Excerpt of an article from the New Scientist, 01 December 2008 by Mark Buchanan (h/t to Richard Hegarty)
EVEN if we turn to clean energy to reduce carbon emissions, the planet might carry on warming anyway due to the heat released into the environment by our ever-increasing consumption of energy.
This picture, taken with a thermal imaging camera, reveals how much heat is being emitted by City Hall in London (Image: National Pictures)
That’s the contentious possibility raised by Nick Cowern and Chihak Ahn of the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at Newcastle University, UK. They argue that human energy consumption could begin to contribute significantly to global warming a century from now.
Cowern and Ahn considered an emissions scenario proposed by James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and others. Under this scenario, which envisages greenhouse gases being cut significantly through phasing out coal over the next 40 years, Cowern and Ahn calculate that the greenhouse effect will start to diminish by 2050, stabilising the climate.
Read more here
Consider then UHI, and my recent measurement of a temperature transect from Reno, NV
Here is the result of my South to North transect driving Virgina Street overlaid on a Google Earth image oriented to match the timeline of the transect:
Click for larger image
It seems clear that waste heat is already having an effect, because the UHI bubble from Reno has been shown by NOAA to affect the USHCN weather station there, which caused them to move the station once. They even include this in their own training manual.
What was amazing is that they’d already determined that there were significant problems with this USHCN station placement that contributed a significant warming bias to the record.
In fact, the National Weather Service includes the UHI factor in one of it’s training course ( NOAA Professional Competency Unit 6 ) using Reno, NV and Baltimore, MD as examples. The Reno station had to be moved because it was producing an erroneous record, and the Baltimore station has so much bias (because it existed on a rooftop of a downtown building) that they simply closed it in 1999.
From that manual:
Reno’s busy urban airport has seen the growth of an urban heat bubble on its north end.
The corresponding graph of mean annual minimum temperature (average of 365 nighttime
minimums each year) has as a consequence been steadily rising. When the new
ASOS sensor was installed, the site was moved to the much cooler south end of the
runway. Nearby records indicate that the two cool post-ASOS years should have been
warmer rather than cooler. When air traffic controllers asked for a location not so close
to nearby trees (for better wind readings), the station was moved back. The first move
was documented, the second was not. The climate record shows both the steady warming
of the site, as well as the big difference in overnight temperature between one end of this
flat and seemingly homogeneous setting, an observation borne out by automobile
traverses around the airport at night.
They were also kind enough to provide a photo essay of their own as well as a graph. You can click the aerial photo to get a Google Earth interactive view of the area.
This is NOAA’s graph showing the changes to the official climate record when they made station moves:
Source for 24a and 24b: NOAA PCU6 Internal Training manual, 2004-2007
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How dense is human population?
Many years ago, I heard Tim Ball say that if all the world’s population was placed in Texas, each person would have over a 1000 square feet to live on.
Texas 261,791 square miles, 640 acres per sq mile, 43560 sq ft /acre at 6billon people calculates out to over 1,200 sq ft per person. He acknowledged that the calculation doesn’t allow for roads, industry etc, but does illustrate how packed in we live.
Bruce Cobb hit the nail on the head:
“Cutting emissions will do practically nothing in terms of reducing warming, since our C02 emissions have little warming effect anyway. So, yes, the miniscule global warming effect of heat dissipations could, in fact, offset the miniscule effect of cutting C02 emissions. The question is, of course, is that a wise way to spend trillions of dollars?”
The Kyoto treaty, please recall, would have done nothing to cool the planet, even by the words of Kyoto promoters.
The efforts to lower CO2 will do nothing to change the climate, just as waste heat from human activities will do the same.
No wonder the AGW promotion machine is so desperate to ratchet up the fear and concerns about a climate apocalypse.
Here’s an ironic story I read today (not sure if it has been adressed or not).
“The amount of U.S. greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, increased last year by 1.4 percent after a decline in 2006, the Energy Department reported Wednesday.
The report said carbon dioxide, the leading pollution linked to global warming, rose by 1.3 percent in 2007 as people used more coal, oil and natural gas because of a colder winter…”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081203/ap_on_go_ot/carbon_increase;_ylt=AiI8vwvm1ehxPFV_mZMktZus0NUE
Thanks to Richard Hegarty: “Contrails form high in the atmosphere when the mixture of water vapor in the aircraft exhaust and the air condenses and freezes. Persisting contrails can spread into extensive cirrus clouds that tend to warm the Earth, because they reflect less sunlight ***than the amount of heat they trap***. The balance between Earth’s incoming sunlight and outgoing heat drives climate change.” from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040428061056.htm
These high-level cirrus cloud cover may be caused in part by the added water vapor which is the by-product of combustion, and perhaps also because the jet exhaust provides turbulence to the air mass, in addition to the particulate by-products of combustion. The particulate matter could act as condensation nuclei which, with the turbulence (you can see this in spreading con-trails), may promote the formation of ice crystals.
But before these cirrus clouds start to form &/or trap heat, the passing of the aircraft has also _added_ to the atmosphere the heat that is also a by-product of combustion.
The two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, but could be complimentary.
I was in London last Tuesday most of the day in meetings. It was a bright sunny day, but jolly cold I thought & so did many others I can assure you. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot of heat coming off the buildings whilst there!
Mind you, when up there during the summer (what we had of it) it felt jolly warm with lots of the sun’s heat being radiated off the masonry walls! How strange?
The same can be said of my home city of Exeter!
Somebody did a study into the weather on the days right after 9/11 when all aircraft in the US were grounded. It didn’t produce any radical results that I can remember. Probably less cloud cover, but did it affect temps?
My solution to global warming is for everybody to take out their air conditioners and put them in backwards. Set the thermostat and watch it get cold out.
When we entered the high tech age at the end of the 1970s, energy flux at and near the earth’s surface went through the roof. In addition to all the dissipation from devices and their power supply networks, there are additional more subtle fluxes. For example, inductive coupling from AC transmission networks, increasing microwave and other short wavelength EM energy, etc. All of it acts upon matter at and near the earth’s surface and imparts additional vibrational energy.
Is Britain overpopulated? Well, not according to this:
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3046/overpop.htm
Another food-for-thought-kinda article:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0500overpopulation.htm
.. Or just google “the myth of overpopulation” and surprise yourself. I did just that a few months ago… 😉
I did the calculation once, on waste heat. Using total global energy usage, and perfectly converting that to heat, I calculated (IIRC), that the total heat generated was 2 orders of magnitude less than observed warming, in watts/m2.
And this was using some pretty generous assumptions.
A.Syme (09:02:28) :
see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020808075457.htm from my previous post
A.Syme (09:02:28) :
Somebody did a study into the weather on the days right after 9/11 when all aircraft in the US were grounded. It didn’t produce any radical results that I can remember. Probably less cloud cover, but did it affect temps?
Yes, it had a statistically significant effect on temperatures, by grounding all flights.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/06/14/contrails.html
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992642
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/climate/climate.jsp?id=ns99992926
And I see Noblesse Oblige made a similar heat calculation on another thread….
From braddles (14:19:14) :
I did read once that a solar power station the size of Nevada (less than 1/1000th of the globe), even with all the inefficiences of solar power, could in theory generate all the power needs of the human race. While this statement was made to support solar power, my take on it was that the human race must be a pretty small player in the global energy budget for that to be true.
-end quote
Absolutely! I’ve also seen a reference that said that using existing technology we could power all of the U.S.A. with a solar plant covering a 100 x 100 mile square in the middle of the desert southwest.
Realize that at least 70% of the sunlight on the square wasted.
Our energy consumption is absolutely irrelevant to the planet.
Another ‘thought experiment’: My room heater is a roughly 1200w heat source. So the solar energy represents a room heater sitting on every square meter of the planet surface… That would be a dozen of them in a 3 meter x 4 meter room. Rather a lot more than my 1 heater. And my heater does not have a 50% duty cycle 24 x 365 … (Globe 1/2 in sun all the time. Yeah, I know, ought to adjust for curvature, but not worth the time. The sun is still way over the top on heat input compared to anything people do).
Another data point? A 1 mile x 100 mile wave farm would power all of California. That’s 10% of the U.S. population (roughly). 1 mile x 1000 miles farm would run the whole U.S.A. That’s roughly the length of the west coast. And this is just the ‘left overs’ from the sunshine via the wind moving the water… Oh, and again a very small part of the wave energy in that space is actually captured. Now look at the size of the whole ocean…
Final point? A typical home uses about 1 KW / 1000 square feet. (Personal observation over many years). Call it 1 kW/100 sq.M. That’s about 1/100 th the solar energy density. Even adjusting for the dark times, you have about a 1/25 ratio. Now consider all the earth surface that is NOT covered with structures…
Basically, the color of my roof is far more important than the energy I consume inside the structure, and the color of the road is far more important that the fuel my car uses.
Hanson uses station pairs to compare and extract the UHI effect from the urban temperature data, could someone explain why a study has not been undertaken whereby station pairs are monitored separately, surely the rural sites are the pristine sites or certainly more pristine than their urban neighbours.
This surely would prove or disprove Hanson`s algorithm.
Les,
I can’t open your links. 2 are bad, the middle one doesn’t point to anything relevant.
Jim
That will teach me to test the links first. None of the links I gave on contrails are currently valid.
My apologies.
From Richard Hegarty (00:23:38) :
In the 1960s there was some discussion on whether it was moral to bring
children into a world on the brink of nuclear war. I doubt that discussion
had any measurable impact on the birthrate.
-end quote
I’d speculate that it may reduce the percentage of the births from people prone to believing that kind of stuff and increases the percentage from skeptics… 😉 “The world needs more people like us and fewer like them!”
I don’t want to hijack this thread while folks have more to add; but I wanted to post a couple of Playstation 2 climate model simulations for people to think on.
Maybe someone who has one of the fancier video game players the GCM folks use, might actually try running these.
You need one of the models that has the feature of letting you turn off the laws of Physics. Like some Brit modellers doubled the atmospheric CO2 while holding the surface temperature constant, and found that some clouds evaporated; so they reported that as a positive feedback effect. Well that only works if the Physics switch is turned off.
So the first experiment is to eliminate that pesky greenhouse gas; water, to see what happens; I call it the “Birdseye” experiment since you have to do a flash freeze of the earth.
Now I should explain that if you really turn off the laws of physics, well the whole darn place is likely to go haywire. So this switch works in a special way. If you flip the switch to OFF, absolutely nothing happens; everything goes on as before. But now you can manually change anything you like without anything else being affected. For example in the off position you can grab a hold of the moon, and pull it off course so it now goes over both poles in a polar orbit; you can even spin it so we get to see both sides.
Then when you turn the switch on, the system reacts to whatever changes you made, according to all the laws of Physics.
So to experiment (a) to get rid of water in the atmosphere. Turn Physics OFF, and also turn Sun to Off, which helps with the Birdseye quick freeze. Then we turn on the freeze machine and quickly bring the entire earth surface and atmosphere down to zero deg C. Now we only cool the top mm or so of the surface, and any part of the globe that is already colder than zero is left as is. Lots of moisture condenses out of the atmosphere, and we let it fall wherever, and become either water, or snow, and ice depending on where it was. Now manually (using tweezers) remove the last remaining water molecules from the atmosphere, so there is zero left. We don’t disturb any other GHG like CO2 for example.
For the dark side of the earth it is not too differeent from normal just a deep winter all over.
So now we turn on both Sun and Physics and watch what happens. The dark side may start to cool down with no water in the atmosphere, but remember only the top mm is freezing, so heat from below starts to try and warm the surface up. The water vapor pressure is still not zero at zero C so some of the dark side ocean starts to evaporate, and start a positive feedback GW effect.
On the sunlit side, we have zero clouds and water vapor, so suddenly the ground level insolation has gone from around 1000 W/m^2, to maybe 1250 or more, so the sunlit surface starts to warm much faster than normal, and water startrs to evaporate from the sunlit oceans, enhancing the H2O greenhouse effect,
Things should get underway warming big time, so more water vapor comes off the oceans, and the planet is warming up under a stronger sun, and positive feedback water vapor GW.
Eventualy we get enough water vapor that convects into the higher altititudes, and clouds start to form, which further blocks the sun, and slows the warming rate.
It looks like it will eventually level off with about 50% cloud coverage, and about 1% average water vapor, and it might start looking pretty much like it is now; we don’t know what it will really be like. If it warms further we get more clouds and precipitation, and more sunlight is blocked so it cools down again. If it cools too much, clouds precipitate and disappear, and more suinlight comes in to warm it up; so eventually it reaches some stable state.
So now we want to do the reverse of this experiment.
(b)
We turn off Physics, and crank up Sun, and we heat the entire earth surface to say 40 deg C (104 F), and we do this quickly so we don’t melt too much ice. The we turn on our maxi fogger machine, and we fill the entire atmosphere from pole to pole with clouds from ground level to say 10 or 20 Km high, a real sauna all over.
So now reset Sun to normal and turn on Physics, and let’s watch what happens. Well with all that cloud, there is virtually zero sunlight reaching the ground, and lots of that ground is actually ice and snow underneath our 40 C layer, so parts of the surface start to cool down, and pretty soon it starts raining for 40 days, and 40 nights, to get rid of all that excess humidity. With no sunlight penetrating it has to cool at the surface, even with all that cloud trapping of IR from the heated surface; but eventually some of that cloud starts breaking up as it loses all its excess water, and slowly some sunlight starts leaking through, and the rate of cooling slows down, but it goes on raining and snowing etc, as the atmosphere unburdens itself from all that excess moisture. Eventually you might end up with around 50% cloud cover and the rest clear skies, so plenty of sunshine is hitting the ground, and it has stopped cooling any further. If it cools too much, clouds precipitate and disappear, and more sunlight reaches the ground, to warm it up again. If it gets too warm, more evaporation froms more clouds and blocks more sunlight to stop the warming. So again the system settles down to some state with partial cloud and partial clear skies.
Now the first question we might ask ourselves, is: did we end up at exactly the same end state in both experiments? Or maybe, the Birdseye experiment settled out at some low temperature, while the Sauna experiment settled out at some higher temperature.
Either way, at both of those end conditions the state is regulated by negative feedback due to cloud cover variation.
If those two states are in fact different, then at some place in between those two states, we should see a positive feedback effect, that will either drive the temperature up to the Sauna state, or else drive it down to the Birdseye State.
What if there are in fact two such states? Which one are we at now, and what does it take to trigger us up or down to the other state.
Now it is possible that there could be more than two stable states; there might be a whole flock of them, and we should expect them to separate regions of positive feedback alternating with regions of negative feedback; and it should be possible to hop from state to state, if we can force our way past the middle of the positive feedback regions, which will flip us to the next state.
Well that is the task; to set up your Playstation two video-game just like the climate modellers do, and try these experiments to see what happens.
Based on the glorious and varied past history of planet earth; I have a biased opinion that in fact, the Birdseye State, and the Sauna State are identical, and there is only one stable state in the ocean/atmosphere climate model. There doesn’t seem to be any historical evidence of periodic switching between different states.
Now in considering that, one must allow for the fact that we do get periodic wild changes in the planet’s orbit; and in that case all bets are off. In this exercise I am assuming a relatively stable orbital and solar behavior condition.
Well maybe Anthony can move this to a neutral corner, for any thoughts and comments, and this thread can go on with the waste heat discussion.
George
Very good, George. I agree, the planet always comes back to its stable state. And it appears that the planet agrees, too.
Wish we could add error bars around 0 so that 0 becomes a band of normal when using this kind of graph instead of a line. What is significantly above/below normal?
From above about solar panels – covering the good state (?) of AZ to power everything else ..
With Tony’s permission, I’ll address the real calc’s for solar power “areas” separately, but this “economic” analysis illustrates the assumptions and false economies that AGW-extremists blindly use. I’m in north GA, and had a 125.00/month electric bill in October. (175.00 or so in summer with the AC running.)
Plugged the numbers into a typical solar panel on-line calculator: It printed out this.
…
100 % of your bill is being supplied by your solar panel system.
This could be supplied by a 8.1 kw solar panel system.
The average price for a 8.1 system is $64800
Rebates
In Georgia you could save appoximately $3000 off the price of your solar system.
Your new solar system price is $61800
Step Four: Final Analysis
Your savings per month are $118
Your old power bill is $125.
Your new power bill is $7
You would approximately save $1420 per year.
This equals an increase in your property of approximately $21301
It will take approximately 17 years to make profit.
This takes into account federal rebates, property value increase and inflation of electricity prices at 5.4% anually.
Due to inflation, by the end of the solar panel payback time, your yearly savings would be $3472
Similarly, the value added to your property by year 17 would be $52083
Georgia has many other local rebates available that you may be eligible for.These could further reduce the price of your solar panel system.
Your solar contribution is equal to saving 23370 pounds of CO2 every year.
This is 117 tons in ten years. It is equivalent to planting 487 trees.
… End of screen.
Notice that a “real” electric bill of 1400.00 per year requires almost 70,000.00 in solar panel installation to replace.
The calculator is “assuming” that my house suddenly becomes “more valuable” with the solar panel (and lead-acid batteries in the basement ?) than without those extra appliances and death-traps.
Further this “value-added” becomes 52,000 over time (what time frame is NOT said!) but no depriciation of the solar equipment and panels over time is described. Does your car become more valuable and require less maintenance over time as it is used every day?
The calculator does NOT require the replacement of sealed or lead-acid batteries (2,000.00 to 3,000.00 every two years) as they chemically degrade with recharging.
Electric power rates AND rebates are assumed to inflation continuously at 5+% per year.
If I am to “make a profit” after 17 years, I hope the panel lifetime is substantially more than 15 years.
…
And all of this assumes that I cut down my neighbor’s trees to get the sunlight in the first place.
Ed MacAulay asks, “How dense is the human population?”
Pretty dense if they still believe in AGW 😉
Les Johnson (11:48:49) : “I did the calculation once, on waste heat. Using total global energy usage, … “. What happens if you calculate the equivalent thermal energy that is IN the various fuel sources? (instead of the energy that is used)
48,680 tonnes Global Annual World Production U3O8 2007 [source: WNA Market Report data
3,939Mt Crude Oil Production 2006 [http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf]
2,977Bcm Natural Gas Production 2006 [http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf]
5,370Mt Hard Coal Production 2006 [http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf]
John Galt (09:24:35) :
My solution to global warming is for everybody to take out their air conditioners and put them in backwards. Set the thermostat and watch it get cold out.
John,
Will you pick up the tab on my electric bill? We are currently (pun) paying $0.18/kwh. I’m sure I could run up a months tab exceeding $500 just for the “cooling.” I don’t know if there is enough garbage for our local bio-mass plant to provide that much juice on a large scale although it could be cost effective in the winter!
Might try it!