Some combustion products have climatic effects. For you to lean into this, the next step would be to calculate the relative effect of perhaps 80 tons of space junk burning up on reentry per year, versus perhaps 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. You’ll want to estimate the radiative forcing or climatic effects of the space junk combustion products to get there. I’ll save you the effort and tell you that space junk burning up on reentry is likely to be several hundred thousand times less impactful than terrestrial GHG emmissions.
Which should not be surprising intuitively, just considering the volume of GHGs we produce globally each year.
And all those sattelites burning up on the atmosphere have absolutely no impact on climate?
Assuming your question is not rhetorical…
Some combustion products have climatic effects. For you to lean into this, the next step would be to calculate the relative effect of perhaps 80 tons of space junk burning up on reentry per year, versus perhaps 42 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. You’ll want to estimate the radiative forcing or climatic effects of the space junk combustion products to get there. I’ll save you the effort and tell you that space junk burning up on reentry is likely to be several hundred thousand times less impactful than terrestrial GHG emmissions.
Which should not be surprising intuitively, just considering the volume of GHGs we produce globally each year.