This is both a shower thought and a stupid question but I think it fits this community better.
Since air conditioning is apparently heating the local environment while cooling down a house I was asking myself whether it would be possible to basically either build a layer of glass/plexiglass right over the actual outer structure of a house, leaving a tiny gap between wall and glass, or at least put a house in a kind of glasshouse dome with a double glass wall. And consequently inject a sulfur compound, calcite etc into that “gap”, basically creating a very tiny micro-atmosphere that has that sun blocking effect.
Would that work, just logically/technically? Would the environment heat up less, more, or just the same as with geoengineering in the stratosphere? Would it even cool down a house/keep it cool at all?
As @[email protected] said, you’re building a greenhouse. Nearly all sunlight that gets through the glass will contribute to heating up what’s inside, and none of the heat will be able to get out. The major reason for the greenhouse effect is that there’s no way for hot air to escape.
Under an open sky, the sun heats up the ground, the ground heats up the air, and the hot air gets blown away by wind and rises through convection, being replaced by colder air from surrounding areas. An equilibrium is reached when the air takes away the same amount of heat per second as the sunlight brings in. But in a greenhouse: the sun heats up the ground, the ground heats up the air, and the air is trapped. It has nowhere to go, so everything continues to get hotter and hotter. The air heats up the glass walls and roof of the greenhouse (the sun helps with that too), until the walls are hot enough to expel all the heat that’s brought in by the sun, in the same way as the non-greenhouse ground would. The end result is that the inside of the greenhouse is way hotter than the outside.
Note that this has very little to do with what chemicals the air is made up of. Even if the gas inside the greenhouse has a “sun blocking effect”, it would still have to absorb all that energy from the sun, and that heat would still be inside the greenhouse.
See other answers for better alternatives :)
Thanks, that was exactly what Shower Me needed to hear
Happy to hear :)
I should also say, I think I used the term “greenhouse effect” incorrectly. What I described is how a literal man-made greenhouse works, but “greenhouse effect” refers to a phenomenon on the world scale that is reminiscent of greenhouses, but operates on entirely different principles. For that, the composition of the atmosphere is actually relevant, and the term “greenhouse gases” refers to gases that contribute to warming. For an actual greenhouse though, as I said, it doesn’t really matter.
Everything you described seems to remind me of a car left in the sun all day. Then you open the door, and WHOOSH, all that hot air hits you in the face.
Exactly! Windshield reflectors try to make the sunlight bounce back out before it has a chance to heat up the interior.