Submitted by Rear-gunner t3_1085n05 in Futurology
ialsoagree t1_j3tspae wrote
Reply to comment by Sleepdprived in Controversial Proposal to Reduce Global Warming Could Threaten Ozone Regeneration by Rear-gunner
Video 1 is complete nonsense.
The heat in your home is of a continuous wavelength (it'll be of all IR bands). You might have some material that can convert higher IR wavelengths to lower ones and then emit those, but it still kept some of the energy.
It can't convert lower wavelengths to higher ones (where is the energy coming from to do this!?).
But there's an entirely different problem. The ambient air is ALSO emitting all wavelengths of IR radiation. So while the panels may emit light of a particular wavelength, they're also absorbing it from the air. So the net exchange of energy is 0. In fact, the panels will likely absorb some of the heat, causing them to warm, and trapping more heat in your home.
If your house is the same temperature as the outdoors, you can't just "move" the heat from inside to outside without expending energy, no matter what you tape to your roof.
In the second video, they're talking about reflecting SUNLIGHT.
That's exactly the same process that emitting particulates in the atmosphere hope to accomplish. The only difference is, emitting particulates in the atmosphere can do it over a much much larger area, and do it above the cloud layer (EDIT: there's also a bunch of potential problems with emitting particulates that I haven't mentioned but exist).
So while you can put something on your roof to reflect UV and visible light (increasing the Earth's Albedo), the total surface area of the rooves of homes across the planet is much much much smaller than the surface area of ice on Earth - which is melting.
All of this is to say, while helpful to reflect more sunlight from our rooves, even doing this on every roof in the world won't even make up for the lost Albedo of ice melting (the Earth will still be absorbing more light than it reflects, even after you spend the trillions to install this everywhere).
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments