“Professor, Professor. Could you spare us a few minutes? We have this wonderful invention.”
Rick and Sophie, two of his best students, gazed at the Professor of World Studies with shining eyes and youthful enthusiasm.
“OK, let’s hear your idea,” said the Professor, trying to keep the fatigue out of his voice. “Talk as I tidy up my papers.”
He’d just finished an hour long lecture on ‘Could giant machines clean carbon dioxide out of the air and combat global warming?’
Always a popular teacher, close to a hundred youthful sweaty bodies had packed into his lecture and he was keen to retreat outside for some fresh air.
Retirement for the Professor couldn’t come soon enough but he still cared about his students and genuinely wished there was a solution to global warming that he could believe in.
Rick grabbed a piece of chalk from the lectern and drew a matrix structure on the blackboard that the Professor had just wiped.
“The solution is simple,” said Rick, enthusiastically. “A field of grass or any other plant life works brilliantly to soak up carbon dioxide and through photosynthesis produces oxygen. The problem is that to combat the levels of carbon dioxide we have in the air these days would take far too many fields. There just isn’t the space on the planet.”
Sophie grabbed the chalk from Rick, elbowed him out of the way, and started to draw light coming down from an oblong sun to represent the work of photosynthesis.
She continued the proposal.
“But what about if we had a large number of framework structures that allowed plant life to grow in the air with space for light to get through. We could use hydroponics to get nourishment to the plants and even have walk ways so they could be tended.”
She slammed the chalk back down on the lectern, linked arms with Rick and gazed triumphantly at the Professor, waiting for his praise.
“Great idea guys,” said the Professor, carefully, not wanting to bring them down with too much of a bang.
“Problem is that what you have just described has already been invented and distributed widely over the Earth. The rain forest has vast numbers of them. They are called ‘trees’ and the problem is that we human beings keep chopping them down!
As the Professor wearily left the lecture theatre, Rick and Sophie had switched to vigorously debating the merits and demerits of participants in a popular national TV talent show.
Outside, the Professor breathed the fresh air of the countryside campus deeply into his lungs and wondered how long Rick, Sophie and all the other young people of the new generation would be able to continue to enjoy this simple pleasure.
The End
(Rob Hopcott – online author – fiction – news)
Copyright Rob Hopcott 2007. All characters in this climate change and global warming flash fiction very short story and other free on-line humor, short stories, flash fictions, micro-fictions, sudden fictions, post card fictions or very short stories on this site are fictitious and no reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.
Tags: carbon dioxide removal, clean air, giant machines, invention, inventions, oxygen, photosynthesis, rain forest, trees