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Turn the earth into a giant refrigerator to fight climate change

Fight climate change emitting the right cocktail of gasses so that a column of atmosphere acts as a natural refrigerator
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Using some magic chemistry;

Could we put the right cocktail of gasses in the atmosphere such that it converts that extra few degrees of convective heat from the greenhouse gasses, into radiant heat in the upper atmosphere that would "glow". Allowing the heat to escape the atmosphere in the form of radiation which could escape into space. Thus creating a column of atmosphere that acts as a giant natural cycle refrigerator to cool the earth down and fight climate change.

Spencerbug, Sep 26 2021


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       I think the way refrigerators work involves mechanically varying the pressure on the working fluid, which is confined in tubes.   

       If I understand this idea correctly, it is supposed to work in a purely chemical way without mechanical components. So, if it worked at all, it wouldn't really be working like a fridge.   

       So, could it work at all? A proper scientist may want to correct me on this, but my hunch is that the CO2 molecules which now capture heat that's trying to escape are, in some sense, already glowing - it's just that they're not glowing in the visible spectrum, and they're not glowing preferentially in an outbound direction, as this idea would require.   

       I'm not sure how you could make anything glow preferentially in a particular direction without some mechanical intervention(such as holding up a mirror under it), and I'm not sure how you would make such an intervention without consuming energy and adding waste heat to the atmosphere.   

       Apart from those small, niggling objections, this is a perfectly cromulent idea.[=]
pertinax, Sep 26 2021
  

       Yea, while there may be some kind of magic gas, mechanical refrigeration works by spraying a substance from a high pressure to a low pressure state like when you spray a can of some aerosol it feels cool. Then they compress it again and remove the heat with water or a fan and repeat the cycle, blowing a fan across the coils when it's in the cool state to cool the air.
doctorremulac3, Sep 26 2021
  

       I was just going to get all excited and propose that the hot side of the coils could be put in geostationary orbit, with long tubes coming down the space elevator to onnect the cold side (on Earth) with the hot side (in space).   

       Alas I realise the primary flaw with this idea is that there is no air for the fan to blow across the cooling fins on the hot side in space, and so it probably wouldn't work.
pocmloc, Sep 26 2021
  

       //Using some magic chemistry//   

       Like that involved in multiple large-scale thermonuclear explosions?   

       [Breaks out sled & puts on mittens]   

       I like sledding! OK you won me over nuclear winter it is.   

       [Hovers finger over big red button]   

       Is now OK?
Skewed, Sep 26 2021
  

       What you need is to focus some of the excess heat in some passive way, where you could use the energy to drive a space elevator / energy beam thingy to lift whatever to orbit.
RayfordSteele, Sep 26 2021
  

       //Alas I realise the primary flaw with this idea is that there is no air for the fan to blow across the cooling fins on the hot side in space, and so it probably wouldn't work.//   

       That's not a problem at all, I should say that's not THE problem.   

       Shield the coils from the 250 degree sun and it's -150 degrees on the other side. Those numbers are probably wildly off but I'm not going to look it up, but there is a big difference the further out you go.   

       Now getting that juice up there would require the biggest thing ever build by man so that's your issue. One of them anyway.
doctorremulac3, Sep 26 2021
  

       //mechanical refrigeration works by spraying a substance from a high pressure to a low pressure state like when you spray a can of some aerosol it feels cool. Then they compress it again and remove the heat//   

       It's the state change that is critical. Evaporating something absorbs a lot of energy, condensing it releases it. And Earth already operates this system. Around the middle of the Earth where solar heating is strongest, lots of water is evaporated, absorbing heat energy into a liquid-to-vapor state change. At higher altitude where the temperature is lower, the water vapor condenses out as clouds, releasing energy as heat, presumably in all directions, and at altitude, a lot of those directions are out to space.   

       So what you have is a water/water vapor system that works a bit like AC, but without the up hill component. It's more like a phase-change enhanced convection, with multiple loops. For example, evaporation absorbs energy at mid day and might release it again in as it cools off at sundown. Or equatorial evaporation condenses out over the cooler poles - it's this cooling air descending over the poles that creates the katabatic winds for example.   

       You can get a feeling for the increased energy transfer a little water vapor offers, by dunking your coat in room temperature water before heading out into the snow, or feeling the surface of a double glazed window that's had a failed seal and now has condensation in it.   

       This is one of the negative feedback loops of global temperature. More heat evaporates more water, and additional energy pushes bigger clouds higher where they lose energy either by radiation at altitude or by raising the temperature (and emissivity) of the colder parts of the planet. It does mean more rain/snow/more powerful weather however. More rain also pulls CO2 out of the air, and when it rains onto, for example limestone, you dissolve it and leave the CO2 as bicarbonate dissolved in whatever convenient body of water is around. Another negative feedback loop.
bs0u0155, Sep 27 2021
  

       Just blow up half of the moon to provide a solar shield and simultaneously reduce tides and gravometric heating.
Voice, Sep 27 2021
  

       //Just blow up half of the moon//   

       That'd work, but probably more due to the amount of ejecta pumped into the atmosphere by all the impacts of bits of it crashing into the Earth & producing a very creditable impression of a nuclear winter than any sun shade the orbital bits provided, you'd get decades of that as different bits orbits degraded at different rates, maybe even centuries if you're lucky.   

       [Idly wonders how much TNT he's going to need to get up there for this]
Skewed, Sep 27 2021
  

       //Idly wonders how much TNT //   

       sigh. 8th would have a ball park estimate straight off the top of his head. Then a bunch of follow up questions including "Exactly HOW blown up do you want it?"
bs0u0155, Sep 28 2021
  

       Yes, I help with a setup & there's no one there to run with it.
Skewed, Sep 28 2021
  

       We need a sentence generator seeded with critical phrases like: "shaped-charge", "Armor-Piercing Discarding Sabot Fin- Stabilized", "about 8ft of det-cord" etc.
bs0u0155, Sep 28 2021
  

       A nice idea but I don't think even the best chatbots & net agents out there are up to the job of serving as an [8th] emulator, if they were I'd already be using one as a me emulator.
Skewed, Sep 28 2021
  

       This sort of happens already. Every time a major volcanic eruption occurs, global temperatures can drop a degree long-term. We just need to blow up a few volcanos I guess
mailtosalonga, Sep 29 2021
  

       [marked-for-deletion] -- a question, not an idea.   

       // Could we put the right cocktail of gasses in the atmosphere [...] ?   

       Yes, we could. When you figure out what mixture of gas, write this as an idea.
Mindey, Nov 13 2021
  

       In summary, no.   

       As others have mentioned, "glowing" happens in a uniform direction, and there's no way to make it preferentially glow in the upper atmosphere so the EM radiation is outward.   

       What you can, in theory, do, is concentrate heat using a standard refrigeration system, and isolate that heat from the surroundings to the point where it radiates outward. I.E. put the hot side of an AC unit in a parabolic mirror pointing at empty sky. In practice, however, you're still going to lose more to the immediate surroundings than to radiating outward, and the net energy addition to concentrate the heat exceeds what you can radiate out.   

       Note that these are practical, not theoretical concerns (you are not violating the laws of thermodynamics since you aren't dealing with an isolated system). So if someone figures out how to build an isolated insulated parabolic mirror deep enough that you can pump all the atmosphere out, it is possible to waste heat to space this way.
MechE, Nov 15 2021
  

       Or point it downward at an open volcano perhaps?
RayfordSteele, Nov 16 2021
  


 

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