Guest post by Ron House
As readers will know, I have been thinking about the hullabaloo about CO2 and global warming and I quickly concluded that CO2 is no threat, won’t do any significant warming (which would be good anyway), and is in fact 100% good for the planet. But someone said to me, if CO2 is no danger, that doesn’t mean that humans are not causing a danger in some other way. Of course I agreed with this, because there are lots of things humans are doing wrongly and thereby causing terrible damage to our world (and the CO2 storm in a teacup is distracting us all from fixing those real problems).
My friend then went on, however, to propose that the danger was still global warming and that the mechanism was, instead of CO2 greenhouse warming, the mere fact that human technology gives off heat. All the power used by all the machines and transport and so on eventually ends up as waste heat. Maybe that is in itself enough to cause us serious warming trouble? So I did some calculations.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, the process of doing useful work must necessarily lose some of the energy from the fuel in the form of waste heat; and that heat, well, heats. In other words, because of the huge extra amount of useful work we do, we create excess heat that would not have been here otherwise, and that heat has to either be dissipated somehow, or else raise the temperature.
The factors that have caused the ice ages, as we saw, are primarily small changes in insolation (heating) by the Sun. The changes can happen because the Sun’s energy output changes or because of cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination, etc., changing the amount of heat that actually arrives on the surface. Changes in the Earth’s orbit are believed to be the triggers for the onset of ice ages, and the changes in heating caused by those changes are thought to be quite small compared to the total power output of the Sun. This might lead us to suspect that human-caused changes in the amount of heat at the surface might indeed have a significant effect on the climate.
To answer this question, we need to compare the amount of variation due to the Sun with the amount of heat emitted by industrial civilisation. if the latter is ‘in the same ballpark’ as the former, then human civilisation might be holding off the onset of a new ice age.
Although there is much dispute about the exact mechanism that causes the onset of ice ages, much of it doesn’t concern us right now because one basic fact is clear: somehow or other, the responsibility lies with changes in the amount of heat received from the Sun.
One theory is that the cause is Northern Hemisphere summer cooling. At our current stage in geological history, the North Pole is surrounded by land masses, which are snowed under every winter. If the summers became just a bit colder, then some of that winter snow would remain on the ground throughout summer, and would then turn to ice. The ice will reflect sunlight much better than green plants or dirt or even liquid water, so the cooling will accelerate and the next summer will be even colder and leave even more ice lying around. And so the planet falls into an ice age. Retained heat in the oceans slows down the changes and ‘smooths over’ short-term effects, but once the process starts, the killing ice eventually reclaims its deathly kingdom.
Dr David Archibald suggests that a key measure of this process is the amount of insolation at 65° north latitude. The power of the Sun at 65°N is about 476 Watts per square metre. That means that at midday in mid-summer at, say, Reykjavik (at 64°N, almost the only significant city anywhere close to 65°N), the Sun has about the power of five old-style incandescent light bulbs. When summer sun at this latitude is sufficient to melt the winter snowfall, all is well. Other factors in this calculation are the length of summer (because, for example, a longer, but slightly cooler summer might melt more ice than a shorter warmer one) and how high in the sky the Sun is in mid summer. And the higher it is in summer, the deeper and colder the long winter ‘night’ will be. The factors are complex and researchers disagree as to how exactly they should be combined in order to make good predictions, but some combination of these factors decides whether we bask in life-giving warmth or flee the deadly cold. We cannot hope to make predictions from the kind of short overview we are doing here, but we can get an idea of the magnitudes involved.
How much radiant energy the Sun has in the past or will in the future shine upon the Earth at this latitude can be reliably calculated from basic physical and astronomical properties of the way the Earth orbits the Sun and how that orbit changes with time. This is not an uncertain thing like the forecasts of climate models; it is not exactly easy to calculate, but it depends only upon the extremely well verified equations of Newtonian physics (or, if you prefer a few thousands of a percent more accuracy, relativity). If we didn’t know how to do these calculations, we could never have landed men on the Moon or flown discovery missions past Saturn and on to Uranus and Neptune. Yes, we do know how to make these calculations and we know it very reliably.
When the calculations are done, we find that at the depth of the last ice age, around 22,000 years ago, the Sun’s power (again at 65°N) was around 463Wm-2. On the other hand, at the height of our own interglacial, the Holocene, which occurred about 11,000 years ago (yes, we have been on the downward slope ever since—though you would never guess it from the hairy scary stories about warming in the media) the summer insolation at 65°N was about 527Wm-2. In other words, we have:
| What | When | Sun’s Power |
|---|---|---|
| Previous Ice Age | 22,000 years ago | 463Wm-2 |
| Holocene Peak | 11,000 years ago | 527Wm-2 |
| The Perfect Time | Now | 476Wm-2 |
From these figures, we may make the following inferences:
- The difference between peak warmth and deepest cold was around 55Wm-2;
- The current value, being only 13Wm-2 above the value at the depth of the ice age, is almost all the way back to ‘cold conditions’; it may be that only stored ocean heat is keeping us out of an ice age (for now).
Moving on, how do these power figures compare with human energy output (mainly by burning fossil fuels)?
Human energy usage in 2006 was 491 exajoules. This translates to an average power usage of 15.56 terawatts each second (divide by the number of seconds in a year). To compare this with the Sun’s power as discussed above, we need to average this over the entire planet. The Earth’s surface area is 510 million sq. km., which gives 30,500 W per sq. km, or 0.03Wm-2. One final adjustment is needed to allow us to do the comparison: the Sun’s insolation given above was as received at noon, whereas this figure is an average over the whole planet. Since the planet’s area is four times the areas of a circle of the same radius, we must multiply by four, giving about 0.12Wm-2 as our final figure for comparison.
The human energy output of about 0.12Wm-2 is clearly overpowered by even the smallest of the numbers we have looked at so far. The 13Wm-2 difference between ice age conditions and today is at least a hundred times larger than human energy output. We might delay a killer ice age slightly, but our heating of the planet is nowhere near large enough to save us.
Are we heating the Earth too much – with heat?
As readers will know, I have been thinking about the hullabaloo about CO2 and global warming and I quickly concluded that CO2 is no threat, won’t do any significant warming (which would be good anyway), and is in fact 100% good for the planet. But someone said to me, if CO2 is no danger, that doesn’t mean that humans are not causing a danger in some other way. Of course I agreed with this, because there are lots of things humans are doing wrongly and thereby causing terrible damage to our world (and the CO2 storm in a teacup is distracting us all from fixing those real problems).
My friend then went on, however, to propose that the danger was still global warming and that the mechanism was, instead of CO2 greenhouse warming, the mere fact that human technology gives off heat. All the power used by all the machines and transport and so on eventually ends up as waste heat. Maybe that is in itself enough to cause us serious warming trouble? So I did some calculations.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, the process of doing useful work must necessarily lose some of the energy from the fuel in the form of waste heat; and that heat, well, heats. In other words, because of the huge extra amount of useful work we do, we create excess heat that would not have been here otherwise, and that heat has to either be dissipated somehow, or else raise the temperature.
The factors that have caused the ice ages, as we saw, are primarily small changes in insolation (heating) by the Sun. The changes can happen because the Sun’s energy output changes or because of cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination, etc., changing the amount of heat that actually arrives on the surface. Changes in the Earth’s orbit are believed to be the triggers for the onset of ice ages, and the changes in heating caused by those changes are thought to be quite small compared to the total power output of the Sun. This might lead us to suspect that human-caused changes in the amount of heat at the surface might indeed have a significant effect on the climate.
To answer this question, we need to compare the amount of variation due to the Sun with the amount of heat emitted by industrial civilisation. if the latter is ‘in the same ballpark’ as the former, then human civilisation might be holding off the onset of a new ice age.
Although there is much dispute about the exact mechanism that causes the onset of ice ages, much of it doesn’t concern us right now because one basic fact is clear: somehow or other, the responsibility lies with changes in the amount of heat received from the Sun.
One theory is that the cause is Northern Hemisphere summer cooling. At our current stage in geological history, the North Pole is surrounded by land masses, which are snowed under every winter. If the summers became just a bit colder, then some of that winter snow would remain on the ground throughout summer, and would then turn to ice. The ice will reflect sunlight much better than green plants or dirt or even liquid water, so the cooling will accelerate and the next summer will be even colder and leave even more ice lying around. And so the planet falls into an ice age. Retained heat in the oceans slows down the changes and ‘smooths over’ short-term effects, but once the process starts, the killing ice eventually reclaims its deathly kingdom.
Dr David Archibald suggests that a key measure of this process is the amount of insolation at 65° north latitude. The power of the Sun at 65°N is about 476 Watts per square metre. That means that at midday in mid-summer at, say, Reykjavik (at 64°N, almost the only significant city anywhere close to 65°N), the Sun has about the power of five old-style incandescent light bulbs. When summer sun at this latitude is sufficient to melt the winter snowfall, all is well. Other factors in this calculation are the length of summer (because, for example, a longer, but slightly cooler summer might melt more ice than a shorter warmer one) and how high in the sky the Sun is in mid summer. And the higher it is in summer, the deeper and colder the long winter ‘night’ will be. The factors are complex and researchers disagree as to how exactly they should be combined in order to make good predictions, but some combination of these factors decides whether we bask in life-giving warmth or flee the deadly cold. We cannot hope to make predictions from the kind of short overview we are doing here, but we can get an idea of the magnitudes involved.
How much radiant energy the Sun has in the past or will in the future shine upon the Earth at this latitude can be reliably calculated from basic physical and astronomical properties of the way the Earth orbits the Sun and how that orbit changes with time. This is not an uncertain thing like the forecasts of climate models; it is not exactly easy to calculate, but it depends only upon the extremely well verified equations of Newtonian physics (or, if you prefer a few thousands of a percent more accuracy, relativity). If we didn’t know how to do these calculations, we could never have landed men on the Moon or flown discovery missions past Saturn and on to Uranus and Neptune. Yes, we do know how to make these calculations and we know it very reliably.
When the calculations are done, we find that at the depth of the last ice age, around 22,000 years ago, the Sun’s power (again at 65°N) was around 463Wm-2. On the other hand, at the height of our own interglacial, the Holocene, which occurred about 11,000 years ago (yes, we have been on the downward slope ever since—though you would never guess it from the hairy scary stories about warming in the media) the summer insolation at 65°N was about 527Wm-2. In other words, we have:
| What | When | Sun’s Power |
|---|---|---|
| Previous Ice Age | 22,000 years ago | 463Wm-2 |
| Holocene Peak | 11,000 years ago | 527Wm-2 |
| The Perfect Time | Now | 476Wm-2 |
From these figures, we may make the following inferences:
-
- The difference between peak warmth and deepest cold was around 55Wm-2;
- The current value, being only 13Wm-2 above the value at the depth of the ice age, is almost all the way back to ‘cold conditions’; it may be that only stored ocean heat is keeping us out of an ice age (for now).
Moving on, how do these power figures compare with human energy output (mainly by burning fossil fuels)?
Human energy usage in 2006 was 491 exajoules. This translates to an average power usage of 15.56 terawatts each second (divide by the number of seconds in a year). To compare this with the Sun’s power as discussed above, we need to average this over the entire planet. The Earth’s surface area is 510 million sq. km., which gives 30,500 W per sq. km, or 0.03Wm-2. One final adjustment is needed to allow us to do the comparison: the Sun’s insolation given above was as received at noon, whereas this figure is an average over the whole planet. Since the planet’s area is four times the areas of a circle of the same radius, we must multiply by four, giving about 0.12Wm-2 as our final figure for comparison.
The human energy output of about 0.12Wm-2 is clearly overpowered by even the smallest of the numbers we have looked at so far. The 13Wm-2 difference between ice age conditions and today is at least a hundred times larger than human energy output. We might delay a killer ice age slightly, but our heating of the planet is nowhere near large enough to save us.
Are we heating the Earth too much – with heat?
Ron House June 3, 2010As readers will know, I have been thinking about the hullabaloo about CO2 and global warming and I quickly concluded that CO2 is no threat, won’t do any significant warming (which would be good anyway), and is in fact 100% good for the planet. But someone said to me, if CO2 is no danger, that doesn’t mean that humans are not causing a danger in some other way. Of course I agreed with this, because there are lots of things humans are doing wrongly and thereby causing terrible damage to our world (and the CO2 storm in a teacup is distracting us all from fixing those real problems).
My friend then went on, however, to propose that the danger was still global warming and that the mechanism was, instead of CO2 greenhouse warming, the mere fact that human technology gives off heat. All the power used by all the machines and transport and so on eventually ends up as waste heat. Maybe that is in itself enough to cause us serious warming trouble? So I did some calculations.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, the process of doing useful work must necessarily lose some of the energy from the fuel in the form of waste heat; and that heat, well, heats. In other words, because of the huge extra amount of useful work we do, we create excess heat that would not have been here otherwise, and that heat has to either be dissipated somehow, or else raise the temperature.
The factors that have caused the ice ages, as we saw, are primarily small changes in insolation (heating) by the Sun. The changes can happen because the Sun’s energy output changes or because of cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination, etc., changing the amount of heat that actually arrives on the surface. Changes in the Earth’s orbit are believed to be the triggers for the onset of ice ages, and the changes in heating caused by those changes are thought to be quite small compared to the total power output of the Sun. This might lead us to suspect that human-caused changes in the amount of heat at the surface might indeed have a significant effect on the climate.
To answer this question, we need to compare the amount of variation due to the Sun with the amount of heat emitted by industrial civilisation. if the latter is ‘in the same ballpark’ as the former, then human civilisation might be holding off the onset of a new ice age.
Although there is much dispute about the exact mechanism that causes the onset of ice ages, much of it doesn’t concern us right now because one basic fact is clear: somehow or other, the responsibility lies with changes in the amount of heat received from the Sun.
One theory is that the cause is Northern Hemisphere summer cooling. At our current stage in geological history, the North Pole is surrounded by land masses, which are snowed under every winter. If the summers became just a bit colder, then some of that winter snow would remain on the ground throughout summer, and would then turn to ice. The ice will reflect sunlight much better than green plants or dirt or even liquid water, so the cooling will accelerate and the next summer will be even colder and leave even more ice lying around. And so the planet falls into an ice age. Retained heat in the oceans slows down the changes and ‘smooths over’ short-term effects, but once the process starts, the killing ice eventually reclaims its deathly kingdom.
Dr David Archibald suggests that a key measure of this process is the amount of insolation at 65° north latitude. The power of the Sun at 65°N is about 476 Watts per square metre. That means that at midday in mid-summer at, say, Reykjavik (at 64°N, almost the only significant city anywhere close to 65°N), the Sun has about the power of five old-style incandescent light bulbs. When summer sun at this latitude is sufficient to melt the winter snowfall, all is well. Other factors in this calculation are the length of summer (because, for example, a longer, but slightly cooler summer might melt more ice than a shorter warmer one) and how high in the sky the Sun is in mid summer. And the higher it is in summer, the deeper and colder the long winter ‘night’ will be. The factors are complex and researchers disagree as to how exactly they should be combined in order to make good predictions, but some combination of these factors decides whether we bask in life-giving warmth or flee the deadly cold. We cannot hope to make predictions from the kind of short overview we are doing here, but we can get an idea of the magnitudes involved.
How much radiant energy the Sun has in the past or will in the future shine upon the Earth at this latitude can be reliably calculated from basic physical and astronomical properties of the way the Earth orbits the Sun and how that orbit changes with time. This is not an uncertain thing like the forecasts of climate models; it is not exactly easy to calculate, but it depends only upon the extremely well verified equations of Newtonian physics (or, if you prefer a few thousands of a percent more accuracy, relativity). If we didn’t know how to do these calculations, we could never have landed men on the Moon or flown discovery missions past Saturn and on to Uranus and Neptune. Yes, we do know how to make these calculations and we know it very reliably.
When the calculations are done, we find that at the depth of the last ice age, around 22,000 years ago, the Sun’s power (again at 65°N) was around 463Wm-2. On the other hand, at the height of our own interglacial, the Holocene, which occurred about 11,000 years ago (yes, we have been on the downward slope ever since—though you would never guess it from the hairy scary stories about warming in the media) the summer insolation at 65°N was about 527Wm-2. In other words, we have:
| What | When | Sun’s Power |
|---|---|---|
| Previous Ice Age | 22,000 years ago | 463Wm-2 |
| Holocene Peak | 11,000 years ago | 527Wm-2 |
| The Perfect Time | Now | 476Wm-2 |
From these figures, we may make the following inferences:
-
- The difference between peak warmth and deepest cold was around 55Wm-2;
- The current value, being only 13Wm-2 above the value at the depth of the ice age, is almost all the way back to ‘cold conditions’; it may be that only stored ocean heat is keeping us out of an ice age (for now).
Moving on, how do these power figures compare with human energy output (mainly by burning fossil fuels)?
Human energy usage in 2006 was 491 exajoules. This translates to an average power usage of 15.56 terawatts each second (divide by the number of seconds in a year). To compare this with the Sun’s power as discussed above, we need to average this over the entire planet. The Earth’s surface area is 510 million sq. km., which gives 30,500 W per sq. km, or 0.03Wm-2. One final adjustment is needed to allow us to do the comparison: the Sun’s insolation given above was as received at noon, whereas this figure is an average over the whole planet. Since the planet’s area is four times the areas of a circle of the same radius, we must multiply by four, giving about 0.12Wm-2 as our final figure for comparison.
The human energy output of about 0.12Wm-2 is clearly overpowered by even the smallest of the numbers we have looked at so far. The 13Wm-2 difference between ice age conditions and today is at least a hundred times larger than human energy output. We might delay a killer ice age slightly, but our heating of the planet is nowhere near large enough to save us.
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Well, actually the amount of heat we pump into the air really does not figure into the equation as you demonstrated. Back in Highschool ( like 15 years ago now ) I was worried about Global warming and went about trying to understand it so I did the same math you just did and realized that man really has a hard time effecting the temperature of the planet directly or indirectly. I would suggest that the major factor in changing temperature if not CO2 however ( it does affect it a little as physics would suggest ) but again no where near the feared amounts advocated by ‘Climatologists’.
Land, water, crop usage should have a much larger impact on temperature then CO2 or fuel usage. But since we need large tracts of land for food and water is naturally occurring I believe these have been ignored by people who believe in CO2 induced Warming. We are going on two and a half decades of lost time examining a trace element that has little to do with the warming/cooling cycles of the earth, one that is actually beneficial to the biosphere and had become a sequestered natural resource and to what end? Even if the world does warm because of CO2 it does not mean it is a bad thing which is of course the real kicker.
“heat is a byproduct of civilisation”
Larry Niven in Ringworld 1969
Wasted time I would say. Here is where the logic falls apart:
“The changes can happen because the Sun’s energy output changes or because of cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination, etc., changing the amount of heat that actually arrives on the surface. Changes in the Earth’s orbit are believed to be the triggers for the onset of ice ages, and the changes in heating caused by those changes are thought to be quite small compared to the total power output of the Sun.”
The solar wind velocity varies between say 250kms to 980kps, today it is running at about 1 million mph. Daily changes can be huge. These changes correlate extremely well to short term changes in surface temperatures, which as we know, add up to the longer term picture.
The Cause of the Earth’s Climate Change Is the Sun by Dr Jeffrey Glassman is on the right track:
http://sc25.com/index.php?id=188&linkbox=true
I like Ron’s calculations – they bring a bit of perspective to it all. But I think Larry raises some interesting questions. Feedback is one big issue. As far as I understand, no-one can model it, so it’s dangerous to build into your assumptions. And as we know, if you can’t get the assumptions right, everything else goes out the window. But still, a nice bit of commentary from both Ron and Larry. Can we see some direct debate on the issues they both bring forward? C’mon guys – you both have interesting things to say.
Thinking outside the square, is a good exercise, and I have no doubt that there will be new energy sources, and better conservation of heat in homes, and perhaps a migration to deep underground chasing that inner warmth. But we don’t want to get hysterical and start beating our breasts, after all we are just doing what humans do, try and get the best for us. If we cut off our noses to spite ourselves for being rotten energy guzzling humans, and consume less, turn our earth heat down, or live near the ice, we might save something for the oncoming eons.
But then again on the balance of probabilities, the sun might give out, an asteroid may strike the earth, gravity might fail, the poles flip, or the magnetic force wain, and on top of that microbes multiply and kill us. Best we just go on being humans and get the best, while we can..
Hmmnn
Watts for dinner tonight dear – cave mushrooms – again, Lichen soup, not that bluey green stuff I hope! what meat in the soup!! wheres Fido!! (just to keep our spirits up and prepare for the future)!!
There remains the question as to whether the warming is truly global or widespread local.
This comparison appears to me to be comparing the current, averaged human energy output on the earth over a year with a value of 0.12 watts per meter squared to the value of the difference of insolation at 65 degrees north in the summer between two years, now and the previous ice age, with a value of 13 watts per meter squared.
I don’t like comparing the average value with a not-average value. I think that knowing the difference of value of the average insolation over the entire earth from the two periods, current and previous ice age, would be a better value to use for a comparison.
Oh, and NASA now has absolute proof that the planet is hotter than ever and we are to blame . . .
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7142976.ece
I wonder if anyone inside the church does the sums that matter like Mr. House does?
Regarding Bill in Vigo’s 5:52 am comment: That’s a brilliant bit if thinking. But that kind of policy is antithetical to the agenda of our current Powers-that-be.
I sometimes wonder if a solution for our energy problem isn’t right under our noses, a solution that might also help us better survive the cooling of the planet. A focused aim to find a viable, sustainable method for dealing with the problems of nuclear energy production, on the level of a Manhattan Project or the race to the moon, certainly seems a better use of our efforts than the B.S. involved in our current “alternative energy” research.
fredb says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:34 am
So, set against a ~3.7Wm-2 for a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial times, hmmm … that’s non-trivial.
3.7 Wm/2 divided by 64 Wm/2 (Solar change) = 5.8%. It’s not only trivial, it’s comical. Maybe we’ll postpone the next ice age by a few years.
Anthony,
There exists some scientific literature about waste heat and its climate effect (urban climatology; its contributes to the Urban Heat Island). For a short discussion of this issue, see here:
A.T.J. de Laat, Current Climate Impact of Heating From Energy Usage, EOS transactions FORUM, Vol. 89, No. 51, doi: 10.1029/2008EO510005, 16 December 2008.
http://www.agu.org/journals/eo/eo0851/2008EO510005.pdf (subscription required)
http://www.knmi.nl/~laatdej/EOS2008.pdf
More can be found on the weblog of Roger Pielke Sr.
A few quick remarks and thoughts.
1) global average energy consumption – and thus waste heat production – is small compared to for example the CO2 forcing (0.01% of 3.7 W/m2).
2) on a regional scale, waste heat production can be quite large. My home country, The Netherlands, consumes on average about 4 W/m2. That is by no means insignificant anymore.
3) on a local scale (megacities and smaller) the waste heat flux can be tens to hundreds of W/m2. That is a lot and surely important for understanding Urban climate.
4) Although the current wast heat production is small on a global scale, energy consumption is expected to grow the coming decades. Moreover, if humanity were to find some real cheap sustainable clean new energy source (something completely new and currently non-existent) energy consumption could increase quite rapidly and reach levels where the global mean waste heat flux could become dominant and quite important as a climate factor. That is not unimaginable. On the other hand, having so much cheap energy available could mean humanity is prospering and therefore waste heat might not be considered a real big issue anymore.
Cheers, Jos.
I am not yet completely convinced by the estimate of 0.12 given for human influence. What if there is a cumulative effect? In other words, you must also count the energy released by all the bombs and atomic bombs exploded during wars and tests, & all satelites put into orbit, etc. etc. for the past centuries. You just cannot go by fuel usage for one year only.
Note that it is mostly snow that reflects light very effectively and that could put earth back into an ice age. Global cooling is possibly prevented by humans because for an ice age to get hold of earth again, large landmasses must be kept under snow blankets as well as the surrounding seas must freeze up and the snow must cover these. That will not happen easily because:
1) Houses & buildings in populated areas are kept warm, which melts the snow (on the roof), + they put salt on the roads and try to melt the snow everywhere as asap
2) A lot of salts (mainly from detergents and other human activities) is released into the rivers that end up in the surrounding seas which prevents them from freezing up.
3) Carbon dioxide forms carbonates in water (i.e. more salts)
So I suspect that humans do affect the climate but it seems mostly in a positive way!!
There are also heat reductions caused by human activity. Irrigating fields of the great plains has reduced the reflected heat from the formerly great American desert. Some that solar energy that was heating the ground has been absorbed by the plants and used to photo synthesize food. Through irrigation and evapotranspiration, humidity has increased and thus increased cloud formation. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but since it appears that the waste heat generated is less than 1% of the 13Wm-2, I don’t think it matters either.
Matt
Dave
June 3, 2010 at 6:39 am
Dang, you beat me to it! I know, lets move the earth farther away from the sun!
If not anthropogenic then what about geogenic?. Is it geothermic energy produced indirectly by the sun or is it produced “locally”?.
Sphaerica says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:16 am
Steve in SC…
The energy radiated by humans and all living creatures comes almost exclusively from the sun
Sphaerica is “roundly” right as also the fossil fuels’ energy came from the Sun…so our earth it is just a “transformer”.
This is why we close the doors of our houses in winter… so not to let the heat escape and heat the Earth.
Steve in SC says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:40 am
The amount of GHG given off by termites, just one species of insects, exceeds all the GHG given off by humans’ and ruminants’ bodies, combined. Just a little factoid.
OK, but if you are going to do a full study of human heat impact you need to look at both sides of the ledger. How much cooling is produced by human activity? For example:
Blocking of sunlight by human produced smoke and smog.
Reflection of heat by human structures.
Blocking of sunlight by human artefacts e.g. satellites, airplanes and balloons.
Altering of evaporation and precipitation patterns by such things as cities, reservoirs and irrigation.
Release of or trapping of subterranean heat by human activity
@Ron House
I can (barely) believe a figure as large as 0.1 watts per square meter from human heat generation.
But you forgot about positive feedbacks! You see, as the CAGW folks would have us believe, every bit of extra heat generates even more extra heat. Just so, that tenth of watt will cause some extra water vapor in the atmosphere and that in turn is the primary greenhouse gas which will cause an extra tenth of a watt of sunlight to be absorbed which, in turn creates even more water vapor which adds more greenhouse gas, and so on ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the ocean is warming up and releasing CO2 like a warm can of beer which adds more greenhouse and the warmer water melts methane ice at the bottom and well, you know, methane is like an uber-power greenhouse gas.
Near as I can figure just the act of lighting up a single cigarette is enough to tip the delicate energy balance of the earth into a runaway greenhouse until we become like Venus where lead melts on the surface. Talk about your butterfly effects…
It is funny: Say whatever you wish, make all the calculations you want, you’ll be penalized anyway for heating up the Earth. Remember when the Roman emperors turned the thumb down?
It’s too late now! You are nobody to spoil big daddy’s business!
Tom Bauch says:
“I always thought that there should be at least some impact on global temperatures by the simple fact of our technology creating heat that was not present previously. ”
Steve in SC says:
“What about the heat energy radiated by humans?
What about the heat energy provided by the respiration of humans?
Sweat? There are lots of BTUs to be had there.”
ALL of the heat energy being liberated in present times by combustion and other chemical means was always HERE and stored by plants and microbes over the previous 1 to 2 billion years from the original ALL CO2 atmosphere. The source of that energy was and always will be the Sun. Now heat being liberated by human caused nuclear reaction(in the illustrative photo above) might be another issue to calculate.
What a mess.
How intelligent are people that can be convinced that warming is bad and
we are actually smart enough to model it….
…both at the same time
I think it’s all computers fault! Back in the early days of climate alarmism, we were worried about getting too cold. Then along came IBM, Apple, and Bill Gates. We started with simple little processors, running along at a simple and slow hz rate. But, as humans are, we always want the “bigger, faster, better” stuff. So, we went to the faster hz rates! Finally we broke the Ghz landmark! We moved on to even higher and hotter processors! Even still, it wasn’t enough to satisfy the average PC user! We started with duo-core processors. Now quad-cores are standard! If you don’t believe they generate much heat, just touch a processor with your bare hand after firing up a PC.(Not the heat sink, the processor itself) It’ll definitely leave a mark! See! Its the computers! Ted Kaczynski could have been right after all!
The concept that humans would eventually overheat their environment through energy utilization was proposed by that liberal pessimist Buckminster Fuller back in the 60’s or 70’s.
I always assumed he was being facetious.