My podcast contribution to this week's Wide Angle: Engineering Earth seems ever so slightly humble compared to some of the amazing geo-engineering projects being dreamed up. I mean, just check out the video of the giant sun shield! No, instead, I speak with a scientist who is investigating whether or not it might be possible to tame global warming through millions and millions of smaller sunshields. Yep, the leaves of crop plants like corn, or what the Brits call maize. Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom has been working with some climate models, and he suggests "a bio-geoengineering scheme in which crop canopy albedo is increased to help mitigate climate change - choosing crop varieties or species having specific leaf glossyness and canopy morphological traits, and ultimately, genetically modifying the structure and composition of plant leaf waxes." That is, admittedly, a mouthful. So, I got Andy on the line to help me understand it all a bit better.
I started by asking him, what exactly is "albedo?"
Right, that was a start. So, what, exactly, did he have in mind by re-engineering the albedo of plants?
(Photo by Jonathunder via Wikimedia Commons)
Clark Boyd covers technology for the PRI public radio program, “The World.”
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