Answers to World Problems. Butch Biendara

the season’s hurricanes, but is the enormous pollution that comes along with them really a positive solution to the problem?

      The sun is the source of the power but it is the evaporation from the oceans that caries that power along in the low pressure storm systems moving from place to place. The turbulence of the tons of water rising through the atmosphere brings the winds that move the weather. Hurricanes die out over land or colder water.

      The illustration below is a simple sketch from a NOOA flier on how the Atlantic hurricanes grow and move westward.

      THE SOLUTION

      An old proverb says “To solve your future problems, you must make your enemy’s children your friends”. Lets look to where the storms are born as babies, for a solution to stop them before they ever get started.

      There is no man-made structure that can hold back the furious rage of weather storms driven by the power of the sun. Even though a thousand ‘consultants’ will say ‘yes’ to your every question, and then charge for the extended unforeseen contingencies. Once the sun’s energy has been put into motion, that power is beyond any solution devised by mankind.

      Rather than trying to stop the energy of those enormous storms or to defuse that energy to some harmless end result, the answer is to stop the gigantic energy of the tropical sun from ever building the mobile energy force that sends a devastating storm to the USA.

      It’s not a quick and easy solution, but rather a practical and doable solution that can be done in increments by any and all interested parties.

      Quite simply - plant a forest that covers the Sahara Desert and ideally all of North Africa.

      Given that the size of the North African desert area is larger than the continental USA, it might seem to be an insurmountable task to plant a forest in the desert. In the two hundred year history of the USA, the land has been transformed in a great number of ways and in a much shorter time the US population has shifted from the productive plains to the coastal areas. It is not an instant fix and will take some time. However, if you break the problem down to workable units, a man can eat an elephant in bite-sized pieces.

      The reason that north Africa is a desert and not a tropical forest is that in spite of the abundant sunshine, there is not currently any significant water to allow for plant growth the can make productive use of the immense amount of solar energy falling on the ground. The southern part of the continent of Africa has the Atlantic to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east to bring moisture from winds blowing either direction. But northern Africa has its weather coming from the vast continent of Asia’s vast desert regions.

      There are geological signs of ancient major rivers flowing and petroglyphs showing jungle animals that someone saw there a long time ago. There are still some small areas with small amounts of rainfall and groundwater as shown at the red spot near the top of the first composite image. At that location, about 70 miles from the coast and at an elevation of 500 feet, a small watercourse flows from the hills to water some fields a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long before it disappears into the desert sand.

      While the land may appear barren now, one advantage of the long period of not growing anything, is that there has been little plant growth to draw nutrients from the soil. The slow natural breakdown of minerals has had no plants to draw it out or any major rainfall to wash it away. With just the right amount of water the desert could burst into bloom again. It has happened over many miles of what was barren desert in the southwestern states of the USA where dams and canals brought water from the mountains to irrigate thousands of acres of lush crops.

      So where might the proposed huge amount of new water for the Sahara come from?

      There is the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and the Red Sea to the east. It is salt water and a long way from the center of the Sahara. Now the question changes to methods of transportation and desalination, two readily workable procedures

      MITIGATION MEASURES

      Tied into this issue is that global governments recognize that their industrial production regularly produces toxic or polluting elements and that there may be a price to be paid to mitigate those problems. To do the mitigation at the site of the production plant may require a total destruction of the plant and a reconstruction cost that is more than the productive business can survive. The USA is all ready using the “Cap and Trade” policy of allowing a polluting production plant to continue in operation by ‘buying’ clean air credits in some other means. In California, polluting industries that can’t be cleaned up without a reconstruction of the entire plant, can pay to buy up older ‘gross polluting’ cars and get the equivalent amount of air pollution reduction.

      Lets take that idea to a higher level and think globally. If entire nations can direct funding from their polluting industries to a worldwide program of cleaner air, it doesn’t take too much arm-twisting to have those ‘Cap and Trade’ funds directed to improving other parts of the world, like North Africa. The fines or penalties of polluting industries can be directed to companies that can devise and produce wind driven pumps and solar powered distillation devices to bring salt water from the four sides of North Africa, inland to the barren areas where some of the barren land can be used to collect the solar energy to distill the water, and the surrounding areas with better soil can become productive with the use of the new fresh water source.

      To begin testing to perfect the process, a preferred site would have a high hill near a shoreline where windmill ‘farms’ would pump seawater up the hills to storage reservoirs. The water then flows by gravity to the next reservoir at a farther inland location and slightly lower elevation than the first windmill pump.

      More windmill ‘farms’ would again pump the water to another higher reservoir. A big plus is that much of the area of the Sahara desert is less than 1,000 above sea level. The image below shows that although there are a few higher interior mountains, much of the area near the coastlines and even at times very far inland, is simply barren low desert. As such there are no high barriers to need huge pumps such as the Edmonston Pumping Plant where water is pumped 1,926 ft up over the Tehachapi mountain pass to bring northern California water to southern California.

      OPERATIONS STAFF

      Obviously there will be some need to operate, maintain and repair the equipment and to plant and harvest what is grown in these newly irrigated lands. That brings in another social element whereby the vast crowds of migrant workers with limited education and skills from Africa, India and southeast Asia would be glad to find a place to have an ongoing job and enjoy the option to grow some crops for their food.

      With a simple design and construction of the solar stills, the regular job of cleaning the salt residue from distillation is a job not requiring rocket science skills. My rough ‘first-cut’ concept for the distillation device is a shallow black plastic pan about six feet on each major side-to-side dimension, in the shape of a collection of hexagons. The reason for the hexagons is to allow for seven subdivisions of one inner hexagon surrounded by six interlocking hexagons, each about two feet in size. The sides of the small internal hexagons would provide the strength and structure to make the panels stable.

      Each individual small hexagon would have an open vertical tube in its center to be a support for the center of the cell’s lightweight clear cover / solar distillation panel. That open tube would also be the means to collect the moisture from the inner slopes of each hexagon’s cover. The perimeter of each small hexagon would be a double wall with the space between the two walls formed as a small trough running between the two perimeter walls that would slope down to one lowest spot where a tube would collect the distilled water and drain it out the bottom. Note the blue circles at the junctions of hexagons where just three drains would collect the water from the outer perimeters of all seven hexagons. The ten drains would be collected into a manifold to drain either into some container