WATCH: Kurtis Baute is entering a homemade greenhouse at midnight Tuesday to conduct an experiment on greenhouse gases and climate change.
“So this is it. This is where I’m going to be spending the next one to three days,” said Kurtis Baute Tuesday as he showed CHEK News the greenhouse he made.
It’s not much to look at but the three metre by three metre by three metre greenhouse will be Kurtis Baute’s home for the next few days.
The scientist will seal himself in at midnight Tuesday along with 200 plants and some bare essentials like water and food rations.
The idea came to him after he put a bunch of soil and plants into a jar two years ago then watched them live and die and change. He wondered what how big a jar would have to be for a human to be in the same kind of experiment.
“I was like yeah that would be a really neat experiment and you could probably teach a lot about the ecosystem that we live in, the earth as a whole from the little experiment so somehow here I am and here’s the jar that I built,” said Baute.
Cool weather and rain are on the way but Baute says he’s less concerned about being cold than too hot because when the sun comes out the greenhouse effect is real.
“I was in here a couple of days ago and it went from 20 degrees to 35 degrees in an instant, like in half an hour because its a solar oven, sunlight gets in, heats up the air and the heat really can’t escape very well and that’s like bad for me but it’s also an example of what’s happening to the entire earth right now,” added Baute.
He says what he’s doing is pretty risky considering the gases that can build up inside the greenhouse but he has devices to monitor the air.
Ultimately he wants people to think about the air we breathe and how all of us impact the atmosphere.
“Because we’re pumping out C02 in the air from burning fuels and that’s impacting our entire climate and what are we going to do about that? We need to do something, like yesterday about that,” he said.
You can follow Baute’s experience and maybe even ask him a few questions as he live tweets @kurtisbaute during the experiment.
You can also find his website here.
Dean Stoltz
