3 ms·
> The Earth has a heat budget, where it can only emit so much heat over time Yes, but it's much higher than most think. We're already creating technology like
by naasking 4y ago
> The Earth has a heat budget, where it can only emit so much heat over time
Yes, but it's much higher than most think. We're already creating technology like paints and evaporators that downconvert and upconvert photons into a band of the infrared spectrum that passes straight through the atmosphere and into space. Read up on passive radiative cooling, fascinating stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cool...
- kibwen 4y agoThat an interesting technology, and indeed we do have the power to exert some control over the Earth's heat budget, I'm not disputing that. However, it seems plain to me that our capacity for spending the Earth's heat budget will, if left unchecked, always naturally outstrip our capacity to raise the Earth's heat budget (the latter requires long-term thinking, whereas the former only requires greedy short-term thinking). If you have two terms that trend to infinity, as long as one term increases faster than the other, it will dominate the other infinite term.