Top Scientists Propose Easy Global Warming Fix:
White Paint

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – After so many years of often tumultuous debates, esteemed environmental scientists meeting here have finally settled upon an almost embarrassingly simple, inexpensive global warming solution which they’re confident every government worldwide will readily accept—paint everything outdoors white. Roads, parking lots, rooftops, buildings, cars, trucks, and so on. Every inanimate object located outside should receive a surface coating of the brightest, most reflective titanium dioxide white paint available, these experts say.

Legislating bodies, businesses, and utilities alike resoundingly cheer the practical brilliance of this plan. By covering the manmade landscape in such a high albedo hue, the earth can once again bounce copious amounts of the sun’s warming rays back into space, much as the world’s polar icecaps, glaciers, and snow covering once did. Decades, even centuries, of man’s environmental destruction could be readily undone by the incredibly low-tech means of paint brush and roller.

The greatest feature of this plan is that it allows the root cause of global warming—the greenhouse effect, due to carbon dioxide release from fossil fuel burning—to continue unabated. No longer will businesses and economists need to worry about the frighteningly high cost of emissions controls, finding alternative energy sources, or forced production cutbacks stifling economic growth. Just a weekend or two spent sloshing white paint around, then it’s back to business as usual of pursuing the almighty dollar. Amen and hallelujah.

Originators of this white paint proposal, two scientists from DuPont’s Edgemoor plant in Wilmington, Delaware, are now considered shoo-in winners of next year’s Nobel Prizes in economics, chemistry, physics, and peace. Such a sweep of the world’s most prestigious awards would be completely unprecedented. However, by so impressively averting mankind’s greatest global disaster of all time, these geniuses fully deserve every possible accolade. A toast!

12.26.09