizzical Answer
“Tell me, what was humanity’s greatest invention?” said the headmistress to her school assembly audience.
After all the bright girls confidently gave their answers and got only rebuttals, the headmistress said to the excited girl in the middle, “OK, Shirley, let’s have a laugh, what do you think?”
“It was the wheel miss, it was the wheel!”
“Well, Humph! How did you know? Somebody must have told you. Huh!”
“Of course miss.”
“It doesn’t count Shirley. No, it wont do. No. And no House points for you, Shirley.”
The headmistress storms off.
Do you recognise the film?
Well after much prayer for inspiration, I a struggling, environmental campaigner for over 20 years now, with little to show for it, have stumbled across the answer to the Climate Crisis conundrum. An answer that fits! An answer that works! The Answer, the SOLUTION!
So, true to Shirley Valentine, when I tell peers and authorities, all just scoff!
“If God had chosen someone to discover it, it would be an Attenborough or a Packham, not a nothing, a nobody” they say. “Go Away”!
“God just wouldn’t do that……. Would God? A nobody, perish the thought!”
The answer is in the caring simplicity. The answer is so simple and easy, it’s been there all along, staring us in our faces, we just didn’t recognise it.
DUCKWEED grows prolifically, a new plant every two days, on one surface, but, with human help (the ones who caused this mess of climate crisis in the first place) duckweed can grow on multi-layered surfaces. The equivalent to multiple worlds! That’s the missing crucial element, the solution to the equation of time and space we have sought to solve, to sequester enough carbon to make a difference and pull us back from the brink of disaster.
The Climate Crisis is a big problem. For many too big a problem to even contemplate what to do. It took globalisation and human society to create this problem, so it is going to take a unified human response to solve it, once the answer is found.
Nothing on Earth seems big enough to capture that much carbon in the time required to. 33 billion tons of carbon are released into the air globally each year. All the fields in the world would only, with their crops, sequester 8 billion tons. Trees take too long to grow, seven years to become effective carbon sinks and so many of them planted are a long term solution.
If we had multiple Earths we could capture that much carbon. So how do we create multiple Earths? We do it by finding the plant (photosynthesis is evolutionary proven to be the most efficient natural way to capture carbon) that can be most easily grown, harvested and processed into solid form. A plant that exponentially reproduces itself every two days. One that can be grown in stacked layers,
effectively in the plant’s eyes, existing on the surface of multiple worlds!
DUCKWEED – the planet’s and humanity’s Climate Crisis saviour! In 70 days one ton of duckweed becomes 32 billion tons of duckweed, it just needs the space to spread! The answer is so simple and most importantly, easily demonstrable to each and every one of us. The means to the carbon sequestration we need to reverse the upward concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We need to change to renewable non-carbon energy sources and means for transport long term. Duckweed production and solid storage will give us the time to make the change to sustainability and rebalance before we damage Earth’s delicate natural systems irrevocably.