''Project Earth'' is a 2008 reality TV series, hosted by

Kevin O'Leary Terrence Thomas Kevin O'Leary (born July 9, 1954), also known as Mr. Wonderful, is a Canadian businessman and television personality. From 2004 to 2014, he appeared on various Canadian television shows, including the business news programs ''Sq ...

, Jennifer L. Languell, Basil Singer and Mocean Melvin, on the

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel, known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery, is an American cable channel that is best known for its ongoing reality television shows and promotion of pseudoscience. It init ...

in which several groups of scientists experiment with radical ideas to slow and/or stop

global warming Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes ...

using

geoengineering Geoengineering (also known as climate engineering or climate intervention) is the deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system intended to counteract human-caused climate change. The term commonly encompasses two broad cate ...

methods.

Projects

The show consists of eight experiments to weigh pros and cons of ideas on how to reduce global warming. The projects are as follows:

Wrapping Greenland

Seeing if glacier melting on

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

can be prevented by covering them with insulating sheets.

Raining Forests

Led by scientist Mark Hodges, they attempt to reforest areas of bare

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

from helicopters using canisters holding a tree seedling.

Brighter Earth

Led by atmospheric physicist John Latham and engineer

Stephen Salter Professor Stephen Hugh Salter, (7 December 1938 – 23 February 2024) was a South African-born Scottish academic who was Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh and inventor of the eponymous Salter's duck wav ...

, the team attempted a Cloud reflectivity enhancement experiment. Their goal was to make clouds more reflective to bounce more of the Sun's heat generating rays back into space as a stop-gap against global warming. By changing the size of water droplets within a cloud, they make clouds brighter and reflect the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

's heat into space. They choose to seed marine

stratocumulus cloud A stratocumulus cloud, occasionally called a cumulostratus, belongs to a genus-type of clouds characterized by large dark, rounded masses, usually in groups, lines, or waves, the individual elements being larger than those in altocumulus, and t ...

s because of their commonality around the world and the fact that they are low-lying, making it easier for man-made droplets to reach them. The Project Earth team uses the potassium chloride and sodium chloride from (salt-based)

flares A flare, also sometimes called a fusée, fusee, or bengala, bengalo in several European countries, is a type of pyrotechnic that produces a bright light or intense heat without an explosion. Flares are used for distress signaling, illuminatio ...

to form droplet particles that are one micrometre in diameter, and that can rise to , even in adverse (cloudless) conditions. The experiment proves that man-made droplets can indeed seed stratocumulus clouds. The team is also charged with creating a delivery system for the cloud creation mechanisms that allows for low carbon emission, remote controlled vessels. They employ the concept of the Flettner rotor by fabricating rotors and installing them onto a reinforced/

retrofit Retrofitting is the addition of new technology or features to older systems. Retrofits can happen for a number of reasons, for example with big capital expenditures like naval vessels, military equipment or manufacturing plants, businesses or go ...

ted

trimaran A trimaran (or double-outrigger) is a multihull boat that comprises a main hull and two smaller outrigger hulls (or "floats") which are attached to the main hull with lateral beams. Most modern trimarans are sailing yachts designed for recrea ...

. After a series of computer simulations based on current and rising CO₂ levels, Basil determined that without the proposed fleet of ships, the average global temperature would rise 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st Century; enough to melt glaciers that are important to the freshwater needs of Asia and Africa and the hydro-electric power needs of Europe. Using a fleet of 1500 cloud enhancing ships employing the recently discovered technologies would reduce that average global temperature change to only 1 degree Celsius by the end of the 21st century. The slower rise in temperature would grant humanity more time to reduce carbon emissions before a major climate related catastrophe was likely to strike. The estimated cost of the fleet of remote-operated cloud enhancing vessels would was valued at $5.8 billion US, a fraction of the $44 trillion US

world economy The world economy or global economy is the economy of all humans in the world, referring to the global economic system, which includes all economic activities conducted both within and between nations, including production (economics), producti ...

that would be irreparably damaged if climate change were to continue unchecked.

Infinite Winds

Testing of a revolutionary wind turbine led by Inventor and lead engineer Fred Ferguson (Magenn Power) in an attempt to harness the energy of high-altitude winds. The team will test a prototype attached to a blimp over The Appalachians to harness the endless supply of wind.

Hungry Oceans

Dr. Brian von Herzen and the Discovery team join Professors David Karl (University of Hawaii) and Ricardo M Letelier (Oregon State University) to test wave powered pumps in an effort to bring nutrients from the depths of the oceans to the surface. This nutrient enrichment of the open ocean's well-lit surface layers is needed to enhance

photosynthesis Photosynthesis ( ) is a system of biological processes by which photosynthetic organisms, such as most plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, convert light energy, typically from sunlight, into the chemical energy necessary to fuel their metabo ...

and trigger large blooms of

phytoplankton Phytoplankton () are the autotrophic (self-feeding) components of the plankton community and a key part of ocean and freshwater Aquatic ecosystem, ecosystems. The name comes from the Greek language, Greek words (), meaning 'plant', and (), mea ...

that could increase the role of vast oceanic regions in the sequestration of anthropogenic

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalent bond, covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in a gas state at room temperature and at norma ...

. However, before producing large scale perturbations using these pumps, the scientific team from Hawaii and Oregon wants to better understand the risks and benefits of such large scale perturbations by looking at the effect that the deployment of a few pumps may have in the environment.

Space Sunshield

Attempting to create a sunshade by placing trillions of lenses in space, led by astronomer and professor

Roger Angel James Roger Prior Angel (born February 7, 1941) is a British-American astrophysicist known for his contributions to astronomy and the design and fabrication of large optics for telescopes, solar power and other applications. He developed the spi ...

. Angel has developed a diffraction pattern by etching onto a lens, which will deflect the Sun's rays.

Orbital Power Plant

Former NASA physicist John C. Mankins's vision of launching thousands of satellites into space, gathering solar energy from the Sun and beaming it down to Earth as microwave energy. The energy will then be collected by antennas on the ground, which will convert it into electricity.

Fixing Carbon

Testing to see if the air can be scrubbed clean of its

. David Keith builds a machine prototype that sucks air into one end and sprays with a

sodium hydroxide Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye and caustic soda, is an inorganic compound with the formula . It is a white solid ionic compound consisting of sodium cations and hydroxide anions . Sodium hydroxide is a highly corrosive base (chemistry), ...

solution, then expelling clean air out.

References

External links

*{{IMDb title, 1267210
Project EARTHProject Earth Blog
Watch full episodes here - https://web.archive.org/web/20080916234809/http://video.discovery.com/player.html Discovery Channel original programming 2000s American reality television series