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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Anthony,
I’m sure that the Reno annual temp chart is probably representative of the actual change that occurred with relocation of the ASOS. However, without having a nearby station to compare with, it proves nothing. A similar drop happened in 1948-49 and the drop in conjunction with the relocation is of similar magnitude and well within the range of the temperature record. I think a compilation of several other stations overlaid on the chart would have helped “prove” the dramatic change.
REPLY: there is a nearby station, and comparison was done. check the link to Russ Steel’s website in the story above. – Anthony
“” Robert A Cook PE (19:44:12) :
From above about solar panels – covering the good state (?) of AZ to power everything else .. “”
Some nice number crunching there Robert.
I think you need to crunch a couple more numbers though. There’s that “you could save $3000 ….” due to the Georgia subsidy !
Now where does that come from? I suspect that the State of Georgia collects that money from somebody else in the form of taxes; likely a business paying taxes of some kind to the State. In order to have paid that tax, that business must have made a taxable profit, so using Georgia’s business tax rates you could figure out how much profit that was. Then taking the typical pretax profitability of Georgia businesses, you can determine just how much total business eneterprise that company had to perform to get that $3000 subsidy for your PE installation.
It’s a fairly good bet that most of that business enterprise would have come about through the consumption of existing fossil fuels; so just how much fossil fuel consumption and carbon footprint, went into subsidizing your “Clean green” PE renewable power system ?
So long as “alternative energy ” systems are taxpayer subsidized; the real costs and economics of those things will be masked.
The Jan 2008 issue of Scientific American magazine, hasa serious article about a large PE solar farm to be situated in waste desert lands of the American South West. The main PE farm is only 30,000 square miles of solar cells, and a smaller solar furnace steam plant is just another 16,000 square miles.
Now 30,000 square miles is 19.2 million acres, which is the exact size of a public wasteland park in Alaska called ANWR, where oil companies would like to drill on 2400 acres; about the size of the average California shopping mall (and parking lot)
Of course, in the desert southwest, every single square foot of that 19.2 million acres would be used for the PE farm, and the entire area would have to be cleared of human habitation, and visitation, because the whole place would be too vulnerable to vandalism/terrorism, so it would need to be fenced and guarded 24/7.
And a lot of environmental groups, plus California Senators and Congresspersons, went to a lot of trouble to protect those useless South west desert wastelands as sensitive desert habitat for endagered species, such as the desert tortois which is California’s “polar bear”.
No I’m not saying, let’s not do PE solar. but I don’t think it is as cheap and as green as it is cracked up to be.
Humans started out with nothing but renewable green solar energy (clean). We spent every waking minute clambering around in fig trees gather ing figs. It wasn’t very effecttive, and our numbers didn’t increase much until we discovered fire and stored chemical energy, which grew our popultation and sustains it now.
Green clean solar energy is certainly renewable, but it isn’t sustainable because it just gets here from the sun too slowly to replace our stored chemical energy. After all it took 4.5 billion years for the sun to store up all that fossil fuel energy that we have consumend in about 150 years or so; and we hope to prosper on solar at its replacement rate ?? I don’t think so.
retired engineer
i have done same calcs. throw in charcoal and wood. all the supposed global warming can be explained that simply.
moreover it is never considered in the IPCC formulation
peerr
“i have done same calcs. throw in charcoal and wood. all the supposed global warming can be explained that simply.”
I would love to see those “calcs”. Sounds like a load of crap to me.
I tried to calculate this. I have a number, but I am not sure of the correctness of it.
Radius of Earth = 6,378.1 kilometers
Solar Constant = 1350 w/km^2 (low figure)
Area of earth disk = pi*r^2 = 128,800,490,577,636 m^2
Area *solar constant = 5.4e+24 J/a
US annual energy consumption = 100 Quads (Quad = 10^15 BTU or 10^18 J/a)
also = 10^20 J/a (which all turns into heat eventually h/t Robert A Cook PE above)
US annual energy consumption is 4 orders of magnitude less than the annual insolation.
Now US energy consumption = 25% of world energy consumption, but
US population = 6% of world population. but total world at US level would still be more than 3 om less than insolation.
If another ice age approaches we might have to turn up the heat.
re Fat Man (2008/12-05 22:16:34)
The energy associated with annual solar insolation is about 5.5E+24 Joules.
The conclusion of IPCC (AR4) – when annualising the 1.6W/M-2 – is that current net effect globally of human activities is 204TW.
Put another way, this means that the energy contribution of human activity, as attributed by IPCC, is 204TW (or in the order of 10^14 watts). The energy delivered by sunlight is in the order of 10^17 watts. That’s a factor of 10^3, or roughly 1,000 times greater.
======================
Global Energy consumption is defined as marketable energy.
In producing electricity, two-thirds of the heat value of the nuclear or coal fuel is released to the environment [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf03.html].
The amount of electricity produced globally from nuclear fuels in 2005 was 2,768TWh [source: Key World Energy Statistics 2007, International Energy Agency]. This equates to 9.96E+18 joules of the energy.
In generating this electricity, twice this amount of energy is released direct to the environment for cooling, either into the atmosphere or into water . This equates to 1.99E+19 joules, which is the value of the energy transferred as heat direct to the biosphere globally as a result of generating electricity from nuclear fuel sources in 2005.
Calculating the energy-cost of extracting the fuel source from the ground and getting it to the power station can get quite complicated – so to get a better idea of what is the possible amount of heat being released to the environment, it may be useful to look at the heat energy contained in the coal, gas and oil we are extracting.
These following production figures for petrochemicals come from http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf.
>> Crude Oil: 3,939Mt extracted 2006, equates to 1.64E+20 joules energy
>> Natural Gas: 2,977Bcm extracted in 2006, equates to 1.14E+20 joules energy
>> Hard Coal: 5,370Mt extracted in 2006, equates to 1.26E+14 joules energy
Total energy in petrochemicals extracted in 2006 was 2.78E+20 Joules.
The annual “order of magnitude” for the total possible heat from extracted fuels (including nuclear, but ignoring the 2005/2006 timing difference) comes to about 3E+20 joules energy potentially being added to the biosphere annually. This is a trivial amount compared to the energy of the total annual insolation (at 5.51E+24 Joules) … only about one 10,000th.
However, to determine the relative significance of this amount of added heat, perhaps we need to look at it in terms of how human activities are influencing the environment more generally. IPCC gives us this figure, which is a warming effect of 1.6 Watts per square meter [ar4-wg1-spm.pdf, page 3].
Converting the IPCC figure of 1.6 W/m-2 into Watts results in an annual figure of 204TW, or 6.45E+21 Joules net energy being added to the global thermo-dynamic system annually.
In reaching this conclusion, the IPCC has considered the effects of greenhouse gases, ozone, stratospheric water vapour, surface albedo, aerosols and linear contrails. It has not however considered the effect of heat being released directly into the environment.
Using these figures highlights that the contribution of direct heat could be an additional 5% – which now seems to be a little more significant , especially when compared to one 10,000th , which we previously thought was a relevant basis for comparision, and dismissing the effect of direct heat add.
Not all of the energy extracted from Coal, Gas Oil, Nuclear and Geothermal sources ends up in the biosphere as heat. However, more than half of the energy of the extracted energy source is “lost” to the environment at some point due to process efficiencies; and it all ends up in the environment eventually, in some form or other. This extra added heat has either to be radiated to space, or the temperature of the climate system will rise.
Developing better knowledge about the amount of heat energy being added directly to the environment will help us get a better understanding of what is actually going on in our climate system. A better understanding in this area will help us make smarter decisions about where to focus our precious time and effort in combating the warming that we generally believe is taking place.
I did a waste heat calculation here based on carbon dioxide emissions rather than hydrocarbon usage and got 0.025 W/m^2 for the magnitude of waste heat for zero efficiency. Assuming 40% efficiency the magnitude would be 0.015 W/m^2. Solar forcing is 342 W/m^2.
You do need to be careful with a thermograph. If the surface you are imaging has low IR emissivity, you don’t get a true measure of surface temperature. Glass windows reflect the sky and surrounding temperatures, and you don’t get the temperature of the window itself. If you get the city hall lightly painted with black paint, you’ll get a more accurate result.
I once calculated the fraction of sun insolation necessary to melt the icecap of the late maximum glacial times to the actual situation, what took approximately 5000 years : I found 1/1000, that means 10 times more that the energy used by humans actually, which is 1/1 000 as given by David or others; that is exactly the same ratio of the sea level rise between deglaciation times (120 000 mm in 5000 years , ie 24 mm per year) and the actual sea level rise which is something around 2mm per year
Funny , no?
Sorry there was a bug , I wrote:
more that the energy used by humans actually, which is 1/1 000 as given by David or others
It is of course 1/10 000, I hope every one made the correction
In the early ’90s I worked in Switzerland for a couple of years. We had a late night TV channel that showed non-stop satellite time lapse images of Europe for the last 8 hours.
Particularly in winter, when all the houses are being warmed by central heating, and all the nuclear power stations are pumping out maximum heat through their massive cooling towers, I noticed that the incoming weather from the Atlantic would stall or be diverted when it hit the massive heat island that is continental Europe. In Switzerland, France, Holland, Belgium and Germany, towns are often just a couple of kilometres apart.
I became convinced that waste heat in Europe had an immediate and direct effect on climate.
For a long time I’ve been looking for some quantitative estimates of the heating effect, but there has been none that I can find and all the diagrams of major atmospheric energy flows never show it. IPCC ignores it as a forcing factor. I think it is real and underestimated.
From E.M.Smith
A lot of figures are bandied about purporting to prove how incredibly dense is the amount of solar energy impinging upon the Earth–and yet?
Maybe while these figures are true they also omit some truth. For instance if 1200 watts as you say is, or even just 300 watts per square meter is so easily available why then are all these silly countries of the world still using energy dense fossil fuels to heat houses? Why are you? Tell that to the residents of the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
If there is such a preponderance of solar energy beaming down ,then why has not nature found a way to capture this energy through the long cold northern winters, instead of going into a state of dormancy as it does?
Seriously the amount of solar energy beamed at the Earth is awesome. But it all is not usable to the Earth. Some of it is color that that allows us to see the beauty of the world we live in. Some reflects away so that the beauty of the Earth may be seen from afar. In other words all aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum are just not available for humankinds disposal for various reasons.
Here in Pa. we have wind farms that are approaching 10 by 30 miles but no one in authority even pretends that they will supplant fossil fuel but merely adjunct to it.
Here is a mental exercise–Work out the energy output of a large coal generating plant and see how many square miles is needed to get the same output summer and winter -day and night,,from a solar photo-cell system.
Next compute all the cars and trucks operating day and night and figure out how many square miles needed to output the same energy by solar photocell
Now multiply 100,000 btus per hour during a 10 degree F day by millions of houses for average houses,,but also add businesses and factories.
Here in the USA we could cut down and burn every tree and all our crops and it still would not equal the energy we get from fossil , hydroelectric , and nuclear energy
That is in one year