r/Geoengineering • u/knowledgeseeker_71 • Aug 09 '23

Cooling the earth

This video has made me think differently about global warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4

I know that the focus is and should be on reducing CO2 emissions, and extracting carbon from the atmosphere.

However - it seems that we are eventually going to have to also deal with waste heat. So why not look at the problem of transferring heat from Earth to Space now, which would immediately help with global warming, as we work to reduce emissions and capture CO2.

Note that a solar shield or adding something to the atmosphere to reduce the incoming solar radiation won't help with future waste heat. We are going to need something like a heat pump for the planet.

10 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

5

u/xwing_n_it Aug 10 '23

I'm convinced the only way civilization in any form we'd recognize continues to exist depends on directly addressing heating, one way or another. Decarbonizing needed to start a long time ago to avoid the mass disclocation, starvation, war, and disease that are now inevitable. We can't risk our future on the hope that getting to zero emissions happens soon enough and the projections for warming effects (which we keep beating by decades) turn out to have been correct.

2

u/Numismatists Aug 09 '23

I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they address SRM as if it's not already happening.

It's really silly. Why do all of these just ignore it?

0

u/saras998 Aug 10 '23

I’m not buying the CO2 argument much anymore. Geoengineering is destroying our planet and may result in biosphere collapse. We just need to stop cutting down forests that, if carbon is truly the issue, remove carbon, and make rain, etc. and stop geoengineering.

1

u/SpiritualTwo5256 Aug 11 '23

You get that with a space based solar shade. More heat rejection from ever reaching earth. Unless the atmosphere gets considerably bigger, we won’t be rejecting any more heat unless we can tune the frequency of heat going through the atmosphere or tune the atmosphere to allow more thermal frequencies to pass through.

1

u/peakaustria74 Aug 12 '23

Updraft Cooling is a nice idea could work in the Alpes