Rob de Laet
Climate strategist and co-author of Cooling the Climate; Project Lead at ARARA (Amazon Regenerative Agroforestry & Restoration Alliance) and researcher at Global Evergreening Alliance.
1
APPEARANCES
1
PODCASTS
Jun 17, 2026
speaker_1HOST
Rob, could you please explain the role of evapotranspiration and latent heat transport plate in your understanding of planetary cooling?
Rob de LaetGUEST
Yes, and let me go one step back, and that is we look at the process of photosynthesis, which we all learned at school.
Rob de LaetGUEST
And we all heard that with sunlight, CO2 and water gets combined into sugars, and some oxygen is emitted.
Rob de LaetGUEST
For every molecule of sugar that is produced, actually a couple of hundreds of molecules of liquid water go through the stomata of the leaves and actually leave as water vapor.
Rob de LaetGUEST
Now we all know how much energy it costs to boil water, if we want to make a cup of tea.
9 MINS LATER
speaker_1HOST
Rob, how do you distinguish between local evaporative cooling, which we can observe under vegetation, and genuine net planetary cooling?