Irish Eyes: Cloning The Weather

Irish Eyes is an occasional column from Scoop's Dublin Correspondent feedback to paloona@yahoo.com.

Against the backdrop of the latest super computer predictions that we have truly stuffed the world’s climate and should expect a good deal of suffering next century as a result of global warming, Irish Eyes seeks to provide a way of watering the Sahara and saving the Amazon. The important point in all of this being that we want to be able to keep increasing traffic and don’t want to be overly distracted from following football.

First thought then was to clone the weather, find a nice ‘off and on’ rainy day at about the right temperature, copy it and keep it.

Obviously this is flawed, most seriously in that it is, sadly, impossible because the weather is one of those rare things that doesn’t have any dna in it.

But then along comes a reminder of the way in which the future is reading more and more like a science fiction book, and the answer to our troubles - nanotechnology.

Naotechnology is little tiny machines built out of single molecules that make your imagination bubble. These little machines are so small they will be able to enter your brain and make you want to be an Elvis impersonator or believe television advertising has relevance to your life.

In America a scientist has built a working railway with carriages made of protein filaments one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. Which is very little, even if you have hair so healthy it shines.

The future is in making little tiny machines you can’t see that float on high and eat up the global warming. They would fly around gathering up all the carbon dioxide your car poured out this morning and make it into tiny little railways.

These tiny little railways would then transport tiny little buckets of carbon in the form of coal which could be sold to big industrial nations so they can make steel and build more cars and increase the traffic flow.

It is so simple and elegant.

For more on nanotechnology see small is beautiful at the Guardian newspaper’s website www.newsunlimited.co.uk

For more on the way in which the climate is ill check out the Hadley Centre for climate change

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