compensating for increased CO2 - methods?

[JayMaechtlen]

How much solar input would have to be intercepted or re-radiated to compensate for increased greenhouse gases?
For example? what happens if we put some huge reflective panels in L2?
(thinking aluminized mylar or equivalent)
Earth's projected area is about 11.9 million square miles.
What percent of that would be needed to compensate for the greenhouse effect?


Jay Maechtlen

http://www.laserpubs.com/techcomm

 

[TugboatEng]

I was thinking solar powered lasers on the ground that could fire energy back in to space but they're not efficient enough. Microwaves might be better.

 

[IRstuff]

The brute-force solar flux is on the order of 10^17 W, some tiny fraction of it would be excess, given global warming, but

https://gcos.wmo.int/en/news/where-does-heat-go

shows the imbalance at 1 W/m^2, so that gives you ~5x10^14 W, which is not a comprehensible value for anything we can do in terms of energy dumping into space.

By that same argument, we need to block about 0.1% of the earth's incoming flux. While L1 is an obvious location (L2 is behind the earth, so only good for astronomy, like James Webb Telescope), just consider that we'd need to cover 49k mi^2 at the earth's surface to block 0.1% of the incoming radiation. The required area at L1 is on the order of 1.3 million mi^2, which is a rather daunting mount of area to cover, not to mention wrecking a some amount of solar observation capability.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[rb1957]

and also "unintended consequences" ...

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.