Global warming thwarted by bacteria!
Is Global Warming real? Maybe. Do we care? Not anymore. Why? Bacteria, that’s why.
In a nut shell scientists have found a way to tell bacteria to eat CO2 and turn it into fuel. Which then will make more CO2 which will then be eaten and turned into fuel. What does that sound like? Sounds like an ecosystem to me and the main reason why we should just chill out about the big bad global warming mess.
Yes, hackers broke into some emails and revealed some shady looking exchanges. They went live with it and everyone went up in arms about how all the global warming talk was faked. Well, doesn’t look like it was faked but certainly throws some confusion on the whole mess. Most climatologists say that the Earth is heating up and it’s caused by all the extra CO2 and other gases being thrown into the atmosphere (anyone remember when it was the ozone being depleted? ahh those were the days) and that causes a greenhouse effect to heat up the earth. Other scientists, who are normally not climatologists, say that the Earth heats up and cools down all the time, we’ve only been doing our thing with oil an coal for a few decades, chill out and we’ll be good.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Who cares? I’m jumping on the Ray Kurzweil bandwagon of ‘everything in the future is going to be really really cool’. Earth is getting to hot? Build something to make it cooler. Too fat? Take a pill that tells your cells to stop storing fat. Want a robot wife? Head to Japan and make a purchase. All these things and more may be coming down the pipe in the future. One of them just hit a scientists petri dish near you.
These little bacteria guys love CO2. They eat it up and spit out a usable fuel that we could use to motorcycles, computers, flying cars and orbital space hotels. Pretty cool. The bigger point here is we’re too self centered to get wiped out by Global Warming. I’m not advocating everyone go out and get a V8 and do some serious driving this weekend, but also don’t spend 50k on solar panels to save the world with your kid’s college education fund. We’ll fix it. That’s what we do. Humans are smart. This one little bacteria is only one of a hundred crazy ideas I’ve seen that will save the day from global warming. Maybe it’ll even work!
Check out this story over at R&D mag. http://www.rdmag.com/News/2009/12/Energy-Engineering-Bacteria-To-Turn-Carbon-Dioxide-Into-Liquid-Fuel/
