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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Is it really that warm?
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-warmest-year-yet-says-nasa-20100603-x7f5.html
We have a program schedued for Sunday here in Australia about icebergs. Not sure of the detail but I get the impression that icebergs have never floated in sea before. Will be an interesting watch.
Enneagram says: June 3, 2010 at 7:47 am 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?
I believe we have inverted the Roman’s gesture, thumbs down meant stick the sword in the ground, thumbs up meant deliver a fatal stabbing.
Bill Berryderry said “I wonder what would happen if all the unemployed fishermen were to be paid $80.00/barell for any oil they could recover from the surface of the gulf. I think there would be many innovative methods discovered to reduce the area of the spill and the thickness of the layer.”
That seems like an outstanding idea. Get the fishermen to catch oil instead of fish. At $80 per barrel 100 barrels would be worth $8000. Seems like a good catch!
It’s worse than we thought!
Each Carbon molecule consumes 2 Oxygen molecules when burned.
The hydrogen molecules also consume Oxygen.
By my cipherin’ we are consuming 40,000 billion lbs of Oxygen every year.
There is only enough left for 127,000 years. But we can only survive at ~15% Oxygen. Therefore we should run out about uuugh…..
Looks like we can’t hold back the ice when it comes. And there is no hope that carbon dioxide can save us either because the vaunted anthropogenic global warming has never been observed. Not even by Hansen himself when he testified in 1988 that warming had come because that was a lie. Temperature curves were already cooked when he spoke as I have proved. But that statement about the oceans’ heat smoothing things over is very important for us today. That is because Arctic warming, which is the only real warming active today, is caused by warm currents reaching the Arctic and melting the ice. It all started at the turn of the twentieth century, after a two thousand year cooling trend. The start of warming was sudden, it was interrupted in mid-century from 1940 to 1960, then resumed, and continues today. It’s cause is a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century that set the Gulf Stream on its present northerly course. A smaller amount of warm water enters the Arctic through the Bering Strait. Thanks to winds in 2007 more than the usual amount entered that way and created a large pool of open water just to the north of the strait while the Gulf Stream side hardly changed. For details read “What Warming?” available on Amazon.com.
REPLY: Carbon might again be the answer, in the form of soot. – Anthony
These calculatons assume that all of the energy use by humans is creating heat, but there is real work being done by some of this energy. The actual heat going into the envirinment is something less than 100% of this number.
Patrick Davis says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:17 am
The article you cited was about James Hansen saying this year is 0.66 degrees warmer than the rolling 12-month average. I think, since it is Hansen, we can safely conclude that it is at least 0.66 degrees colder today.
The icebergs in southern waters is an interesting situation. I read recently that Aussie govt. is claiming icebergs are closer to Australia than ever before, so ice must melting and glaciers breaking off icebergs faster. Think about that. Icebergs are lasting longer today, allowing them to migrate further, indicating that the sea is colder and they are staying as ice longer!
The warm-earthers seem to stand on their heads to think, I can conclude by this. They claim that more blood to the brain is better, but they are verging on passing out.
Although in Australia, are people normally inverted anyway? Sorry for this confusion.
Entropy, entropy, *siss boom bah!*
Good point, Ron, thanks for contributing.
Enneagram says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:14 am
BTW Our advice for you, living in that self-denominated “developed world”, you better begin worrying about your economy, about reality: Only those who produce goods for selling know, they will eat tomorrow, so….
________________________________________________________________________
Boy have you got that right. The idiots in the US government have been busy exporting US manufacturing or selling it off for quite a while.
In the USA our population has about tripled since 1970, government employees had doubled by 1996 while education and manufacturing jobs fell. Government jobs and welfare are now at least triple that of the manufacturing jobs that support them. During the Clinton/Gore era the format of the statistical records changed so comparison is no longer easy to former years. Gee I wonder why.
Here is a very rough chart:
US Census figures – – – – – – – – – – – – – 1970 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 1996/2006
Total Population – – – – – – – – – 137,085,000 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 304,059,724
labor – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 82,771,000 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 133,662,000
government – – – – – – – – – – – – – 12,320,637 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 22,543,000
Manufacturing – – – – – – – – – – 19,864,209 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 13,632,000 (1996)
Education – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 6,079,968 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3,215,000 (1996)
2002 – welfare/SS assistance – – – – – ??? – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 11,667,994
2002 – Over 64 years – – – – – – – – – – ???? – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 1,995,284
Over the 1970 to present time period LEVERAGED BUYOUTS:
wiped out many of the well funded, successful businesses who had no debt since they would be ripe targets for hostile takeovers.
Once the feeding frenzy of the eighties was over, what US business was left has been sold off: Statistics (courtesy of Bridgewater) showed in 1990, before WTO was ratified, Foreign ownership of U.S. assets amounted to 33% of U.S. GDP. By 2002 this had increased to over 70% of U.S. GDP. http://www.fame.org/HTM/greg%20Pickup%201%2010%2003%20report.htm
THAT is the reality that the US government has been busy hiding all these years.
Dave Springer says:
June 3, 2010 at 7:45 am
You just invented the perpetual motion machine!..Just apply a little of feedbacks to your wallet and it will grow bigger and bigger…Have you wondered that it is THE SAME ILUSSION AS PRINTING MONEY?
Here is that chart again. (preview would be so nice)
US Census figures – – – – – – – – – – 1970 – – – – – – – – – 1996/2006
Total Population – – – – – – – 137,085,000 – – – -– – – – 304,059,724
labor – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 82,771,000 – – – – – – – 133,662,000
government – – – – – – – — – – – 12,320,637 – – – – – – – – 22,543,000
Manufacturing – – – – – – 19,864,209 – – – – – – – – 13,632,000 (1996)
Education – – – – – – – – – – –- – – 6,079,968 – – – – – – – – – 3,215,000 (1996)
2002 – welfare/SS assistance – – – – ??? – – – – – – – – – – 11,667,994
2002 – Over 64 years – – – – – – – – – ???? – – – – – – – – – – 1,995,284
Steve Keohane says: Thanks for the information. My Hollywood history was wrong. It happends that we use thumbs up for joyful meaning.
You see, as summer draws near, you’ll be assaulted and stalked by AGW propaganda. Here in the SH those ads are either paid by banks (very curious, isn’t it?) or by NGO’s. Just a few minutes ago I was hearing the following through the radio: Do you know that by using electricity you are damaging the world?…This is a message of XXX Bank to raise conscience on conservation of our earth.
What are banks so worried about?
If we keep cooling (losing energy) as those numbers indicate we have for the last 11,000 years we will be back to what the conditions that prevailed at the depth of the last ice age in 3019 years.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs
From a story at Fox today,
“The claims figures come a day before the Labor Department is scheduled to release the May jobs report. Analysts expect that report to show the economy added 513,000 jobs, the most in 26 years. But at least 300,000 of those positions are likely to be temporary Census workers. ”
If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what does. No one teaches how a nation creates wealth anymore. It’s maddening! That small paragraph should send chills down every U.S. citizen’s back! It doesn’t. Some would even characterize it as good news. It’s not. It cripples our economy and endangers our society. We’re still printing money.
That is very important topic discuss here because today’s everyone talk about global warming, I really take interest in these type of researches.
Oh, I saw those reactors, and a thought; Yes, WUWT is gonna show us how many liters of hot water that is pouring out of the nuclear reactors , and at what temperature!
And set up a table, and roughly calculate how many nano-degrees it will heat up the oceans.
Just to sort that out, I mean. But that was not to be.
Because this is, as far as I can see, the only energy not coming from the sun. But how much (or little) is it? Cannot do it myself, it steal too much of my time. The government is already stealing half my life via taxes.
“bubbagyro says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:39 am ”
Channel 7, Sunday, 7:30pm. Icebergs “landing” closer to Australia (Implied in the tralier) never happened before, apparently. The movement in support of CAGW via releases on GHG’s, CO2 etc, through human activities in Australia is ramping up. KRudd747 has to save himself from losing thise year’s election. So far, he’s lost all credability (Phnurk! Like pollies have “credability – sheesh). On this site I predicted the KRudd747 Govn’t would be a one-term-wonder. So far, his “administration” seems to be folloing the politically suicidal path of longer term administrations, like the UK Labour party for instance.
I for one do not care as I know the “Govn’t Machine” has nothing to do with the party/politician that is voted for. And the Mad Monk, is just as slimy.
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:54 am
Interesting figures. Many people around the world think at least computers are manufactured in the US but they are not. A few days ago we knew through the news that there was a chinese factory where there have recently been up to ten workers suicides; owners from Taiwan said that the problem was being fixed by installing screens on workers room windows to avoid workers jumping outside. It happends that these workers earn an avg. of US$300 per month and have one day a week rest and live next to the factory. There is where IPADS come from. Doesn’t it remember “A Brave New World” gammas’ life?
It might be of some interest though to calculate the energy contibution over the inhabited land area (a figure which is considerably smaller than the whole surface area of the globe).
This must be at least part of the UHI effect and could form a basis for a calculation of its magnitude.
There’s another issue with using “energy consumption” and equating it with “heat produced.”
Effectively it boils down into: converting energy into another form doesn’t always necessitate conversion of all of the energy to heat. Nearly always there’s a noticeable slice that is converted into waste heat – and for lots of activities the answer is indeed ‘all of it’ ends up as waste heat. But it isn’t everything by any means, and some of the big offenders happen to be methods of storing energy as opposed to methods of converting useful energy to waste heat.
Trivial example:
Lifting a rock to the top of a hill. Yes, there was friction involved. Perhaps even a lot of friction. But the vast majority of energy spent on any sensible approach to getting the rock to the top of the hill is actually converted into gravitational potential energy – not waste heat.
The electricity spent in the aluminum industry is almost entirely devoted to effectively reversing the thermite reaction – the most exothermic simple reaction known. Which is why recycling aluminum is the most sensible of recycling efforts. Remelting metallic aluminum requires a trivial amount of energy compared to the the amount required to convert bauxite to metallic aluminum. And thus all the aluminum we see is “stored energy.” (And, actually, -lots- of stored energy.)
So, we see, that economy follows the same rules of thermodynamics. Now you are becoming conscious that your four cylinder car’s engine is working with just one cylinder. In order to fix it you have to tune it. That means to proportionate “gas” to “oxygen”. Either you do it or it will stop working at all.
But don’t worry, if you do it rapidly, from one day to the other, it will be easier, and things will be back to normal in, say six or twelve months.
Alan S.Blue
And thus all the aluminum we see is “stored energy.” (And, actually, -lots- of stored energy.
Good point!, see:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
VicV says:
June 3, 2010 at 7:25 am
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.
_________________________________________________________________________
The US government has made it very clear they are not interested in sustaining the lives of humans. On the contrary they want to promote the death or sterilization of a whole bunch of us.
1974 Kissinger population growth memo
Forced Sterilization for Population Control, 2008
“There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.”
John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet in a book he co-authored.
USDA helps finance Spermicidal Corn research
Do not forget Eric Pianka’s Speech
60,000 Americans coercively sterilized , and between 1963 and 1965 more than 400,000 Colombian women were sterilized in a program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation…
I double checked this a year ago against some UN population studies and found, in Africa, a unexpected “decrease” in fertility reported by a puzzled researcher.
I wonder if government health care will eventually require implanted RFID tags and DNA testing followed by mandatory sterilization of those with “defective” DNA? Some hospitals are already DNA testing newborns
“Enneagram says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:30 am
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:54 am
Interesting figures. Many people around the world think at least computers are manufactured in the US but they are not. A few days ago we knew through the news that there was a chinese factory where there have recently been up to ten workers suicides; owners from Taiwan said that the problem was being fixed by installing screens on workers room windows to avoid workers jumping outside. It happends that these workers earn an avg. of US$300 per month and have one day a week rest and live next to the factory. There is where IPADS come from. Doesn’t it remember “A Brave New World” gammas’ life?”
Basically the Victorian Era Work Ethic, it has never changed, it has just been exported (Economies with minimu wage export jobs. UK, Ireland, US, Australia etc etc etc). In Victorian times, in the UK, Manchester, it was textiles. That “industry” was exported in search of expanding the profit base (Or in other words, exploiting a cheaper labour base) . Now it’s gadget consumables, iPod and all the other crud gadgets we’re expected to buy, and then buy the version 2 of the same thing. It permiates across all industries, even food. Where does your food come from?