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.
George E. Smith says:
June 3, 2010 at 4:30 pm
“”” 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.
What’s that got to do with Reykjavik?
“”” John Finn says:
June 3, 2010 at 4:48 pm
George E. Smith says:
June 3, 2010 at 4:30 pm
“”” 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.
What’s that got to do with Reykjavik? “””
Well the sun still puts out 1000 W/m^2 on a flat surface perpendicular to the sun. OK so at Reykjavik at say 64 North the solstice sun would be at 26 above the horizon; or at midsummer sun it will be 49.5 above the horizon; so a bit more atmosphere to churn through taking cosine of 40.5 deg gives me 0.76, so air mass about 1.3. Still got to be over 800 Wa/m^2 perpendicular to sun angle.
So you can try to spread say 800 Watts from 5 160 W bulbs over that square metre, or you can lay it on the ground and then try to spread 800 Watts over 1.3 squ metres; your choice. Still can’t do it. Probably can’t do it anywhere because if you can’t do at equatorial noon , you aren’t going to do it with the increased surface area at some high latitude; that is match the sun with 5 light bulbs which was the test. Even at Reykjavik.
If CO2 protects us from an ice age, that’s great. However, here’s something to consider….
According to one theory of how ice ages start (e.g. http://www.iceagenow.com/Ocean_Warming.htm and http://www.amazon.com/Not-Fire-but-Ice-Dinosaurs/dp/0964874687) it begins with ocean heating from underwater volcanoes. This leads to massively excess evaporation, which leads to massively excess precipitation, which in winter is massively excess snow. Once all that snow falls, it doesn’t melt the next summer, because of albedo.
If this theory is correct, a little CO2 more or less in the atmosphere isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference.
BTW, I seem to recall reading that ice-ages did not begin until after North and South America came into contact, and thus blocked a strong, semi-global warm tropical current that may have kept the Antarctic climate relatively temperate as it flowed south around Africa.
Enneagram says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:09 am
“Then, only if the “prophet” goes to the beach and he takes a bath, we´ll be in trouble”
The oceans could conceivably rise 2-3m right there.
Patrick Davis
Save your nastiness for websites that applaud the use of such vitriol.He is not the “mad monk”,his name is Tony Abbott.
If it wasn’t for him we would be implementing an ETS,whatever his reasons,he came down on the side of rational thinking.
Hi Larry,
(1) True, it is the unknown, which is why I concentrated on the relative magnitudes of natural vs anthropogenic factors. If our stuff is a small proportion, we cannot be the major influence.
(2) The infrared surface radiation that is supposed to be the cause of global warming is also at ground level, and the received solar radiation (which was divided by 2 to account for the proportion stopped before reaching the surface, is also at ground level – so all factors are commensurable.
(3) I was discussing extra emitted heat, land use is another question, to which I do not at present know the answer. But a small anecdote: the university where I until recently worked had a 40-year celebration, in which they showed photographs of the same scene (looking towards town from the uni) taken 40 years apart. 40 years ago, the uni was surrounded by farm land, and now it is swallowed by townscape. But the views were surprising. The old one showed a flat brown, burned plain with few trees (most likely taken during a drought, but droughts do happen). The modern one showed nothing but foliage! People had planted shrubs and trees all around their new suburban blocks and made the whole lot much greener than it was before. So I don’t know whether bare land use changes, as opposed to putting machinery etc on that land, is the cause of urban warming.
Hi Steven,
The numbers came from David Archibald’s article referenced above: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/23/ice-ages-and-sea-level.
In the early part of the Pleistocene until 1 million years ago, the ice ages were on a 41,000-year cycle, which corresponds to oscillation in the tilt of the Earth’s axis (the obliquity). Since then, ice ages have been on a 100,000-year cycle, which corresponds to precession of the Earth’s orbit, meaning that the axis of the Earth’s elliptical orbit slowly advances around the Sun. My understanding is that no one really knows why first one, then the other, influence took the dominant role in timing the ice ages.
That does not mean we cannot explain the effect. For example, the orbital precession means that at different times, the northern hemisphere will have its summer when the Earth is closer to the Sun than at others (and vice versa for the south, of course). Likewise, the obliquity will determine relative intensities of summer and winter by the extremity of the tilt. I avoided looking at all the uncertainties in that by merely considering the relative magnitudes of the natural and the anthropogenic factors. Since the latter is two orders of magnitude smaller than the former, it is very unlikely that the latter is making a critical change to the natural development of the ice age cycles.
Human energy usage in 2006 was 491 exajoules
I believe this figure is seriously wrong.
The world mines 5.9*10^12 kilograms of coal each year. If we assume that all that is lignite and all of it is burnt we get pretty close to 490 exajoules. Just from coal. Of course not all is lignite and not all is burnt, but the figure is surprisingly close.
Then we add our oil and gas usage on top. Wood and other renewables.
I reckon the 491 exajoules is a calculation of how much we use at the end point, in our homes and factories.
I would guess we actually warm the earth by an order of magnitude more than that. At which point our efforts stop being insignificant (considering that we are only talking about a small change to an already naturally warming climate).
For example the “output” of a nuclear power station is not even close to a measure of how much it warms the earth. Watts Bar Plant produces 10,050 GW·h a year. But it doesn’t run close to 100% efficient. Even the most modern plant cannot hope for 50% conversion. The rest is “lost” as direct heating of the environment. Then we lose much of the electricity generated in transmission. To heat.
There are 150 nuclear power plants on ships that are currently heating the world but don’t even get entered into calculations of how much energy we use.
I would think the actual heat generated by humans needs to be calculated from scratch. Working out how much coal is burned each year, not how much is burned in a useful way. How much heat nuclear energy creates, not how much useful electricity is generated.
Then add in albedo changes due to cropping etc. And we might find our efforts aren’t so puny after all.
John Finn says:
June 3, 2010 at 4:44 pm
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.
???
From the black body formula and the 10K degree difference seen in the ice core anomalies ( and presumed to reflect world anomalies) the watts/m^2 now is the often quoted 390 ( assuming average temperature 15C). For 5C the radiation is 338.7 watts/m^2.
This is a difference over 50 in watts/m^2, overall average in the year and globe.
If one accepts the 3.7 watts/m^2 of the IPCC this is still less than 10%, and if one takes the effect without computer model feedbacks , much less.
The .12 figure is four times the average over the entire earth (.03) because the 476 figure represents sunlight received at noon – but then the planet rotates and the power drops. You could divide the 476 by four if you like, or you could use 683Wm-2, which is the direct sunlight for a point at which the sun is directly overhead (direct solar power is 1366Wm-2, but only about half gets to the surface). The exactly best comparison would be the subject of detailed debate, but the fact that the figures for solar insolation changes are two orders of magnitude greater than the figure for human energy output, that won’t change.
Excellent analysis! I have wondered if any of them could answer a simple challenge: write a simple computer program that generates the magnitude of positive feedback they allege and which doesn’t cause a runaway if you replay it with events like the nearby explosion of a supernova, the cretaceous asteroid, the Deccan traps eruptions, etc. I don’t believe they could do it, yet the real earth must have avoided runaway because all those things have happened and yet here we are.
The figure came from: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf16.html
It may be you are right that this is a post-wastage figure. If so, doubling it should fix the problem. OTOH, I have been generous to the opposing case in all the rest of the assumptions. For example, if indeed it is the figure at 65N that matters, then almost none of the human energy budget gets emitted at anywhere near that latitude – divide by ten or a hundred. If a whole of earth calculation is done instead, then we have to bump up the solar figure also. But the two figures are in such different ballparks that it doesn’t change the outcome.
Another perspective: 0.03 W/m2 human energy consumption compares with the 1 W/m2 at top-of-atmosphere measured for the solar cycle. When factored for Earth’s area and albedo, that’s about a third of a W/m2 at the surface, or ten times the human energy consumption.
AGW types estimate that the global temperature variation due to this solar-cycle change amounts to only about 0.1 deg C over the 11+/- year cycle. If you run a statistical analysis of temperature vs. CO2, AMO, ENSO, sunspots and other factors, that analysis roughly agrees with this 0.1 C contribution by sunspots. So we can approximate the human energy consumption contribution as 1/10th of this or 0.01 deg C, once and done.
House raises Milankovitch forcings. He says (and I will agree) insolation at 65N latitude was
463W/m2 at -22kyr; 527 W/m2 at -11kyr; 476 W/m2 today.
So M forcing is almost as low as it was before the ice age started to end. Why then are we not in an extremely cool spell right now? Why has the globe NOT cooled significantly in the last 10,000 years, and has in fact been warming for the last 30 to 100?
House glosses over this by speculating that it could be the heat from the oceans. I think we can rule this out easily. If the heat from the oceans has been keeping us at near Holocene optimum conditions for the last 10kyr in spite of near-ice-age insolation at 65N, then its thermal inertia should also have kept all that ice from going away as rapidly as it did, should it not? Also, the ocean does not GENERATE heat. Once the M-forcing began to fall, the oceans should have cooled along with it and should have been cooling for the last 10kyr. We see cooling in the records, but only about 1deg C since the peak 8000 years ago. That 8000 year cooling has been nearly wiped out in only the last 150 years.
Instead, one factor that has kept the Earth from cooling at today’s low 65N insulation level is ice cover. There are no great northern continental ice sheets to reflect solar energy back into space.
You will not like to hear this, but another factor is CO2. It had been bouncing between 220 and 180 ppm in the last 40,000 years of the ice age and then shot up into the 260-280ppm range, and stayed there (until we kicked it up to the 380s). The Milankovitch forcing has to go a little extra lower to kick off ice sheets when CO2 is up. (Once the ice begins to grow, invariably CO2 begins to fall, reinforcing the ice growth.)
Nobody is sure exactly how Milankovitch forcings trigger ice ages and their terminations (the 65N insolation is not a perfect fit), but the above two are regarded as contributing factors.
The latest hypothesis (months old) of what triggers the ice age ending is the size of the ice sheets. It takes almost 100,000 years for the ice to grow to its maximum. Prior to the peak ice, most swings in insolation are simply reflected off the ice and don’t trigger a big melt. However, once the ice pushes far south enough and to a high enough altitude, it then becomes sensitive to the Milankovitch swings. A Milankovitch forcing that wasn’t enough to matter when the ice only extended to 50 deg N matters when the ice has finally reached 40 deg N. The insolation at 40N begins to increase sharply, causing ice there to melt rapidly, dumping vast amounts of fresh water into the ocean, which alters ocean circulation, causing accumulated CO2 to be pumped out of the deep ocean, leading to the runaway feedback loop of ice retreat, albedo decrease, CO2 increase, temperature/humidity increase, and GH warming, kicking the world from “ice house” mode to “green house” mode. It is the increased size of the ice sheet that creates the “trigger point”. As the ice sheet grows, the insolation required to trigger a big melt decreases until the trigger finally gets switched. (It was probably in Science sometime in the last 3 months.)
It is also worth noting that the Milankovitch forcing is currently bottoming out and very close to a minimum. For the next 50,000 years, it will be higher than it is today, helping to keep the next ice age away, along with a 50,000 year-long low value for orbital eccentricity. We are very fortunate that we have developed our technological achievements at this time in planetary history. We still have 50,000 years to figure out how to end the ice age cycle to keep us nice and toasty.
Spector says:
June 3, 2010 at 9:37 pm
So, after the joining of N & S America, all that may be needed is for the Antarctic Sea Ice to connect with S America, cutting the flow off from Pacific to Atlantic. Lost in current thinking of 10,000 years overdue for Ice Age is the Younger Dryas, which halted and reversed the warming out of the last Ice Age. Not knowing what caused the Younger Dryas, a gigantic hole in the theoretical process is stuffed with an Epicycle called AGW. The net effect of AGW, being a humongously dogma-centric theory, is to put the thinking process into deep freeze.
Time to wake the sleepyheads up.
Ref – 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? It’s too late now! You are nobody to spoil big daddy’s business!”
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People “think” they are weak, therefore they are! Not even lemmings are as dumb as people, the myth of lemmings racing over cliffs into the crashing, boiling sea to their doom makes for a great cartoon, but says more about us than of our lowly little relatives. Please don’t amplify the lie of Big Daddy. We The People made this mess and no one else is responsible and no one else can make it right.
Jbar says:
June 4, 2010 at 4:21 am
House raises Milankovitch forcings. He says (and I will agree) insolation at 65N latitude was
463W/m2 at -22kyr; 527 W/m2 at -11kyr; 476 W/m2 today.
From your numbres we are closer to to 463 than to going to 527
Being an optimist is an evolutionary advantage, up to a point.
Isn’t the following contradictory?
It is also worth noting that the Milankovitch forcing is currently bottoming out and very close to a minimum. For the next 50,000 years, it will be higher than it is today
How do you think we will avoid the dip which we have neared and coast to the next ice age? The ice core records say that we are on borrowed time, and the drop in temperatures from the beginning of the holocene agrees also.
Some years back I made some calculations to get an indication of whether anthropogenic energy may be heating the planet and causing global warming. My thermodynamics made me arrive to the conclusion that the temperature rise due to energy used by us humans, be it oil, coal, gas or nuclear is INSIGNIFICANT. And I did not include any losses due to radiation to space.
My workings were based on the weight of the atmosphere, specific heat value of air, global energy budget, and utilising thermodynamic’s law that all energy will eventually result in a temperature rise.
Furthermore, I assumed that none of this temperature rise would migrate to the oceans but would remain locked in the atmosphere. Since the oceans have a mass thousands of times of the atmosphere, the fact that the oceans would eventually absorb some of this energy, would turn this insignificant temperature rise into a nothingness.
I feel sorry for the warmer who would like to see the planet burning up, but it won’t. Is he an arsonist?
To expand, what I had done, through googling I got the following data:
Total oil extracted per annum and assume that it is all burnt up in one way or another
Same for coal
Same for gas
Calorific values of these three Hydrocarbon fuels
Total MWH genrated by means of nuclear energy
Got the total mass of the atmosphere, specific heat value
Churned up all the data in the following way:
Sum of all energy from coal, oil, gas and nuclear in one whole year = Mass of atmosphere x specific heat of air x Temp rise during one year.
Assume that no energy loss due to this is lost to space or oceans and you get the temp rise for one whole year. IT GETS TO A VERY LOW VALUE OF A FRACTION OF A DEGREE.
When I got to this I just stopped from further iterations because it was just not worth the time.
But if one consideres that energy is continuously lost to space ON A DAILY BASIS, and I lumped ALL THE ENERGY INTO ONE WHOLE YEAR, this insignificant rise in temp turns into an irrelevance.
I would be glad if someone checks me out, maybe I m wrong after all.
One wee little problem with your calculation Mr. House, the bulk of human activity is below 64 N concentrated over land, i.e. 30% of earth’s surface at most. The concentrated waste heat energy merely adds to the peak in isolated geographic areas of dense population (cities) and thus is dissipated harmlessly in an increased rate of heat transfer as hot air rises and expands in the upper atmosphere. Other than that your thinking is sound, the ice ages start at the polar regions where cold fronts originate and moved by the jet stream.
Here’s a thought for everyone to consider, ice ages are a cyclical event “averaging” 80k years. When you look at the timing as we know it of ice age on set and decline, EVERY ice age begins without fail when the obliquity (41k year cycle) of the earth progresses BELOW 23.5 degrees towards the low point of 22.1 degrees. Most but not all ice ages end when earth’s obliquity approaches 24 degrees, but not always, sometimes the ice and snow doesn’t melt enough to sustain the warming trend. We are now below 23.5 degrees. I challenge everyone to look at the obliquity charts and examine for yourselves the timing of the cycle to ice age onset. At this point even if the sun didn’t go into a slumber period as it seems is happening now, the decline in obliquity still would cause an ice age. The last 400k years conclusively proves this. http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/03_1.shtml
I repeat what I said before, I may have missed a comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/03/a-question-of-watts-are-we-heating-the-earth-too-much-with-heat/#comment-402597
It is remarkable how similar this discussion here is to the climatic change discussion in the 1970s.
Back then there seemed to be general agreement that the human effect on climate was through aerosol pollution, which probably had a net cooling effect, and then warming by the generation of heat itself, and of CO2 when generating this heat by burning dug-up carbon. There seemed to be general agreement (Lamb in UK, Mitchell in USA and Budyko in Russia) that the effects were currently insignificant, and anyway they cancelled each other out.
But there was concern for the future. We should not forget the original hockey sticks of this time. Population, urbanisation, energy production, nuclear weapons…this was the real basis for environmental alarmism that Borg Lomborg has shown has since been replaced by fantasy.
In the early 1970s the Russian climatologist, Budyko, noted that pollution controls were starting to reduce aerosol production. If pollution reduction continued, and the energy production hockey stick continued, then in the short term, warming might become a problem (in the long term it would work to oppose the decline to the next ice age). For him, the direct heating effect is as significant as C02, and he was concerned that it might be more so, if we continue to drive up the hockey stick of energy production, not on fossil fuels, which would be impossible, but by expanding (think: it would be explosive expansion) of nuclear power.
From the beginning of interest in recent and prospective global climate change (from the 1920s and 30s) the direct heating effect of human civilisation was alway a consideration — if only in the problem of avoiding distortion by urban and industrial heat production.
While Budyko was early with concern (even alarm) for warming, his concern seems reasonable enough to me, and it was moderated by the likes of Hubert Lamb (the founder of CRU) pointing to the feedback mechanisms (such as clouds) that could moderate the slight increases in global temp we were indeed directly affecting.
We seem to find ourselves isolated from this discussion because during the 1980s alarmist grab the media’s attention with their fearful senarios, and a new and immensely expanded funding cycle was driven by this fear. In the rush that followed, the moderated debate between Lamb and Budyko and others was trampled and almost forgotten.
bubbagyro says:
June 3, 2010 at 7:42 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.
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bubbagyro, do you have the reference for that?
Yes. IF the solar cycle changes in mere insolation (as opposed to more subtle effects like exposure to cosmic rays etc.) is causing things like the Little Ice Age, then it is unlikely, but just barely possible, that human heat might have an effect on that level. But since the AGWers and most of us agree that this level of mere heating does not make the difference, then human heat certainly doesn’t.
You may be correct, but I didn’t gloss over it, because speculation on that point is not crucial to my argument. What exactly it is that holds off or promotes an ice age doesn’t change the insignificance of the human heat contribution.
Now we might have ‘bought’ that a year ago, but no reasonable person is going to believe the temperature datasets are anything but fantasy today. Just as with Darwin on WUWT a little while ago, one can pick any station one pleases and look at the raw data, and if one avoids growing urban areas and airports, one finds the same thing: flat overall or nearly so, with short-term ups and downs. I did it with my local station (treating where I live as a place picked at random) and got the same result.
As for the latest theory you mention, I remain unconvinced. CO2, for all sorts of reasons, doesn’t have a significant greenhouse effect, not the least being that the air is opaque at a range of ten feet to a photon in the CO2 absorption band, and we know from the simplest of observations that convective cells are far, far bigger than that, making convection the dominant heat transport mechanism. That doesn’t mean that ice sheet size isn’t involved as a trigger, of course, merely that I don’t buy that CO2 has anything at all to do with it.
That’s not a problem, that is a big factor that reinforces my argument, but which I didn’t include so as to be ultra-conservative in my conclusion. If I tell you you are in no danger of death from being hit by a pillow, then it is no objection to my conclusion to point out that you are being hit by a feather, not a whole pillow.
Yes, I haven’t gone through that site in depth but it looks very interesting. Such data is problematic when we don’t really know what the specific mechanism of the trigger is, only the grab bag of factors involved. A repeated happening is suggestive, but we still don’t know what is coincidence and what is causative.