A conversation with Rob de Laet, project lead of Cooling the Climate and co-author of the book Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years. The science is pretty clear and getting clearer by the day: water cools the planet. The more living, healthy vegetation we have on this planet, predominately perennials and thus trees, agroforestry systems and healthy forests, the cooler the climate is and the less extreme weather events occur. Living plants literally make the Earth sweat and remove heat from the biosphere.
Humans have systematically devegetated the planet as Judith D. Schwartz likes to say, and the ongoing climate weirding suggests we may have gone too far. Now we’re seeing real calculations: how many square kilometres do we need to regenerate to lower the global temperature by just one degree?
If this is all becoming increasingly evident, why isn’t it common knowledge yet, especially in the headquarters of banks, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and governments?
This is the story of a successful entrepreneur getting drawn into water cycle restoration, planetary cooling and all the good stuff that comes with it. We share notes on why this movement, maybe the defining story of our time, hasn’t broken through yet and what we can do about it.
EARTH’S NATURAL COOLING MECHANISM
The biosphere regulates temperature through evapotranspiration and cloud formation. When forests release water vapour, heat transfers to the atmosphere and radiates into space via a two-phase system.
“So, we have a two-phase air conditioning system: one evapotranspiration from a tree to cloud level and two from cloud level out into space. And that’s not recognised. It’s recognised to a certain point, but not by a mile, good enough in the climate models. And this is simply a cooling mechanism.” Rob de Laet
AMAZON’S GLOBAL CLIMATE LEVERAGE
According to some calculations by Rob and other scientists, regenerating vegetation on 2.8 million km2 of land in the tropics, transitioning to agroforestry or reforested areas will stop the planet from heating up further and in fact curb temperatures downward by 1 C. That is big (the size of Argentina) but not impossibly big.
As Earth’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon functions like a thermal release valve. Its evapotranspiration capacity equals planetary energy imbalance, degradation directly amplifies global heating.
“The total cooling capacity of the Amazon rainforest, if it’s not in the year of drought, is roughly equal to the total Earth energy imbalance on the negative side. If you have a balance sheet of cooling and warming, two sides, then actually the cooling capacity of especially tropical rainforests is gigantic; basically, that gave us clear, clearer proof or evidence, I should say, that a lot of the heating up of the planet, which has been attributed to the greenhouse gases, is actually caused by the destruction of the cooling capacity, the air conditioner.” Rob de Laet
STRATEGIC DEPLOYMENT OF $1 BILLION
Capital should accelerate a digital finance platform connecting land stewards with regenerative capital. This enables systemic scaling through automated monitoring and market linkages.
“Because that is the digital financial structure to scale up. Then you start to talk with people to actually leverage that money to get maybe $20 billion bond structures to put into that system and then upload land and do the refinancing of the transition of that land and show that it works. Of course, it needs to be proven.” Rob de Laet
BARRIERS TO MAINSTREAM ACCEPTANCE
Climate science institutions historically prioritised measurable CO2 over complex water-cycle dynamics. This modelling bias created institutional inertia against biosphere cooling solutions.
“You can’t model water. Water is, first of all, in three, or if you like, some people think four states. Let’s keep it to three, ice, a liquid, or a vapour. And it basically moves around all the time. CO2 basically has a slight local variation, but in the end it’s the same everywhere. You just need one, one point, on a mountain in Hawaii, to measure what the global situation is. Climatologists think decades ahead. The definition was always the changes over 30 years or longer. Actually, the water cooling is happening on a daily basis.” Rob de Laet
OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED
Koen and Rob also talked about:
- Why hasn’t the water cycle restoration movement not caught on yet too much
- What is holding back for this knowledge on how to cool the planet to become common knowledge?
- Entrepreneurial drive accelerates regeneration
LINKS:
- Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years Book
- Cooling the planet, project to reverse the tipping point of the dieback of the Amazon
- COOLING THE CLIMATE – Proposal to reverse (a large part of) the climate crisis
- Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation
- Explorer.land
LINKED INTERVIEWS:
- Alpha Lo – What if water is more important than carbon
- Millán Millán – Farm water at its proper scale
- Marcel de Berg – Water is a more important cooling factor than the heat of carbon
- Ties van der Hoeven – The regreening project we can’t afford not to do, restoring the water and weather systems in the Med, starting with fish
- Zach Weiss – On a mission to train hundreds of thousands of people in key water restoration techniques
- Anastassia Makarieva – Healthy forests invest their capital to create their own rain
- Tim Coates – Sell flood mitigation to institutional players to finance water cycle restoration
- Ichsani Wheeler and Lenka Danilovic – How to make water our friend again thanks to hippies with satellites and indigenous water management
- Rodger Savory – Restore the water cycles and reverse desertification in California, regenerating 150.000 acres with 600.000 cows
- Jesús Areso Salinas – Building towers to trigger rain, to help nature sweat and cool
- Ali Bin Shahid, one of the few who can model and calculate water cycle restoration
- Antonio Nobre – If nature were a bank it would have been saved already
- Walter Jehne, stop talking about carbon emissions and focus on restoring the water cycle
- Philip Kauders – From Goldman Sachs to investing hundreds of millions in agroforestry in Brazil
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.