I always came up with the weirdest ideas when I was in school.
I wanted to be an astronaut, pathologist, nuclear scientist and biologist, all in one.
In Grade VII I learnt about photosynthesis, a process by which green plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose, using energy from the sun.
The most crucial ingredient in the plant apparatus that facilitates the reaction by absorbing sunlight is chlorophyll, the pigment that gives plants their green colour.
It was my eureka moment when I learnt about it.
There it was, chlorophyll, the solution to all the world's problems.
What if all human beings were given a dose?
I imagined a swarm of green people resembling a human savannah turning themselves to the sun, synthesising their own food without electricity, without wasting fuel and without cutting down trees.
All this takes place by using CO2, the major pollutant gas and the by-product would be oxygen!
I would contemplate and debate this endlessly with my mum, a biologist. She told me flatly that a human cell could never accept the pigment.
I gave up and forgot all about my green folks when I lost interest in biology and opted for commerce in senior secondary school.
But memories of my grand eco-designs resurfaced when I watched the film Please Help the World, shown at the opening of the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
It showed children from around the globe making a fervent appeal for our planet.
It ended with the message: "We have the power to save the world. Now."
We can't afford to be blasŽ about global warming anymore.
Recently, BBC's Ethical Man Justin Rowlatt was mocked and derided over his views on climate change by American talk show host Doc Thompson.
He was not allowed to speak a word and the host and the viewers played down the human impact on our planet and belittled the idea of reducing emissions.
The level of ignorance and apathy is shocking.
Earlier myths that the earth has an inbuilt mechanism to heal itself and restore the balance in the atmosphere simply don't hold true now.
Temperatures have risen by three to five per cent within 50 years, whereas in pre-historic times the change took place over a span of 15,000 years.
Plants and animals can't adapt to this change in such a short span of time.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that are present in foams and aerosols have broken down the ozone layer in our stratosphere, resulting in a hole above Antarctica.
Without the ozone layer, which gives a layer of protection to our planet, the temperatures would be 100 degrees Celsius at daytime and 150 degrees Celsius at night.
This means that with the depletion of the ozone, our planet is just going to get hotter.
Perceptible changes have already begun happening.
There has been a record increase in hurricanes, droughts, heavy rainfall and flash floods, in parts of the world where such phenomena were earlier uncommon.
Melting of glaciers and polar icecaps is not just a threat to penguins and polar bears.
If the sea levels keep rising, Bahrain will be underwater in the near future.
It's time we became proactive and did something, rather than just talk.
How ironic that people came together and formed a quick consensus on how best to deal with global recession but are very hesitant to talk about cutting down emissions that can save our planet.
If the cost of human impact on the environment were to be measured in ecological dollars, we would probably wake up.
I've realised now that we don't really need an army of chlorophyll-infused hybrid human beings to make a difference, we just need greener people.
l Jennifer is a former Bahrain resident now studying in Mumbai. Her family still lives here.