thank you for this clear piece and your central point that we need an integrated look at energy balance.
I have been operating from the Gaia theory since 40 years and it always helped me to understand the crisis we are in. Climate change is much more complex than global warming and fossil fuel emissions (though they are a problem, no doubt about that!), the problem als has to to with the degradation of the biosphere as a whole to take care of the Earth's bodily functions to work towards homeostasis.
The Earth doesn't regulate its temperature through any single mechanism; it does so through a coupled set of ecological subsystems that behave functionally like the organs of a living body. Phytoplankton in the surface ocean handle oxygen production and, through the biological pump, lock carbon into the deep ocean on hundred-thousand-year timescales, by far the planet's largest biosphere dependent carbon reservoir. The cryosphere cools passively by reflection at the poles. Tropical rainforests cool actively at the equator, not just through shade and transpiration but as planetary-scale latent heat pumps: each gram of evaporated water carries about 2,260 joules of energy, and the Amazon alone moves roughly tens of petawatts this way, which is orders of magnitude more than total human energy consumption. That latent heat helps drive the Hadley circulation itself. Ocean currents redistribute the rest. Peatlands and boreal forests store carbon on shorter timescales as the terrestrial complement to the deep ocean.
It also helps to keep the carbon numbers in proportion. The atmosphere currently holds roughly 880 gigatonnes of carbon at 430 ppm. That sounds enormous until you set it against the rest of the system: terrestrial vegetation and soils hold around 2,500 gigatonnes, permafrost another 1,500, fossil fuel reserves still in the ground perhaps 4,000, and the deep ocean somewhere around 38,000 gigatonnes, roughly fifty times the atmospheric pool. The lithosphere, in carbonate rocks and sediments, holds vastly more again, on the order of 100 million gigatonnes. In other words, the atmospheric carbon we are arguing about is a thin film on top of a very large reservoir system, and the fossil fuel contribution to date represents a small fractional perturbation of the active pools. The reason it matters so much is not its absolute size but its position: the atmosphere is the thinnest, most reactive part in the whole arrangement, and small shifts there propagate quickly through temperature, ocean chemistry and circulation. This is exactly why a whole-system view is needed. Decarbonization needs to happen, but it basically means storing the excess carbon in one of the other pools. The biosphere, when strategically supported, can do a lot of that work pretty fast, within years and decades rather than centuries.
This also matters for your argument because it suggests the albedo question and the forest question aren't really separate issues to be traded off against each other; they're parts of the same regulatory architecture, and the right unit of analysis is the whole energy budget of the coupled system, not any one flux. A darker forest absorbs more shortwave radiation, yes, but especially in the case of the tropical rainforests, it also pumps latent heat out of the tropics, generates clouds (which reflect), drives moisture export to other continents, and maintains biodiversity that sustains other regulatory functions downstream. Basically the tropical rainforests increase planetary albedo when functioning well, unlike the Boreal forests.
The same logic applies to your reflectivity argument. Increasing surface albedo in built environments is almost certainly a good idea, and you're right that it's underexplored relative to its cost and simplicity. But to know whether a given intervention is genuinely cooling the system rather than displacing heat somewhere else, we need a single framework that measures all heating and cooling effects: radiative forcing, latent heat transport, cloud feedbacks, ocean heat uptake, carbon sequestration timescales in commensurable units. Otherwise we risk optimising one term while quietly degrading another, which is arguably what's already happening when we treat forests, solar deployment, and emissions as three separate ledgers. For the heating/cooling impacts we are working to make w/m2 the central unit of calculations (both at the Earth's surface where it matters most and Top of Atmosphere, where the final EEI tally is made). This then makes all impacts like GHG forcing, albedo, latent heat transport, cloud production, etc, comparable and part of the whole set of interventions we need.
Your piece is, I think, an argument for exactly that kind of integrated ''whole Earth balance sheet accounting'' and the sooner we have a shared framework for it, the better the chances that interventions like the reflective ones you describe as well as the NBS that are far more potent than now acknowledged, get the serious evaluation they deserve.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this. It is an extremely thoughtful and insightful comment, and I think a great deal of what you are saying aligns strongly with the broader systems level perspective we are trying to communicate.
I particularly agree with your point that climate change cannot be reduced to a single variable discussion around CO₂ or surface temperature alone, and that understanding the Earth as a coupled regulatory system is essential if we are going to properly evaluate interventions and trade offs.
We would genuinely like to invite you onto the MEER podcast to discuss these ideas in much more detail, as I think it would make for a very valuable and nuanced conversation. If that is something that would be of interest to you, please let me know and we can arrange it.
happy you liked the feedback, always have been a supporter of you on Twitter (where I usually just retweet, unlike on LinkedIn).
Thank you very much for the invite to your podcast, grateful for the opportunity to exchange ideas how we can work on a framework that holds the complexity of the Earth system and weighs the interventions that could still get us out of the existential danger zone we are now in.
Please reach out on my email: robdelaet@yahoo.com or WhatsApp (+55 71 992617846) and we can take it from there,
Thank you very much for coming back to me, and also for the kind words and long-term support — that is genuinely appreciated.
I think the discussion you are raising around integrated Earth system accounting, latent heat transport, biosphere regulation, and coupled energy balance frameworks is extremely important and very much aligned with the broader direction we are trying to push the conversation toward.
We will reach out by email soon to set up a podcast discussion, which I think would be a really valuable conversation.
I woul like to hear this again: "Rob de Laet Okay. Obviously, I learned a lot from Peter Bunyard here, and also from Anastassia-Makarieva and others.
But basically, the biotic pump is a mechanism with which
leaves as soon as the sun rays touch them,
and they started photosynthesizing together with making sugars.
Actually, they evaporate hundreds of molecules per molecule of sugar that they make of water vapor, and that goes up in the air.
Now, it takes a lot of energy to make liquid water into a vapor, and that energy then basically is 9:57 transported from the forest floor up and out, and together with small particles called bio aerosols,
these particles make it possible that the vapor that goes up, which is actually a greenhouse gas,
so actually also heats up the atmosphere, they need to re-condense as fast as possible, and that are clouds.
So the trees are making clouds, and at cloud level, a couple of things happen at the same time.
The first one is that the moment that that gas goes into liquid, it implodes to more than a thousandth part of its volume, creating an underpressure, which basically pulls up much more air, and that gives the forest possibility, because it's under pressure, to pull in air from the side, which at the ocean side basically pulls in moisture.
Now, so that moment that that happens,
wind starts to happen because of this underpressure, and the system, it has been proven by Salati in the 80s, that over the Amazon, this process of evapotranspiration,
cloud forming, rain forming, because it rains out, and then it moves on, it happens again, happens 11:15
up to seven times in circulation, basically rehydrating the whole of the continent, and the biotic pump in general basically rehydrates the continents, which were not as humid and well
irrigated until the angiosperm trees started to evolve about a hundred million years ago, which
had a four times more capacity of evaporating water through their leaves. Now, this whole thing,
there's one part which we actually added to it, that the moment that the recolonization at cloud level happens, a lot of the heat that is stored in that process is actually getting radiated out
in a frequency that does not get picked up by the greenhouse gases and goes straight out into space, 12:01
cooling the earth. So you have a two-phase air conditioning system operating by the great forests, so I'll leave it at that. Herb: Wow
The trees are making cloudsgas goes into liquid,it implodes creating an underpressure, which basically pulls up much more air, and that gives the forest possibility, because it's under pressure, to pull in air from the side "
Hi Peter,
thank you for this clear piece and your central point that we need an integrated look at energy balance.
I have been operating from the Gaia theory since 40 years and it always helped me to understand the crisis we are in. Climate change is much more complex than global warming and fossil fuel emissions (though they are a problem, no doubt about that!), the problem als has to to with the degradation of the biosphere as a whole to take care of the Earth's bodily functions to work towards homeostasis.
The Earth doesn't regulate its temperature through any single mechanism; it does so through a coupled set of ecological subsystems that behave functionally like the organs of a living body. Phytoplankton in the surface ocean handle oxygen production and, through the biological pump, lock carbon into the deep ocean on hundred-thousand-year timescales, by far the planet's largest biosphere dependent carbon reservoir. The cryosphere cools passively by reflection at the poles. Tropical rainforests cool actively at the equator, not just through shade and transpiration but as planetary-scale latent heat pumps: each gram of evaporated water carries about 2,260 joules of energy, and the Amazon alone moves roughly tens of petawatts this way, which is orders of magnitude more than total human energy consumption. That latent heat helps drive the Hadley circulation itself. Ocean currents redistribute the rest. Peatlands and boreal forests store carbon on shorter timescales as the terrestrial complement to the deep ocean.
It also helps to keep the carbon numbers in proportion. The atmosphere currently holds roughly 880 gigatonnes of carbon at 430 ppm. That sounds enormous until you set it against the rest of the system: terrestrial vegetation and soils hold around 2,500 gigatonnes, permafrost another 1,500, fossil fuel reserves still in the ground perhaps 4,000, and the deep ocean somewhere around 38,000 gigatonnes, roughly fifty times the atmospheric pool. The lithosphere, in carbonate rocks and sediments, holds vastly more again, on the order of 100 million gigatonnes. In other words, the atmospheric carbon we are arguing about is a thin film on top of a very large reservoir system, and the fossil fuel contribution to date represents a small fractional perturbation of the active pools. The reason it matters so much is not its absolute size but its position: the atmosphere is the thinnest, most reactive part in the whole arrangement, and small shifts there propagate quickly through temperature, ocean chemistry and circulation. This is exactly why a whole-system view is needed. Decarbonization needs to happen, but it basically means storing the excess carbon in one of the other pools. The biosphere, when strategically supported, can do a lot of that work pretty fast, within years and decades rather than centuries.
This also matters for your argument because it suggests the albedo question and the forest question aren't really separate issues to be traded off against each other; they're parts of the same regulatory architecture, and the right unit of analysis is the whole energy budget of the coupled system, not any one flux. A darker forest absorbs more shortwave radiation, yes, but especially in the case of the tropical rainforests, it also pumps latent heat out of the tropics, generates clouds (which reflect), drives moisture export to other continents, and maintains biodiversity that sustains other regulatory functions downstream. Basically the tropical rainforests increase planetary albedo when functioning well, unlike the Boreal forests.
The same logic applies to your reflectivity argument. Increasing surface albedo in built environments is almost certainly a good idea, and you're right that it's underexplored relative to its cost and simplicity. But to know whether a given intervention is genuinely cooling the system rather than displacing heat somewhere else, we need a single framework that measures all heating and cooling effects: radiative forcing, latent heat transport, cloud feedbacks, ocean heat uptake, carbon sequestration timescales in commensurable units. Otherwise we risk optimising one term while quietly degrading another, which is arguably what's already happening when we treat forests, solar deployment, and emissions as three separate ledgers. For the heating/cooling impacts we are working to make w/m2 the central unit of calculations (both at the Earth's surface where it matters most and Top of Atmosphere, where the final EEI tally is made). This then makes all impacts like GHG forcing, albedo, latent heat transport, cloud production, etc, comparable and part of the whole set of interventions we need.
Your piece is, I think, an argument for exactly that kind of integrated ''whole Earth balance sheet accounting'' and the sooner we have a shared framework for it, the better the chances that interventions like the reflective ones you describe as well as the NBS that are far more potent than now acknowledged, get the serious evaluation they deserve.
Best regards
Rob de Laet
Hi Rob,
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this. It is an extremely thoughtful and insightful comment, and I think a great deal of what you are saying aligns strongly with the broader systems level perspective we are trying to communicate.
I particularly agree with your point that climate change cannot be reduced to a single variable discussion around CO₂ or surface temperature alone, and that understanding the Earth as a coupled regulatory system is essential if we are going to properly evaluate interventions and trade offs.
We would genuinely like to invite you onto the MEER podcast to discuss these ideas in much more detail, as I think it would make for a very valuable and nuanced conversation. If that is something that would be of interest to you, please let me know and we can arrange it.
Thank you again for the excellent response.
Hi Peter,
happy you liked the feedback, always have been a supporter of you on Twitter (where I usually just retweet, unlike on LinkedIn).
Thank you very much for the invite to your podcast, grateful for the opportunity to exchange ideas how we can work on a framework that holds the complexity of the Earth system and weighs the interventions that could still get us out of the existential danger zone we are now in.
Please reach out on my email: robdelaet@yahoo.com or WhatsApp (+55 71 992617846) and we can take it from there,
Looking forward,
best,
Rob.
Hi Rob,
Thank you very much for coming back to me, and also for the kind words and long-term support — that is genuinely appreciated.
I think the discussion you are raising around integrated Earth system accounting, latent heat transport, biosphere regulation, and coupled energy balance frameworks is extremely important and very much aligned with the broader direction we are trying to push the conversation toward.
We will reach out by email soon to set up a podcast discussion, which I think would be a really valuable conversation.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas further.
Best regards,
Peter
Looking forward to talking with you! Gratitude! Rob
I woul like to hear this again: "Rob de Laet Okay. Obviously, I learned a lot from Peter Bunyard here, and also from Anastassia-Makarieva and others.
But basically, the biotic pump is a mechanism with which
leaves as soon as the sun rays touch them,
and they started photosynthesizing together with making sugars.
Actually, they evaporate hundreds of molecules per molecule of sugar that they make of water vapor, and that goes up in the air.
Now, it takes a lot of energy to make liquid water into a vapor, and that energy then basically is 9:57 transported from the forest floor up and out, and together with small particles called bio aerosols,
these particles make it possible that the vapor that goes up, which is actually a greenhouse gas,
so actually also heats up the atmosphere, they need to re-condense as fast as possible, and that are clouds.
So the trees are making clouds, and at cloud level, a couple of things happen at the same time.
The first one is that the moment that that gas goes into liquid, it implodes to more than a thousandth part of its volume, creating an underpressure, which basically pulls up much more air, and that gives the forest possibility, because it's under pressure, to pull in air from the side, which at the ocean side basically pulls in moisture.
Now, so that moment that that happens,
wind starts to happen because of this underpressure, and the system, it has been proven by Salati in the 80s, that over the Amazon, this process of evapotranspiration,
cloud forming, rain forming, because it rains out, and then it moves on, it happens again, happens 11:15
up to seven times in circulation, basically rehydrating the whole of the continent, and the biotic pump in general basically rehydrates the continents, which were not as humid and well
irrigated until the angiosperm trees started to evolve about a hundred million years ago, which
had a four times more capacity of evaporating water through their leaves. Now, this whole thing,
there's one part which we actually added to it, that the moment that the recolonization at cloud level happens, a lot of the heat that is stored in that process is actually getting radiated out
in a frequency that does not get picked up by the greenhouse gases and goes straight out into space, 12:01
cooling the earth. So you have a two-phase air conditioning system operating by the great forests, so I'll leave it at that. Herb: Wow
#3F 114 10:18 @robdelaet.bsky.social
The trees are making cloudsgas goes into liquid,it implodes creating an underpressure, which basically pulls up much more air, and that gives the forest possibility, because it's under pressure, to pull in air from the side "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co7eigqN2d8&t=580s