Moving The Earth's Orbit To Counter Climate Change And Global Warming| Is It Possible

During a congressional hearing last week, Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas asked a U.S. Forest Service official if her organization or the Bureau of Land Management could change the orbit of the moon or Earth to reverse the effects of human-caused climate change. That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, doesn’t it?


Radiative equilibrium, the balance between incoming energy from the sun’s rays and energy emitted from Earth, is key to our understanding of our planet’s changing temperature, says Britt Scharringhausen, a planetary astronomer at Beloit College.


A gentler option would be to siphon off the energy of other celestial objects, such as passing asteroids or comets, by engineering close planetary flybys. This technique is regularly used in reverse, with great success, by spacecraft that boost their speed by passing close to a planet to steal a portion of its orbital energy