Easy, right?īy Scharringhausen’s calculations, a three-degree-C decrease in temperature to counteract current and near-future anthropogenic warming would require us to move our planet an additional three million kilometers from the sun. All we have to do is find a way to move all 5.972 septillion kilograms of Earth’s mass farther away from our star. So let’s take Representative Gohmert’s advice and simply increase X, the distance to the sun. To make Earth cooler, we need to decrease a variable on the right side of the equation: We can’t easily lower the sun’s temperature or radius-and clearly meaningful reductions to our heat-trapping, albedo-shifting greenhouse gas emissions are out of the question. Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, says that while it will take the sun on the order of 100 million years to increase in luminosity by 1 percent, our greenhouse-gas-emitting global civilization is projected to increase the solar energy retained by Earth by 1 percent over the next few hundred to 1,000 years. Our star is very slowly swelling and brightening, becoming slightly larger and more luminous as it ages. Some variables in this equation are changing naturally.
That, in turn, eventually leads to a higher average planetary temperature. Anthropogenic warming causes snow and ice caps to melt, which can make Earth’s albedo decrease. There is a connection between climate change and albedo: snow and ice, for instance, have a high albedo, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sunlight that hits them back to outer space. Here, Teq is Earth’s temperature, T ☉ is the sun’s temperature, R ☉ is the sun’s radius, X is the distance to the sun, and A is Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity.* Albedo measures how well our planet reflects solar energy, where 0 would be perfect absorption and 1 would be perfect reflection. Page from planetary astronomer Britt Scharringhausen’s lab notebook shows a handwritten equation for determining a planet’s radiative equilibrium ( highlighted in green), which sets its effective temperature. It is described in the following equation, as scribbled out by Scharringhausen. Radiative equilibrium, the balance between incoming energy from the sun’s rays and energy emitted from Earth, is key to our understanding of our planet’s changing temperature, says Britt Scharringhausen, a planetary astronomer at Beloit College. Such an increase would render some presently people-packed parts of the planet effectively uninhabitable and threaten the sustainability of global civilization as we know it. According to current consensus estimates, that fever is likely to get much worse if left unchecked, raising Earth’s average temperature by another one degree C by the 2060s. In short, this world is running a low-grade fever. The latter figure is, however, an increase of slightly more than one degree C from Earth’s typical temperature across the past century. Our planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 149.6 million kilometers, and it soaks up enough sunlight to have an average temperature of about 15 degrees Celsius. That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, doesn’t it? Let’s do it.įirst, we must take stock of what we have-the givens in what will be our equation for moving Earth. Forest Service official if her organization or the Bureau of Land Management could change the orbit of the moon or Earth to reverse the effects of human-caused climate change. During a congressional hearing last week, Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas asked a U.S.
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