Rhinocrisy

This dream was too weird not to write down.

When I was young, in the war I was in the army. Except I never saw any action. All I did was take part in one mission where I was dropped in to blow up some hotel, I’m not sure why. Except at the last minute I was pulled out and never actually blew up anything.

After the war, I was in one of those G.I. bill work programs, to help you get by. But for some reason, they had written in my file that my expertise was social work, in advising people on pregnancy of all things. So they made me a pregnancy counselor for the rural hospitals in my area. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that the only relevant experience I had was that I aborted on some balcony.

This is where my memory cuts out… I meet someone equally strange while I’m at the hospital and he tells me something.

Idle back-of-the-envelope calculations to save the world are a favorite pastime of mine, the product of, believe it or not, long road-trips with my family, where my dad would work us through calculations such as the circumference of the world at our latitude and the like. Here’s a fun one:

In the latest New Scientist, a reader inquires about painting roofs white to increase albedo and thus prevent global warming. Someone responds to inform us that about 3% of the world is covered by buildings. A third says that we would do better to instead cover the world with photovoltaic cells.

Well, let’s see how well we can do with this. Let’s restrict ourselves to the U.S., so we can get plenty of data. Let’s assume the U.S. has a proportionate number of buildings according to its population; probably more, but it’s always better to be conservative. This is 5% of 3% of 510,065,284.702, which is the surface area of the Earth in km². For some reason I happen to know off the top of my head that the average incident sunlight in the U.S. is 200 W/m² (I don’t know how this stuff happens to me). Which means, if we do some multiplication, that American rooftops are drawing, on average, 1.53e14 W. Let’s say a photovoltaic cell has an efficiency of 16%; this allows us to produce 2.44e13 W, or in a year, 7.7e17 kWH. To put this figure in perspective, the U.S. consumes something like 3.6e12 kWH of electricity annually. In other words, even if we only did this with 0.1% of buildings, or if the process is a thousandfold less efficient, we would still be producing two hundred times as much power as we consume annually. Sounds like a good idea!