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?
Plant trees around your house. Shadow and natural cooling because they tend to evaporate water. Use white outer surfaces to reflect sunlight for additional benefit.
that shouldn’t have any better effect than any other form of blocking the sun, which can be accomplished with trees, or very inexpensive shade cloth. NightHawkinLight developed some sort of super heat reflecting paint that you can make at home, you’ll want to check his channel for updates because he’s been improving it
As @FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 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 :)
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.
Laws of thermodynamics. You can’t totally trap heat. All you can do is encourage it to spread a bit faster in one spot compared to all the other places it’s spreading.
From your description, this sounds a lot like how double/triple pane windows work, or like a Trombe wall. Although a Trombe wall is meant to heat a home, vents could be used to take advantage of convection currents that shed the heat away from the house.
That said, this wouldn’t necessarily be cooling per-se, but would be avoiding heat gain. And at that point, any material that’s loosely coupled to then house would be equally effective, like a wall with studs 24" (60 cm) apart rather than the USA standard of 16" (40 cm).
In fact, this is how some homes with massively overhanging roofs manage to passively keep themselves manageable in the summer, since the overhang blocks direct sunlight from reaching the walls and windows at summer’s high noon, but lets light in when the sun is lower in winter. Soffit vents let convection currents flow up the inside of the roof, exiting at a ridge vent. So the idea is sound and already deployed in relevant climates.
