Here is a little-noticed scientific breakthrough that will completely change the world, and offers us THE solution to climate change: https://phys.org/news/2024-08-metasurfaces-thermal-unprecedented-ways.html
"But how could this possibly solve climate change?" I hear you ask.
The answer is that the ability to *choose the output frequency of thermal radiation* allows us to radiate away heat from the planet *without that heat getting trapped by the atmosphere*.
You see, there are certain frequencies that our atmosphere doesn't interact with at all. Anything emitted on these frequencies just leaves the planet and heads out into space as though the atmosphere wasn't even there.
Think about the moon for a moment. When the sun is up on the moon temperatures can reach 120 Celsius, but when the sun goes down those same rocks radiate away heat so fast that the surface temperature of those same rocks gets down to -130 Celsius. Lack of a meaningful atmosphere on the moon plays a big role in that.
If we can build metamaterials that will radiate away thermal radiation at specific temperatures then we can create any industrial or power-generating process we want and just not have to care about the thermal output. We can fire all that spare heat into space. We can create heatsinks to cool the oceans.
With these kinds of metamaterials we could pave the deserts in photovoltaic cells and not have to care about the change in albedo that creates, because we'll radiate away more heat at night than we absorb during the day!
It will, of course, take us a couple hundred years to work out all the bugs, run the trials, etc...so we really do need to stop emitting all that carbon...but this materials science advancement gives us a path to dealing with a world in which we've already lock ourselves in to several degrees of warming without having to require everyone on the planet live an energy-impoverished life.
This discovery is HOPE.