Caldeira It seems in the desperation to erase “the pause” in time for Paris, Ken Caldeira has jumped the shark with this claim. Basically he’s claiming that the heat from fossil fuel combustion is a factor, not just the posited slowing of infrared from Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere by increased CO2 concentration.
This headline “Greenhouse gas-caused warming felt in just months” is in contrast to what Caldeira previously said in this Institute of Physics publication saying:
…we find the median time between an emission and maximum warming is 10.1 years, with a 90% probability range of 6.6–30.7 years.
Now whether its months, years, or decades, they still have to get around the problem of “the pause” and climate sensitivity, which so far appears to be low in observations as seen here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/29/an-observational-estimate-of-climate-sensitivity/
Washington, DC–The heat generated by burning a fossil fuel is surpassed within a few months by the warming caused by the release of its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to new work from Carnegie’s Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The release of CO2 into the atmosphere contributes to the trapping of heat that would otherwise be emitted into outer space.
When a fossil fuel is combusted, heat is released. Some of this is used to make electricity or heat human-built structures, but eventually all of that energy escapes into the environment and warms the planet. But this combustion process also produces carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas that accumulates in the atmosphere for thousands of years and traps heat that would otherwise escape into space, causing global climate change.
In a modeling study of coal, oil, and natural gas, Zhang and Caldeira compared the warming caused by combustion to the warming caused by the carbon dioxide released by a single instance of burning, such as one lump of coal, and by a power plant that is continuously burning fuel.
They found that the carbon dioxide-caused warming exceeds the amount of heat released by a lump of coal in just 34 days. The same phenomenon is observed in 45 days for an isolated incident of oil combustion, and in 59 days for a single instance of burning natural gas.
“Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more,” Caldeira said.
For a power plant that is continuously burning, the warming caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded the heat released into the atmosphere by combustion in less than half a year–just three months for coal plants. With this kind of steady continuous combustion, it takes 95 days using coal, 124 days using oil, and 161 days using natural gas.
Caldeira explained: “If a power plant is burning continuously, within 3 to 5 months, depending on the type of power plant, the CO2 from the power plant is doing more to heat the Earth than the fires in its boiler. As time goes on, the rate of burning in the power plant stays the same, but the CO2 accumulates, so by the end of the year, the greenhouse gases will be heating the Earth much more than the direct emissions from the power plant.”
“It’s important to note that heat emissions from combustion are not negligible, particularly in urban areas,” Zhang added. “But carbon dioxide-caused warming is just that much greater. Our results drive home the urgency of cutting emissions immediately.”
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Funding for this work was provided by the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER) and the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The data that used to calculate thermal emissions with thermal contents of fossil fuels and estimate CO2 emissions are available from IPCC AR5 (https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf). The historical CO2 emissions data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) fossil-fuel CO2 emissions dataset, and can be accessed via http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/CSV-FILES/global.1751_2008.csv.
Surely, this is excellent news!
If we can burn a lump of coal then get free energy for ever what is not to like?
Is this a source of cheap energy that we somehow have managed to overlook?
Cheap? I can beat that. Wind is free, free I tell you.
Right graphic. Some people have always believed in a perpetual motion machine. Now they are translating that wonderful idea into perpetual heat energy from a CO2 molecule. Isn’t cargo cult – science wonderful?
So the warm periods in the past *were* due to man, because man was burning lots of wood fires and heating up the atmosphere. #GreeniesAreStupid
He’s wrong, it cools more at night than it warmed during the prior day, and there’s also no warming preserved through winter.
“he’s claiming that the heat from fossil fuel combustion is a factor, not just the posited slowing of infrared from Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere by increased CO2 concentration.”
Come on guys, it’s simple math.
Jared says “Solution, you must pay carbon credits to be allowed to workout.”
Only if your food is coal and oil. Now, on the other hand, your gas…
Do vitamin supplements count?
Headline: The first true perpetual motion machine has been found as Climate Scientologists, pumping out massive quantities of heat in the form of alarm and panic, in order to insure the 2015 Paris COP doesn’t flop like a dead fish, are actually releasing more heat energy than they’re ingesting. The IMF plans to operate gigantic steam generators in Central Africa, where electricity deserts are most widespread.
Gosh!
Think of all the heat produced by all those 98.6° F carbon-based lifeforms that are running around! And they emit CO2!!!
Eliminate a bunch of them and everything will be fine!
Not to mention the methane produced by the giant beef and bean burrito that one must occasionally consume, simply because they are so tasty.
The climate hype industry is greatly helped by the scientists who already know the results prior to performing experiments, running the models or doing research.
I’ve said this before. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If the observations don’t support you then you’re wrong.
This explains why Smokey Bear never wears a jacket or sweater.
“Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more,”
They make it sound like it’s going to get really hot out there. Time for us all to get some Pyrotect clothing for daily wear.
Ten on the minus hundredth power is ten billion times more than ten on the minus one hundred and tenth power, therefore it must be a huge number.
Months is accurate! Every fall we ramp up combustion of fossil fuells. About five months later the temperature begins to rise, peaking in July/August after the peak of combuston in January/February. A few months late without combustion ou temeratures begin to fall again, and the cycle repeats. Cause/effect can easily be confused with seasons, models can show CO2 link in much greator detail!!
Now if you could just prove that with a model and get published…
This seems quite plausible. Good call.,
This combustion heat is what is heating up the thermometers around the cities and airports and giving us global warming readings. We already knew this and have become worried about it.
Gary. Not so much combustion heat but the influence of asphalt, concrete, steel, etc. absorbing more energy (thus converting it into heat and then radiating IR) than nice trees, shrubs, and grass which transpire and thus are cooler.
That’s fantastic – so all we have to do is burn a bit of coal and its the heat that just keeps on giving
Eye wateringly funny
What about the heat from volcanoes? And lightning-sparked wildfires and forest fires? How does geothermal heat release like geysers factor in? This is only so much “smoke and mirrors” and is another claim that any day now the temperature will “do a double whammy” after hiding in the shadows for a decade or two.
The world’s annual energy use is 0.0101% of annual Solar ToA.
That’s why the guy has to claim that the greenhouse is 100,000 times greater than the regular burning because the power of the sun is inconvenient for the story
Didn’t you know the greenhouse component of CO2 is 10 times more powerful than the sun itself!? What are they teaching kids in climate school these days for you not to know that!?
Is’nt it time that the Wormest claim victory! Eighteen years ago the heating stopped. They did a great job. What are they going to Paris for. To congratulate themselves for saving the planet.
It warms during the day. It cools at night. Each new day the Sun must repeat the work it did the day before. The same as if I turn off my heater in my house when I go out and must turn it back on again and reheat it when I come home again. The heat is not trapped. If it were possible to turn off the sun completely the planet would cool to that of Uranus within days. Talk of residency times for CO2 of months and years is absurd.
Please wwf, talking about the sun turning off is much scarier than the article could have ever been to anybody who’s up on this stuff! We still don’t know why stars become pulsars and it would be a bummer to orbit one. Talk about rapid climate changes….
It’s all theory until someone can actually observe it in action, but current theory is that pulsars are the rapidly rotating cores of super nova. Because of their powerful magnetic fields, energy can only be released along the magnetic axis. So there is a big blast of energy whenever that axis is pointing towards us.
Speaking of large numbers, according to Warmist doctrine some 3.94 billion hiroshimas worth of heat has accumulated in the oceans since 1990. Whew! We sure dodged a bullet there. Just imagine if all that heat had decided not to go into the oceans, and heated the atmosphere instead. It’s sneaky heat, too, because some apparently has decided to hide in the ocean depths these past 18 years.
Must be trying to get away from all the loony warmists.
“…the rate of burning in the power plant stays the same, but the CO2 accumulates,..”
Actually, it does not. The rate of absorption remains the same. In 14 months most of it goes into the biosphere and the oceans. In 60 months it has all gone. And by the way, termites produce more CO2 than humans.
Actually, the rate of burning in a present day coal plant does not stay the same. They are the plants with the ability to change load rapidly in order to match demand on the grid without selling or buying power (at a loss) to/from your neighbors. They’re also the cheapest way to pick up the slack when wind and solar fail. They can be throttled down on a nightly basis and then meet peak demand on a cloudy, windless and sultry “dog day”. No other form of power generation gives the same generating versatility for a lower price than pulverised coal and fluidised bed plants do. Current nuclear technology only allows for steady base load generation, and hydro is similar to nuclear.
Surprisingly, the claims are accurate and correct. Let us deconstruct things and see what happens.
1) They claim that the thermal energy from FF combustion warms the planet.
We all agree that this is true, but the total heat involved is many, many orders of magnitude less than the earth’s daily heat budget. And evey day, that heat gets radiated away as part of the daily heating/cooling cycle.
2) They claim that after a daily accumulation effect of 2 to 3 months, the greenhouse contribution from the CO2 is on par with the thermal effect of the combustion. And this is many, many orders of magnitude less than….. (see above).
This, I think, puts the anthropogenic CO2 effect right about where it belongs.
This brings back memories. I recall, way back in the mid 1970’s, the environmental movement was turning from just radicle to militant. They started making the claim that FF combustion was warming the earth through thermal effects (greenhouse warming would come later). It was very easy to show how disasterously foolish the claim was. The enviros quickly dropped the claim when they realised they were getting laughed out of the room with jeers and hoots of derision, every time.
(I seems we had hit on the one tactic which stops enviros dead in their tracks.)
So it is very interesting that this claim has been brought back from the long ago dead.
Do the climate models also generate these brainless climate theories? This theory sounds like the computer program I read about over 15 years ago where you input several complex words and the computer generated a paragraph in correct English using those words that for all practical purposes seemed completely logical.
Yes, simulating a googol number of monkeys typing away at random, at least one of them would come up with a few sentences of Shakespeare: “To be or not to be that is the climate question…”
I thought I read a study somewhere that the dwell time of CO2 in the atmosphere was less than 30 years for 95% of it and 100 years was an outside limit for total removal. NOT thousands of years.
What are you going to believe, the data, or a million dollar computer model?
So all of the progressives flying to Paris are gonna fry us?
The idiocy just keeps on comin’.
Interesting the article only talks about heat from fossil fuels.
Are they claiming that burning renewable do not also add to heat on earth? Now that’s really smart fuels.
Nice to know that the ethanol in my gas tank does not heat the engine or the surrounding air.