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.”
###
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.
And here in Australia it is the coldest start to winter for 40 years.
The early chill is due to greenhouse gases, which are now known to trap both heat and frost:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-15/severe-frosts-will-become-more-common-due-to-greenhouse-gases/5812290
“Heads I Win, Tails you Lose!” – Welcome to the world of climate “science.”
Oh good lord! What a load of tripe from the ABC!
That can’t be correct.
I continue to read in the Sydney Morning Hamas and view on the A(LP)BC that this year (2015) is already the hottest year EVVVAAAAHHHHHH. And the year is not yet half over!
I have run across two statements in articles, either here or some other climate blog, that the sum of all energy currently used by all humans in one year is equal to that received by the planet from the sun in a few hours of any day. One post attempted to document this with calculations of solar radiation compared with estimates of energy usage, the other was simply a blank declaration.
If this is anywhere near correct, the yearly energy usage/production of any power plant one decides to select is such a tiny percentage of incoming solar energy that it seems likely to be too far down in the error noise for its heat production to ever make it into any total atmospheric temperature calculations.
Also, isn’t it likely that the major contributor to UHI is the absorbed solar of all the asphalt, concrete, and such materials in the urban environment rather than the human activity therein?
I too have seen something similar.
Just consider the surface area of the planet in metres, and the K&T average for solar at TOA and on the ground. There is more than a fair few watts!
I did the actual arithmetic above, enjoy. A tiny percentage that is less than 0.03% and on the same order as geothermal energy, also negligible.
I did a back of the envelope computation once that suggested that if we turned all of our roadways into solar cells, we could easily, easily produce all of our energy needs — if we could store it. Just think about it — outside of your house, your half of the section of road in front of your own yard is probably much larger than your roof, maybe 20-30 meters long, at least 2 meters wide to the halfway point if not three. Call it 50 square meters. That’s easily 5 to 10 kW of capacity right there, all being released as heat as sunlight falls on the blacktop and is mostly absorbed. This doesn’t count the miles and miles of expressway and country roadway and so on. A Wal-Mart parking lot is maybe 30,000+ square meters and would generate 30 to 60 megawatts. We could probably manage if we just turned all of the median in federal interstate and limited access highway into solar cells — maybe a million linear kilometers maybe 50 meters wide, 50 billion square meters, maybe 100 TW of generating capacity (on average) — if we could store and deliver it.
So yes, roadways alone are on the same order as what we need, and land use changes like this are likely responsible for the same order of “extra” heating (compared to virgin timber and grassland) produced by civilization. But this is still negligible compared to CO_2 in the atmosphere which is still very small compared to the Sun itself as far as energy budget goes.
UHI is not a negligible contributor to the global anomaly only because there is enormous bias in the locations of thermometers, and UHI heating produces all sorts of local warming. The local warming is not negligible, it is more like 1 to 2 C, and can be even higher for particularly badly sited weather stations. It is uncompensated by any sort of rural cold island — it doesn’t work that way — and it corrupts the thermal record of civilization from the bottom to the top. It isn’t unlikely that the divergence between LTT and surface record is at least partly because LTT measures a much truer average temperature, while the surface record is hopelessly corrupted with an ever growing UHI bias as civilization grows and weather stations are slowly but surely affected. Affected on average. That’s all it takes.
IMO, UHI alone is likely to be 0.2 to 0.3 C of the warming reported by uncorrected HadCRUT4 over the last 165 years. But if you take it away, CO_2 sensitivity drops to around 1 C or even less, right where the radiative theory predicts it to be, ceteris paribus. No feedback greenhouse warming. How sensible is that?
rgb
Imagine if we spent a 1/2 trillion dollars on this. Nah..,better to chase CO2 (pronounced cozy) the magical unicorn of AGW.
If someone could invent non fragile solar cells that did not break when driven on by massive weight bearing vehicles this would be a solution.
But that is not easy, perhaps we just need some young curuios person not old and cynical to invent it.
But for now we can put them on our roofs.
Except in Arizona where you get charged a fee for investing in solar panels.
One of, if not the best place to install solar from a ROI standpoint on the planet.
Shi
It’s hard to imagine a more irrelevant metric than the ratio the radiative heat caused by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere after burning fossil fuels, to the heat directly released when burning those fossil fuels. Do you want to compare sum total of all the heat contemporaneously generated as all our cows fart, to the forcing caused over time by the methane thereby released into the atmosphere? Why? What possible useful information could such a metric convey? What equation would possibly use that value? Would it motivate us to try to capture the heat as they fart so we can generate electricity?
What if we just burned the cows before they could fart? Would we get more usable heat out of the actual burning process while at the same time reducing our carbon footprint, because CO2 is a less potent gas than methane and because not much CO2 is released when burning a cow compared to how much methane a cow farts over a lifetime?
Where were these guys educated?
Livestock for human consumption release an equivalent amount of methane as open pit coal mines.
~ 10% per EPA estimates for each source (A decade old data now)
That is one of the reasons some people are pleading for a vegan lifestyle.
I would rather put a auto igniter and a gas sensor on there tails so I can enjoy a burger if I want to.
Or a Jimmy Kimil horse pants for cows and a weather balloon capture system to heat your home when the cows come home
🙂
I haven’t read other comments, but are they now just discovering UHI?
Isn’t UHI a combination of change of albedo, material with different latent heat retention properties and waste heat as a by product of human life-style?
If a country consumes say 60gWh or energy and generates (because of power loss) say 90gW/h of energy to provide the required power, surely that energy mainly in the form of heat has to go somewhere? So there is nothing remarkable about the proposition in this paper, but of course it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and backradiation.
The more the temperature record is the result of UHI, the less effect greenhouse gases have contributed towards any warming observed in the temperature record.
Jesus. If “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”, I just cannot imagine the COLDING caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere since carboniferous period.
O_o
/sarc.
In fact I can know imagine the extend of this cooling. Obviously in north hemisphere we are cold in winter because “a few month” before, in spring and summer, plants absorbed so much CO2 that the “warming caused by the release of its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere” reversed.
Thanks Mister Caldeira, know i understand seasons much better.
Levels of CO2 in the Carboniferous period were very low from a geological perspective, very similar to today’s levels.
It was also a period where temperatures plummeted.
So, perhaps you mean some other period?
The Carboniferous was cold because Gondwana was over the South Pole. Southern Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia had large glaciers for millions of years at a time over about 60 million years in total. It is called an ice age you know.
Glaciers three times larger than Antarctica today, results in more solar energy being reflected to space and, viola, the Earth is colder.
huuuu… really … must I explain ?
I choose carboniferous because of the massive “anti-burning” (coal formation) of the period. Caldera’s argument use an “accumulated heat” that is more or less (burned energy x elapsed time) x some constant, without regards to CO2 level whether initial or final. I guess I can likewise reckon an “accumulated cold” (or “missing heat,” if you have rather) that is more or less (coal formation energy x elapsed time since carboniferous) x same constant, whatever CO2 level, to point the silliness …
Cannot I ?
“…The scientists and media know what needs to be done
To protect the developing nations.
Solar powered wind turbines should be built by the score,
Bankrupting all future generations….’
Read more from “Climate Compensation – Alice in Wonderland”
http://wp.me/p3KQlH-7G
They make it up as the go along.
Oh, I see that that has already been said. ( Bruce Cobb June 2, 2015 at 1:17 pm )
I believe the level of Stupid in the Warmosphere has reached a tipping point.
‘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.’
So where is this cumulative, runaway, locked-in warming then, chaps? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where, which is rather damaging for their entire theory of man-made catastrophe. No wonder they HATE the bloody pause.
Is this paper a joke? Is the Innovative Climate and Energy Research and the Carnegie Institution for Science who are funding this know what science garbage they are funding. This paper sounds stupid and is stupid.
Tell you what, I am thinking of submitting a proposal to the Carnegie Institution on how the “pause” was due to an increase in people using air-conditioning. If I include “soon” the warming will overcome humanities air-conditioning capacity and polar bears will go back to dying in the north pole, I should get instant funding.
I mistrust any chart that does not reveal the units of heats. A “ratio” looks worse because they can expand the chart. Really, we are discussing fractions of degrees.
The fact that there has been no surface warming for more than 18 years and almost no warming in the tropical regions (Global warming is not global, the warming has occurred in high latitude regions) supports the assertion that the IPCC general circulation models (GCM) are incorrect.
The analyses of a half dozen natural phenomena and satellite analysis of top of the atmosphere radiation changes vs short term temperature changes all support the assertion that the warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is less than 0.4C which indicates the majority of the 0.7C warming in the last 150 years has not due to the anthropogenic CO2.
The IPCC’s general circulation models assumed the increase in atmospheric CO2 causes an increase in water vapor at all levels in the troposphere which amplifies the CO2 forcing.
That is an assumption. There is no theoretical reason why it would be correct. The water vapor elevation profile assumption is not correct which explains why there has been almost no high altitude warming of the troposphere.
In addition to the incorrect water vapor profile with altitude assumption error, the GCMs assume there is a reduction in cumulus nimbus clouds (cloud cover in general) with increased temperature. Particularly in the tropics there is an increase in cumulus nimbus clouds (the cumulus nimbus clouds form earlier in the day when the surface temperature is warmer) which results in increased reflection of short wave radiation back into space. This strong negative feedback mechanism in the tropics resists temperature changes in the tropics which explains why there has been almost no warming in the tropics.
As CO2 is evenly distributed in the atmosphere and the amount of CO2 greenhouse forcing is proportional to amount of long wave radiation that is emitted at the latitude in question before the CO2 increase, the most amount of warming due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 should have occurred in the tropics not in high latitude regions. As noted below there is almost no tropical region warming. The IPCC general circulation models are incorrect and known to be incorrect.
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Crux_Flawed_Science.pdf
What about the excess heating at higher latitudes melting ice and snow and changing surface reflection and thus higher absorbtion?
Methane release is 20x to 80x more damaging in the decade to century timeframe.
Thawing in the north and south latitudes can be an huge positve feedback mechanism.
You did not cover this in your above otherwise good presentation.
Can you elaborate on these issue and there cumalitve effects going forward?
Ron
Not happening. The 24 years of ever-greater Antarctic sea ice area between 1991 and 2015 at latitudes closer to the equator than the Arctic ocean (which is now hovering right at only 7% below normal for the past 3 years) is reflecting 1.68 TIMES as much energy back into space as is being absorbed by the exposed Arctic ocean. The darker land albedo between 60 north and 70 north is largely due to the greater growth all arctic trrees, brush, shrubs, and grasses absorbing more heat energy over longer parts of the year due to increase in growth due to CO2 of 15-17%.
“Adults” get paid for this dribble? How do I tap into that?
Interesting fairy tales of warming by carbon dioxide. How do they get away with it while living in the age of the pause/hiatus of warming? Let me tell these pseudo-scientists what they are missing. What the pause does is to prove conclusively that carbon dioxide does not warm the atmosphere. First, the Keeling curve tells us that atmospheric carbon dioxide is constantly increasing. Second, the Arrhenius greenhouse theory tells us that that this carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and uses its energy to warm the atmosphere. That is called greenhouse warming and is the alleged cause of anthropogenic greenhouse warming, AGW. Third, the existence of the hiatus/pause proves that there is no such warming. Thus, the Arrhenius theory is a scientific theory that has predicted a non-existent greenhouse warming. A theory that makes false predictions is considered to be invalid and belongs in the waste basket of history. That is where the Arrhenius greenhouse theory belongs. And with that,
THE GREENHOUSE THEORY OF GLOBAL WARMING DIES.
Anthropogenic greenhouse warming is simply a fairy tale and billions spent trying to stop it are completely wasted. The pseudo-scientific cabal that made this possible is the worst ever case of false science in the world and those who made it possible must be made to answer for it.
P.S.: You have also been cheated by this cabal from knowing that there was another hiatus in the eighties and nineties. It lasted from 1979 to 1997, 18 years, according to satellite temperature measurements. It is over-written in ground based records by a fake warming called late twentieth century warming. GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT co-operated in bringing this about. They used identical software to mutually adjust their records and the computer, unbeknownst to them, left its footprints in their publicly available temperature curves. See Figures 15 and 24 in “What Warming?”
Arno, I disagree that 18 years of no warming in any way invalidates the Arrhenius theory (which isn’t correct anyway, so it is a straw man — what it really doesn’t invalidate is Modtran and straight-up no-feedback radiative transfer theory). First of all, the climate is highly multivariate. Just as past warming doesn’t come with a label and hence cannot be proven to be greenhouse gas warming by any means we have available, so the lack of present warming doesn’t come with a label and cannot be proven to be due to the greenhouse effect per se being incorrect.
To put it bluntly, as long as natural variation is the same general order of greenhouse warming and unpredictable if not random, we cannot really arrive at any attribution of causes or lack thereof. Greenhouse gas theory at least loosely explains the average warming observed over the last 165 years. I know you’ve seen this figure because I’ve posted it before, but:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Toft-CO2-PDO.jpg
displays a simple one parameter fit of the greenhouse theory against HadCRUT4. The fit is statistically very good and is in good correspondence with a reasonable estimate for the climate sensitivity from radiative theory.
Note well that the “pause” can extremely simply be “explained” in terms of additional phenomena modulating the general greenhouse theory. I’m not suggesting that this is the case — I’m suggesting that neither one of us can rule this out, and this figure in general is not evidence against greenhouse warming caused by CO_2.
What is likely invalidated is indicated above by William Astley — the GCMs. Their computations of warming are in increasing, systematic disagreement with the observed climate. They are almost certainly wrong, which is not surprising because it is unreasonable to think that the methodology used to compute their estimates for climate have the slightest chance of working. William points out a few of many places where they are known at this point to be wrong in detail. He omits still others, some of them quite new, such as the apparent lack of strong cooling from aerosols, so that aerosol cooling is also (critically) over estimated in climate models by a factor of perhaps 3 or 4, which means that (to compensate) they overestimate greenhouse warming by a similar factor.
It is a lot more reasonable to believe that greenhouse warming is responsible for some, but (given objections that I’m sure we share about the probable unreliability of HadCRUT4 and GISS etc) likely not all, of the warming over the last 165 years. At this point we cannot sensibly separate the warming by cause (and may never be able to in a chaotic system) but a climate sensitivity in the range from 0.5 C to as much as 2 C is not really excluded at this point, as long as one allows for decadal natural variability on the scale of 0.1 to 0.4 C. This is obviously not going to be easy to rule out given the fit above and the large and seriously underestimated error bars on past temperatures in all of the major temperature series.
rgb
CO2 reflects Infrared Radiation, it does not absorb it, This is important to understand at a fundamental level if one is actually is attempting to find the truth, not look for things that back up ones beliefs. (This is a problem for both sides of the debate.) .
I have not seen anything that also looks at the delta between IR reflection from above and below the atmosphere, aka heat trapping from downward IR reflection and heat rejection from the suns IR input from entering the atmosphere. Can this explain the 3x to 4x difference in computed downward Ir reflection and #s from real measurements?
Arno,
put comment below RGB’s comment below, please read and respond.
Also RGB and others with knowledge about external and internal atmospheric reflection values.
“They found that the carbon dioxide-caused warming exceeds the amount of heat released by a lump of coal in just 34 days.”
That means I can burn a lump of coal in December and in 34 days enjoy a warmer January. What’s not to like?
I wish it would warm up here(New Brunswick, Canada) we are like 15-20 degrees below normal. Yesterday our high was 46. That’s unheard of for June. It should be in the 70-80 degree range. One reason for the cold-strong wind off the cold ocean. Apparently the old Atlantic Ocean hasn’t warmed up much.
Just being curious. If I were to fill my micowave oven with carbon dioxide would it cook quicker?
The study left out the release of methane on GHI.
Above about 1% methane release the GHI exceeds the heat release of waste heat/end use of electricty that turns into heat. Open pit coal mines release 10% of the methane, 20 to 30% for NG with a industry admitted 1.5%. This is an under estimate by most reputable sources Between 2 and 3% is probably closer.
If this turns out to be true then NG is worse than coal in terms of GHI.Raw NG release is 20x to 80x worse for GHI depending on the time frame used. It takes up to a century for NG to decompose into CO2.
Important to note it is worse by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in the short term and it decase to 1 not zero as it becomes CO2. This takes centuries to decay to zero.
NG methane release needs to drop below 1% for it to have any benefit over coal in GHI.
This is relatively simple math if one has had any exposure to math in science prep in college.
Stopping/reducing methane release is the most practical way to stop short term (less than a century) GHI increases.
It also increases profits for the oil and gas industry in the long term as more produce is not lost in production.
Also no studies have been done to estimate the loss of methane through earths cracks not near the well heads. This easily can dwarf the release from collection site, transportation and pipelines, and incomplete combustion. If equal to production releases just using industry estimates we are above 3% to 4% methane release into the atmosphere. This is a real problem and will not ever be talked about without government funded studies. Dont expect the industry to show their dirty underwear and do the study themselves.
We used to dump gasoline into the streams before we found out it was useful.
And people wonder where cancer came from.