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.
We CONSUME 15 terawatts a year.
Most of that energy is bound to (in)organic materials.
Based on the solar constant the surface of the earth absorbs about 170 W/m2 continously.
We are not ‘adding’ any significant heat in relation to that.
Enneagram says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:03 am
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?
___________________________________________________________________
The whole AGW scam originated with the bankers in the first place. Check out Maurice Strong, David Rockefeller, the World Bank, Greenpeace and WWF. They are all interrelated if you follow the money (and power games)
Anthony – Soot was already suggested in the seventies when there was a brief ice age scare but was not taken seriously. It sounds like a logical geoengineering step but where do we go with it? In either case, it is our descendants who will have to deal with specifics if they decide to do it. Unless, of course, someone invents a longevity pill very soon!
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:58 am
That’s another sophism. There are calculations that show, instead, that the whole population of the earth could live and eat adequately in an area equal to Texas state.
Just look through a window of a plane when flying: Not only population but organic life on earth is quite scarce. BTW I live in a country having about 30 millions inhabitants and with a similar area as the whole Europe. Those “nice” guys lie or they are just simply stupid, like the guy of a “balanced earth”.
John Mason says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:37 am
But, what if we slow the rotation of our planet with all the windmills we are building – hmmmmmmm?
John, I think we’re OK. You see the deforestation of the equatorial rainforests will offset the windmills we’re building at higher latitudes. Kind of like when a figure skater is spinning and they move their arms from straight out at their sides to straight up above their head.
Charlie K
Wasted watts???
Sounds like Anthony mixed NyQuil with scotch to treat his recent illness. ;>)
#
#
James Sexton says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:14 am
“….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 why I have done a lot of research on the Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking and the economy. What I see scare the bejeze out of me.
Back in the eighties Peter Drucker stated in a seminar that one worker supported 10 office personel. Think what that means today. No wonder the USA is close to bankruptcy! Stewart Dougherty, a specialist in inferential analysis, stated, it is now “it will be statistically impossible for the United States to pay its obligations unless it repudiates them in large measure, or the dollar is sacrificed on the altar of searing, society-altering inflation. “ Unfortunately the USA can no longer tell the central bankers where to go as the Icelanders did. Obama just signed on to the “Financial Stability Board” and an International Economic Union that would control all financial institutions around the globe. This includes the U.S. Obama also doubled the money supply and that allows the central bankers to “print” US dollars at will because US banks are already operating free of any reserve constraints.
In other words the central bankers now have tighter control of this and other countries.
Patrick Davis says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:59 am
“….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?”
_______________________________________________________________________
Actually I think of it as a return to feudalism, masters and serfs.
“Where does your food come from?” Seems you find the sticky fingers of the World Bank/IMF in that area too.
“Balancing national budgets can be done by raising taxes, which the IMF frowns upon, or by cutting government spending, which it definitely recommends. As a result, SAPs often result in deep cuts in programmes like education, health and social care, and the removal of subsidies designed to control the price of basics such as food and milk. So SAPs hurt the poor most, because they depend heavily on these services and subsidies.
SAPs encourage countries to focus on the production and export of primary commodities such as cocoa and coffee to earn foreign exchange. But these commodities have notoriously erratic prices subject to the whims of global markets which can depress prices just when countries have invested in these so-called ‘cash crops’.
By devaluing the currency and simultaneously removing price controls, the immediate effect of a SAP is generally to hike prices up three or four times, increasing poverty to such an extent that riots are a frequent result. “ http://www.whirledbank.org/development/sap.html
On a more serious note it is interesting to see the values of energy received from the sun during hot and cold times, and to see that compared to the energy used by us.
Isn’t the effective surface area receiving light for the purpose of calculating watts per square meter simply the area inside the circumference of the earth, not half it’s spherical surface area? A square meter at the limb gets almost no Watts per meter squared relative to a square meter with the sun overhead. The maximum amount of sun the earth can get is the area of it’s silhouette.
Also, did you account for the reflection off of water where the sun is at a low angle where its index of refraction bounces almost all of the light?
Sorry I balled up that last post. I was attempting to blockquote Steve from SC before I did the calculation. Ended up quoting myself and leaving Steve’s comment out.
To recap, the energy added by humans is ~300W per person and results in about 0.0035Wm-2 when dividing by the area of the earth.
Be it the earth’s energy budget or any other budget, all you need is inputs and outputs balanced, or best a little more input than output, if you don’t you’ll face an “ice age” and no one, none, nothing, can stop it. Think this way: Not even God himself could make 2+2 to equal more than 4, it would destroy his creation and himself.
Though some little “devils” think they can. …In medicine those little devils are called cancer cells.
Arno Arrak says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:27 am
Looks like we can’t hold back the ice when it comes.
There is geo engineering that should be studied for the case of a return of the ice age. It will not be simple and very serious studies must be carried out before something is applied. Instead billions of dollars have been wasted in bad studies of the effects of a trace gas.
If we are talking of 30 watts/m^2 differences in solar input, mirrors in space focusing sunlight to earth where it would make a difference to the freezing, could do that , considering that at the top the strength of the sun is 1300watts/m^2 or so. These mirrors would have the advantage of being controllable according to need.
“15.56 terawatts each second”.
Please, change this to 15.56 teraJoules each second.
1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.
“Watt each second” makes no sense.
The fossil fuels we now burn came from photosynthesis millions of years ago, most likely formed when the landmass was near the tropics, and geologically carried away toward the poles. Or, the fossil fuels are from a more ‘tropical’ Earth. In either case, the energy came from the Sun and is stored here. Had plant life not captured it, I am willing to bet that energy from the Sun would most likely have ‘blackbodied’ off the planet. Life has already caused climate change, by tranforming the primordial Earth.
The paradox here is that we have used a relatively warm climate to expand human population and longevity.
If we plunge toward an Ice Age, which seems likely given the cyclic nature of the last million years, then we shall need those fossil fuels to survive at elevated populations.
Our problem then would be “Wasted Watts”. And we do some seriously heavy wasting of precious fossil fuels.
10% of all electricity consumed is to light the Planet at night. Get that # down. Efficiency is key.
A major wastage is the Global Trade, which seeks to transport the production of whole countries to as far away as possible, in the name of bigger profits. Before the economic downturn, the pressure was on bunker fuel and diesel, as there was not enough of the former and it had to be supplemented with the latter.
Land haulage is by convenience, not efficiency, as semi is put in front of rail.
Work is not close enough to where we live, in general.
Manufacturing is not well distributed.
These are behavioral and planning problems, all solvable.
We need to prepare for an eventual Ice Age return, and we are as vulnerable as we could possibly be.
During the Little Ice Age, stripping of the countryside of fuels took place, as people needed extra warmth to survive, and that should be a warning.
The failure of any warming signal outside of UHI effects (as in rural areas) is another warning sign, that even the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels is no match for natural blackbody loss.
Alex says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:00 pm
“Watt each second” makes no sense.
It does, or you would expect this blog to be called WhathappenedwithJoule instead?
Watts are watts!.
interesting.
still, even a trivial increase in convection will overcome any man-made warming irrespective of the source.
All I see these days are constantly moving goal posts. Clearly the argument of AGW has failed.
A lot of people carry around with them a bothering thought in the back of their minds. How can all other monitored solar bodies as the moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn’s moons warm over the last decades without the Earth to also warming in parallel.
If the Martian polar caps melted (or more properly decreased) as we here on Earth experienced the same polar ice decrease phenomena, won’t we not have to wait until the Martian polar caps regain their former ice area before we can say anything about Earth’s polar ice area?
Keep your eyes on Mars’s polar ice caps.
If they rebound, the moon and other monitored solar bodies cool, and Earth does not respond in parallel, then even I would have to admit that then we really have something to talk about in the tenths of a degree.
Also, thank you Ron for an very interesting post, it helps to keep one’s mind in motion!
(accidentally posted to the wrong thread, so, repeating here where it should be)
“”” 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). “””
Average power would simply be in Watts. I’m sure I’m the hundredth who said that.
But hang on a minute there; not so fast to condemn us Humans who use energy.
So how much of OUR energy use is renewables. Hydroelectric, wood peat, cow dung you name it. All that energy came from the sun; and as it rattles down the food chain (not the cow dung) it slowly converts all that crap, into heat; and it does that whether we use any of that energy or not.
So please confine your finger pointing to just the fossil fuels; much of which (the coal) is also energy the sun stored here eons ago. Well yes it didn’t dissipate years ago; so it is available for now use; and adds to your zigaWatt total.
But a big chunk of our energy usage would turn into waste heat even if we didn’t use it.
And so long as we exhaust it at a high enough temperature; then it will radiate away somewhat faster.
Of course that will lower the Carnot efficiency any way; but usually we design our systems ot not do that and we still get high temperature waste; like from our car exhausts for example.
So we ain’t nearly as bad off as you think Mate; we are just using what would have gone up in smoke anyway (cept the fossils).
One point: Most of human activity releases heat into the atmosphere. (Nuclear power plants warm nearby lakes, but they are a tiny part of the total) Air has far less heat capacity, so it will warm up more than land or oceans. It’s still trivial.
I worry more about the deforestation causes by government paperwork. And while it isn’t totally paper, printing money has to consume vast resources. Think of all those poor trees that will never attain ‘hockey stick’ status.
Excellent analysis!
In pure engineering fashion, when the agw hyperbole is replaced with watts per square meter, the alarmists retreat with their tails between their legs.
Tim Clark says:
June 3, 2010 at 7:28 am
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.
You’re not comparing like with like. The 64 w/m2 solar change refers to the difference at noon at midday in mid-summer . See the article where it says
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.
The ~3.7 w/m2 CO2 forcing operates day and night all year round. The solar forcing does not. It doesn’t look as though albedo has been considered either. The annual mean change in solar forcing between the LGM and the holocene will be much less than 64 w/m2.
“”” 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. “””
Not true. The sun puts out at best clear sky sun at zenith; about 1000 Watts per Square metre on a flat surface.
No way you are likely to achieve that with five light bulbs. Even if they are 200 Watt light bulbs, and we assume that what they don’t put out in Lumens, they put out in radiant Watts ; so we have a total radiated power of 1000 Watts, including visible and thermal. Good luck on collecting all of that on a square metere of flat surface.
I doubt that it is doable even if you had five 1 kW lamps.
To even attempt it you would have to design special non-imaging concentrator Optics to arrange 4 pi steradians of energy from five bulbs all on to a single flat surface of 1 m square.
Re: My earlier post
John Finn says:
June 3, 2010 at 3:51 pm
The link below has the mean annual and monthy insolation figures for a selection of European cities. Note the latitude of Oslo is ~60 deg N and it ‘s mean annual insolation is ~95 w/m2. I’ve checked out some figures for Reykjavik (~64 deg N) and the annula insolation there comes out at ~84 w/m2. That’s less than 20% of the noon on mid summer day peak which suggests that the mean difference between now and the Last Ice Age is only about 3 w/m2. Remember that global temperatures were around 5-6 deg lower than to-day. The expected forcing from a doubling of CO2 doesn’t seem quite so harmless after all.
http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/insolation-and-a-solar-panels-true-power-output/