h a l f b a k e r yNot so much a thought experiment as a single neuron misfire.
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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.
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Annotation:
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I think the way refrigerators work involves mechanically
varying
the pressure on the working fluid, which is confined in
tubes. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Apart from those small, niggling objections, this is a
perfectly
cromulent idea.[=] |
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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. |
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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). |
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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. |
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//Using some magic chemistry// |
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Like that involved in multiple large-scale thermonuclear
explosions? |
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[Breaks out sled & puts on mittens] |
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I like sledding! OK you won me over nuclear winter it is. |
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[Hovers finger over big red button] |
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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. |
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//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.// |
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That's not a problem at all, I should say that's not THE
problem. |
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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. |
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Now getting that juice up there would require the
biggest thing ever build by man so that's your issue. One
of them anyway. |
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//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// |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Just blow up half of the moon to provide a solar shield and simultaneously reduce tides and gravometric heating. |
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//Just blow up half of the moon// |
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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. |
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[Idly wonders how much TNT he's going to need to get up
there for this] |
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//Idly wonders how much TNT // |
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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?" |
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Yes, I help with a setup & there's no one there to run with it. |
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We need a sentence generator seeded with critical phrases
like: "shaped-charge", "Armor-Piercing Discarding Sabot Fin-
Stabilized", "about 8ft of det-cord" etc. |
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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. |
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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 |
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[marked-for-deletion] -- a question, not an idea. |
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// Could we put the right cocktail of gasses in the atmosphere [...] ? |
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Yes, we could. When you figure out what mixture of gas, write this as
an idea. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Or point it downward at an open volcano perhaps? |
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