Guest essay by Eric Worrall
How often have you heard claims that a warmer [climate] will be more energetic – that we shall all experience more violent storms, more rainfall, more storm damage, because the atmosphere is “absorbing more energy”?
Such claims are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of energy.
Consider an electric flashlight battery. An electric battery contains energy, but that energy doesn’t do anything – the battery can sit on a shelf for months, ready to be plugged into your flashlight. But plug the battery into your flashlight, and leave it on, within hours the battery will be dead – all its available electrical energy has been used up.
Similarly, a battery plugged into a motor also uses up its stored energy.
Plugging the battery into your flashlight or a motor, and switching it on, puts that energy to work. The battery eventually dies after it has converted all of its stored chemical energy into electrical power.
How does this example of a battery powered motor relate to climate change?
In physics terms, the Earth’s climate is also an engine. Instead of a battery, the climate is powered by solar energy – sunlight falls on the daylight side of the Earth, is converted to heat, and is then radiated away into space. The means by which that energy is transported from warmer regions to cooler regions before being radiated into space is the sum of all of the world’s climate phenomena – wind, rain, ocean currents are all part of the global climate engine which is powered by our sun.
How does global warming or global cooling affect this climate engine?
The point to remember is energy from sunlight is delivered at a constant rate to the Earth’s surface, because solar output is more or less steady, and the size of the Earth doesn’t change. The power of the climate system, the rate at which work can be performed by the climate system, is constant.
Global warming – accumulation of energy in the form of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere – does not affect the amount of energy which is available to power the Earth’s climate. If the accumulated energy were to affect the climate, by contributing to more violent weather, it would be expended, just like the stored chemical energy in a battery is expended when it is connected up to a flashlight or a motor.
The way that energy is used by the Earth’s climate might change if the world warms. For example, Milankovitch cycles – the slow changes to distribution of sunlight caused by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit – likely have a profound effect on global climate, triggering the growth and recession of ice ages. But the orbital wobbles described by Milankovitch cycles don’t affect how much sunlight in total strikes the world, they only affect the proportion of the total sunlight budget which is received by the Northern and Southern hemisphere during different seasons.
The implications of a total Earth climate energy budget are profound. A warmer world might experience more rainfall. But there has to be a tradeoff. Evaporating water to produce rainclouds requires an enormous amount of energy. If energy is diverted from the global climate budget into producing more rain, less energy is available to power wind and ocean currents.
There is freedom of movement for small changes. A lot of sunlight which strikes the Earth is bounced straight back into space, with minimal impact on the climate. If the albedo, the reflectiveness of the Earth were to drop substantially, more sunlight might be absorbed, which might make more energy available for wind, rain and ocean currents. But there is no guarantee a warmer world would have a significantly lower albedo. Some albedo might be lost if polar ice melts, but polar ice doesn’t receive that much sunlight, compared to the amount of sunlight received by tropical regions. Any drop in albedo due to melting polar ice would likely be more than compensated by increased tropical cloud cover.
Awareness has grown over the last few years in the climate community of this thermodynamic limitation. A lot of climate scientists have started qualifying scary predictions of wilder weather, by saying storms will become more violent, but they will occur less frequently. But as I noted at the start of this post, far too often the qualification is lost. Many people believe weather will simply grow more violent without constraints if the world warms, because they don’t understand the hard limits imposed by the Earth’s total climate energy budget.
Warmer climatic conditions which are more prone to thunderstorm formation might result in more frequent but weaker storms, with less damaging winds. But a boring prediction like that wouldn’t fit the climate science narrative that global warming will make everything worse.
The following scientific paper explores limits to the Earth’s climate energy budget in more detail;
Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate
Incoming and outgoing solar radiation couple with heat exchange at Earth’s surface to drive weather patterns that redistribute heat and moisture around the globe, creating an atmospheric heat engine. Here, we investigate the engine’s work output using thermodynamic diagrams computed from reanalyzed observations and from a climate model simulation with anthropogenic forcing. We show that the work output is always less than that of an equivalent Carnot cycle and that it is constrained by the power necessary to maintain the hydrological cycle. In the climate simulation, the hydrological cycle increases more rapidly than the equivalent Carnot cycle. We conclude that the intensification of the hydrological cycle in warmer climates might limit the heat engine’s ability to generate work.
Read more (requires registration): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/540.full
Update (EW): Willis points out that the statement “… energy from sunlight is delivered at a constant rate to the Earth’s surface, because solar output is more or less steady …” is wrong and misleading. Clouds reflect sunlight back into space before it reaches the surface. Since clouds are a function of temperature, and warmer temperatures create more clouds, warmer temperatures reduce the amount of energy entering the climate system.
Related, and a good read with citations. AR5 being one of them.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/01/09/smackdown-ams-paper-exposes-media-scientists-as-falsely-hyping-human-attribution-in-extreme-weather-events/#sthash.UePr1Nnj.dpbs
Once “climate scientists” evolve closer to Einstein’s theory of relativity (E=mc2) than flogiston, it will be entertaining to hear how the mankind influences either the atmospheric mass or the speed of light.
Just my gut feeling but increased global temperatures seems to mean less ice in the arctic and pretty much the same temps everywhere else. Which adds up to a much smaller energy gradient in the northern hemisphere, so less severe storms, fewer hurricans. It’s all good.
A quick “back of the envelope” calculation of the Carnot efficiency of the earth’s climate is something like 20%. IPCC projected global warming will reduce this to something like 18%. This means the amount of work the atmosphere can do is reducing over time, meaning that on average weather will become less extreme, rather than more extreme.
Weather systems are driven by differences in pressure, temperature and moisture, which is another way of saying differences in energy. It’s analogous to the power generated by water falling through a dam’s penstock to produce electricity. If the water above the dam is the same as the water level below it, there is no potential energy. The higher the water level behind the dam, the greater the potential energy.
If the temperature and humidity of the planet were uniform–even uniformly hot and moist–there would be no storms. Hurricanes and tornadoes don’t form simply because there is a lot of heat and moisture; they form when there is a rapid and significant change in temperature that causes moisture to precipitate and release energy. The greater the temperature, moisture, and pressure difference, the more powerful the storm.
For example, the violent tornado systems that develop over the southeastern U.S. are the result of collisions between the (relatively) cooler, drier weather systems crossing the U.S. and warmer, wetter systems flowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes and typhoons form not just because the surface of tropical oceans warm, but because cooler, drier air flows over them to increase evaporation and release energy.
A thunderstorm is an incredible natural engine powered by differences in moisture, temperature and pressure. When water vapor in the air evaporates to form a cloud it releases huge amounts of energy. When there is enough thermal energy from temperature differences to lift the moist air in the cloud to higher altitudes where it cools even more and goes through another phase change to become ice, even more energy is released. Those are the anvil clouds that mark the tops of the tallest, most powerful storms with massive hailstones, powerful winds, and sometimes tornadoes.
The widespread notion among climate scientists that global warming by itself would increase the power of storms and the resulting damage demonstrates a remarkable ignorance of fundamental meteorology. If they can’t get meteorology right, they shouldn’t expect us to take their pronouncements about global warming seriously.
stinkerp,
“When water vapor in the air evaporates to form a cloud it releases huge amounts of energy. ”
Dontcha’ just hate it when you make a solid post but then let out a brain fart?
There’s a couple of meteorological aspects missing both from the article and from (most of) the replies here.
First it is not just a matter of DeltaT between Equ and Pole.
It is also about DeltaT between surface and the tropopause.
And specifically about the role of LH release in that.
A warming world will contain more WV – which due the hydrological cycle is greatest in the lower trop and specifically the surface layers.
A thermal on uplift will cool at the DALR until reaching the Norman’s point (condensation level).
At that point it ascends (given conditional instability) at the SALR.
It cools more slowly and theefore has greater uplift as the environmental LR will be greater (given convection in clear air).
See this SkewT…
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jh8TMs97luA/T_DE7QqAhxI/AAAAAAAAEpc/0-WzoHeRoho/s640/CAPE-Skew-T.JPG
The large (shaded red) CAPE (Convectively available potential energy) is what gives the storm it’s uplift power. On the dia area=energy.
AT a high dp that CAPE increases and, as you can see from the dia – it is not linear.
Also note that the CAPE area would increase if the mid/upper trop had cooler air overlying (this actually does and may well have given rise to tornadic activity).
IOW: it is the abuttal of cold/dry overlying warm/moist that creates greatest CAPE.
And hence increased “storminess”.
The other thing is that storm intensity can come with persistence.
A reduced Equ to Pole DeltaT also reduces the PJS and so baroclinic systems can become stalled in cut-offs of the jet and get “stuck” in one place more easily (flooding) and HP similarly (building heat/drought).
Any persistence or increased storm activity has to be accommodated by the Earth’s climate energy budget. My point is this energy budget isn’t going to increase, so increased storm intensity has to be compensated by reduced power elsewhere in the climate system.
It might be a little late but don’t the models assume relative humidity remains constant and the wet lapse rate remains the same?
No.
Calculations with GCMs suggest that water vapour remains at an approximately constant fraction of its saturated value (close to unchanged relative humidity (RH)) under global-scale warming (see Section 8.6.3.1).
AR4
“The point to remember is energy from sunlight is delivered at a constant rate to the Earth’s surface,”
Not quite if you concider a specific place on Earth. There is a daily variation that also produces some weather events.
Averages all over, and you miss the important variations that make up the weather and in the end the climate.
Eric,
You said, “… Milankovitch cycles – the slow changes to distribution of sunlight caused by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit – likely have a profound effect on global climate, triggering the growth and recession of ice ages. But the orbital wobbles described by Milankovitch cycles don’t affect how much sunlight in total strikes the world, they only affect the proportion of the total sunlight budget which is received by the Northern and Southern hemisphere during different seasons.”
That isn’t quite true. The changes in the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit does affect how much EM energy is received by the Earth during its transit around the sun because of the inverse-square law. Depending on what portion of the Earth is facing the sun during the perihelion and aphelion, and the average reflectivity of those portions, the amount reaching the surface will be different. To wit, that article you linked to says, “Changes near the north polar area, about 65 degrees North, are considered important due to the great amount of land. Land masses respond to temperature change more quickly than oceans,…” This could help explain why the Arctic seems to be warming more rapidly than mid-latitides. The article also says, “When the orbit is at its most eccentric, the amount of solar radiation at perihelion will be about 23% more than at aphelion.” Currently, the difference is less than 7%.
Hi Clyde, thats a good point that as the Earth’s orbit becomes more elliptical, it will spend less time at perihelion. Will the perihelion of the Earth’s more elliptical phase be closer to the sun? Will that compensate for less energy received at aphelion? I don’t know the answer to that one…
All that energy to evaporate water. You were thinking that energy gets expended somewhere. My view is that it gets released. C/AGW view is that heat gets retained. Long and lengthy discussion about the laws a thermodynamics
If the heat is released, there is no run a way warming. It’s a water world. The water acts like of all things like a coolant.
And if it’s retained, we are all in deep do do, which is why the climate people are screaming.
To add urgency to their pleas to have the world governed by the little captain in N Korea, because only a system like that can save us from ourselves, they trotted out the earth’s energy budget, how much is incoming, absorbed, and the most important number, outgoing.
There really wouldn’t be any polar vortex to worry about due to 2 things; ever increasing amounts of co2, and the amount of time that has elapsed since those dire and stern warnings were issued. They seem to think that some warming beyond the time frames is still related to what I consider a dead theory.
If they are going to have upon the white horse and proclaim it’s in the name of science the predictions should match the math that says this much warming will occur within this time frame. Even adjusting the numbers upwards haven’t helped them much. All they are able to claim, weakly at that, is the warmest year ever.
I said it 15 years ago and I’ll say it again, the heat gets released not retained. After 15 years, who’s right ? No other science would allow, cold fusion for example, this kind of nonsense to continue. Not privately, publicly, or in any institutions. It’d be shouted down in mass. And it will be.
Really this argument about whether the heat is released or retained is the grain of salt that balances the salt shaker.
Absolutely, I support Willis’ emergent phenomena theory – it takes a huge push to warm the world. But it is interesting to explore the constraints on a warmer world.
No, that would not be true. Any form of energy input will drive the climate system. The sun is one such energy source. Deep sea volcanism and heat flow from the core of the earth is the other.
“Since clouds are a function of temperature, and warmer temperatures create more clouds, . . . ”
Simplistic nonsense.
The hottest places on Earth have the least cloud – arid tropical deserts. Maybe the writer meant to say something else.
Cheers.
I caught that, too. Seems elementary.
Mike. They also get quite cold at night. “More people freeze to death in the desert than die of heat” is the conventional wisdom. Because there’s no GHG (water vapour!!!!!) to keep the heat in.
This thread reminds me why I dropped physics in second year. Some of the commenters may not have got that far.
70% of the world’s surface is covered with water.
Eric wrote;
“Awareness has grown over the last few years in the climate community of this thermodynamic limitation.”
Well, enough folks have been hammering the simplistic “traps heat” nonsense that maybe it’s starting to sink in. Heat cannot be trapped, any valid analysis needs to consider the thermal capacity of the elements involved and the velocity of heat flows to predict the final outcome.
Radiation on the other hand can be “trapped”, a simple Faraday cage (if you own a microwave oven you own a Faraday cage) can indeed trap radiation. There is no evidence that the gaseous atmosphere of the Earth acts in anyway like a Faraday cage when it comes to radiation. For one thing there are vast areas of the spectrum where the atmosphere is effectively totally transparent. And the thought that 400 ppmv of the atmosphere is able to “block” all the exiting IR is silly.
Another point often misunderstood, radiation from a colder object will arrive at and be absorbed by a hotter object. Even if the object is a pure crystalline element, IR will be absorbed and warm a semiconductor even though it may not be energetic enough to raise electrons to a higher energy state. Surely a PV cell with a hot water bottle next to it will get warmer even though the IR from the bottle is not energetic enough to cause photo-voltaic effects to occur and generate current. This could “act as a blanket” and make the warmer object warmer still, but it does not for passive thermal reservoir, it merely changes the response time.
For instance, the interior walls of an optical integrating sphere (at about room temperature) do indeed “back radiate” energy to a incandescent filament within (at say 3100K) and “warm it”. This is known as “self absorption”. A well known effect, not subject to debate. This “self absorption” (aka warming from the “greenhouse effect”) does indeed change the efficacy of the filament, this IN CONJUNCTION WITH an external power supply will make the light bulb brighter/warmer.
The big difference is that an incandescent filament is a SOURCE of thermal energy, i.e. it emits visible and IR radiation without cooling down because it is connected to a power supply. A rock (like the Earth) is merely a RESERVOIR of thermal energy, i.e. It loses all of the thermal energy emitted as quickly as it leaves as IR radiation. This happens even if the rock is “warming up”.
Another misconception, the energy free void of “space” does not have a temperature. Temperature is a characteristic of matter. A point in space where no matter is present does not have a temperature.
If the volume of space just outside the Apollo crew capsule was at 4K the thin (about 1/8″) thick aluminum wall of the capsule would have fractured from crystalline metal failure and the internal pressure would have blown Neil Armstrong (RIP) and Buzz Aldrin (Safely back from a recent misadventure in Antarctica, luckily) out into space. Yes the exterior wall of the capsule facing the energy free void of space cooled and the wall facing the Sun warmed. This is why the capsule rotated while traveling to the Moon. There is a large vacuum chamber at the Johnson Space Center (Houston, Texas, USA) that was purpose built to test this.
The crew capsule was on a large turntable (no you can’t play your old 79 rpm vinyl on it) and rotated around in the chamber. One wall of the chamber was filled with incandescent light bulbs, the other side had a chilled “shroud” filled with helium to simulate the energy free void of space. Apparently it worked because they made it to the Moon and the chamber still exists (it is a national historic engineer landmark). This same chamber is being used to test the new James Webb Space Telescope (a follow on for the Hubble)
The often quoted 3.5K or 4K number is the “color temperature”, “radiation temperature” or “Black Body temperature” of an emitting body with the same spectral shape as the background radiation measured from outside the Earths atmosphere. The actual energy received varies depending on where one looks into the universe.
Cheers, KevinK
Hi Eric,
I do find it very ironic that you seems perfectly happy to quote approvingly from a paper which is based
on analysing data from “a climate model simulation with anthropogenic forcing” (from the article “The time period 1981 to 2098 is simulated using a combination of historical radiative forcing estimates and the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (24) future scenario”).
Thus I would like to know, when do you decide when to believe the output of global climate models predicting the climate 100 years into the future and when do you decide to dis-believe them? And on what grounds do you make this decision?
It is interesting to explore the ideas of people you disagree with to point out their internal inconsistencies.
That would be this paper then “The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism”.
Interesting you describe pointing out that climate change will not alter the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, and sunlight powers the climate system is “Alice in Wonderland” mechanics.
I said nothing in this post about whether the world will warm, I was simply exploring some constraints on the system.
When (not if) this silly CAGW hypothesis is officially disconfirmed (my guess is within 5~7 years), CAGW advocates will claim their feigned ignorance of cloud cover for why CAGW models were so devoid of reality…
NASA’s Water Vapor Project conclusively showed that there IS NO “runaway positive water vapor feedback loop”, and without this, CO2 forcing equates to an ECS of around 0.7C, which is precisely what all the empirical evidence and physics show is possible. (Less the cooling effect of collapsing solar cycles and a possible Grand Solar Minimum event starting from 2032 and lasting 50~100 years).
Since oceans have 1000 times more heat capacity than air, almost all CO2 forcing is quickly absorbed by the oceans, and ocean temps have only increased 0.09C since the 1950’s… Oh, the humanity!!!
Oceans are a 1.3 billion KM^3 solar battery, which helps keep earth’s temperature in a relatively narrow range of around 17.0C (+- 7C) through the elegant cloud-cover mechanism (from: warmer oceans/more evaporation/more cloud cover/cooling, to: cooler oceans/less evaporation/less cloud cover/warming).
Milankovitch cycles, cause glaciation/interglacial periods (not CO2). Thankfully, we’ve been in Milankovitch warm cycle for the past 12,000 years…
To believe CO2’s teeny tiny forcing effect could increase earth’s global temps by as much as 5C in just 150 years is completely insane… The math, physics and empirical evidence simply do not support this assertion; not even close..,,,, CO2 fluctuations are an EFFECT of natural warming/cooling cycles, not the CAUSE of them…
Even IPCC’s 2013 AR5 report admits NO increasing trends of severe weather incidence/intensity for the past 60~100 years for: hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, droughts, floods, tornadoes, tropical storms, sub-tropical storms, thunderstorms, and hail…
CAGW is so busted.
CAGW is so busted >>> but just to confirm – the whole GHG warming up the lower atmosphere is ‘busted’ too right?
No… CO2 forcing per doubling is a real thing, currently defined by the logarithmic function: 5.35*ln(560ppm/280ppm)*(.31 Stefan-Boltzmann Constant)*(.5 negative cloud cover feedback)=.6C.
The negative cloud cover feedback is still being debated, but even if the there isn’t any negative cloud feedback, the maximum warming per CO2 doubling could not be muchmore than 1.2C, which is not a problem…
One can see why few engineers number among those with a tendency for climate hyperbole. I have been surprised that the main proponents of ever more violent weather, tipping points, and other scary scenarios are scientists at all! Eric it is telling that you would have to inform climate scientists of these first year engineering ideas.
Also few properly educated geologists can be found among the frightened. I studied paleontology and paleoclimate as an undergrad in the late 1950s in Winnipeg, where the university itself sits on the floor of the Pleistocene Lake Agassiz. It is no surprise to me that the very prominent climate scientist Tim Ball is from that very university. It has been known since the latter half of the 19th Century that the earth has been dipping in and out of “ice ages” during the recent millions of years. The Dwyka tillite in South Africa which we studied, tells us of considerably older glaciations and since my studies other icy eras have been discovered that go farther back still.
Between the empirical data on climate of properly trained geologists (geology “lite” seemed to appear after they changed the name to ‘Earth Scientists’ ) and the pragmatism of engineers lies the key to understanding climate.
He did have one statement that was wrong. The energy output of the sun is steady. I would argue that isn’t really true. The plots of energy emition show this.
Close enough for government work.
“In physics terms, the Earth’s climate is also an engine. Instead of a battery, the climate is powered by solar energy – sunlight falls on the daylight side of the Earth, is converted to heat, and is then radiated away into space. The means by which that energy is transported from warmer regions to cooler regions before being radiated into space is the sum of all of the world’s climate phenomena – wind, rain, ocean currents are all part of the global climate engine which is powered by our sun.”
Exactly. Don’t they teach this to kids in school any more? If they did, they would not be deceived by the climate change/global warming scare.
Natural selection drives towards healthy balance. The more digested grass is deposited, the quicker fresh shoots grow above it.
But those clouds are part of the Earth’s system and “simply” do things with the solar flux hitting Earth…
All our energy (except small amount of geothermal) comes from the sun in form of electromagnetic radiation across wide range of spectrum generally known as light.
Now this is odd:
The red path shows an exotic looped trajectory of light through a three-slit structure, which was observed for the first time in the new study. Credit: Magaña-Loaiza et al. Nature Communications
That’s awesome!
(Sometimes I have to go a long way out of my way to go a short distance.)
The engine analogy is spot on. Evaporating water moves air masses vertically. Storms arise. The water vapor is performing work on the atmosphere. Then the now drier, cooler air masses must return to the surface and in doing so, adiabatic compression warms the air back up to surface temp in line with the lapse rate.
Consider the average precipitation…about a meter per year. The enthalpy required to evaporate that quantity of water is what? Compare that to annual insolation enthalpy…
Also remember that same enthalpy of vaporization is released back to the environment after cloud masses have risen to an average of 18000 feet msl. That is the halfway point, mass based, of the atmosphere.
“If the accumulated energy were to affect the climate, by contributing to more violent weather, it would be expended”
But it would still warm the Earth–conservation of energy.
This is a very confusing and, I think, confused essay. The claim that a warmer Earth has more energy to drive storms is wrong, but the reason it is wrong had to do with thermodynamics and I cannot tell if the author of this essay understands it.
A storm is a heat engine, converting thermal energy to mechanical energy. A heat engine that simply converts thermal energy to mechanical energy and does nothing else is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, called that because it violates the second law of thermodynamics. Actual heat engines take heat from a hot source, turn some of it into mechanical energy, dump some of it in a cooler sink. The amount of energy available to do work depends not on the temperature of the source but on the temperature difference between source and sink.
If global warming warms both source and sink, there is no reason to expect the amount of energy available to do work to increase. It might increase or decrease, depending on the relative warming of the two.
By “expended” I meant radiated into space.
From the post;
In physics terms, the Earth’s climate is also an engine. Instead of a battery, the climate is powered by solar energy – sunlight falls on the daylight side of the Earth, is converted to heat, and is then radiated away into space. The means by which that energy is transported from warmer regions to cooler regions before being radiated into space is the sum of all of the world’s climate phenomena – wind, rain, ocean currents are all part of the global climate engine which is powered by our sun.
“If global warming warms both source and sink, there is no reason to expect the amount of energy available to do work to increase.”
But it can’t warm the whole sink. The sink is the surface that radiates to space. It radiates an average 240 W/m2; that won’t change (unless solar or albedo does). So its average temperature can’t increase.
Hum … this is tantamount to assess that source cannot warm either (unless solar or albedo change–which may well happen). Or some energy appears in the system out of nowhere to heat the source despite constant solar energy entering. I don’t buy it.
Besides : the average 240 W/m2 may and does change.
solar panels eat energy at ~100 W/m² magnitude ; since this energy is immediately used up, it make no significant difference on the energy budget. Photosynthesis, however, make a difference, because of stored energy at day, year, and even eons scale of time, in the ~10W/m² magnitude. Biosphere has enough power to mess with the average 240 W/m2.
“El nino” (i.e. flow in or out of the ocean) is another thing that does change the 240 W/m² average. Remember the “missing heat” argument
1. Look to the gradients.
2. The ideal Carnot cycle produces no power. The issue is power, not energy. The Carnot Efficiency is not the proper metric.
3. Don’t forget chemical/biological storage.
Ok, for someone who did far better in thermo, than I: assume we construct enough wind turbines to meet half of the world’s energy needs. What effect would removing this much energy from the atmosphere have on climate?
I suspect it would be negligible, like CO2, but considering how much money has been made on the CO2 scare, perhaps we can generate (pardon) another fake catastrophe and find our own gold mine.
Blow me!
(That could be our slogan. It wasn’t meant as an insult.)
Not bad. I was thinking something along the line of, Don’t Break Wind – doing so creates climate change. Reject the stench of deni@l!
Someday we could generate a windfall selling wind credits to operate turbines.
just check wikipedia, to begin with. Will suffice, methink
The ability to perform work is based upon the differential of energy from one place to another. For the battery, the ability to perform work is based on the difference between the voltage on each end. Consider voltage the same as pressure in a pipe. More volts is the same as more pressure and thus a higher power output potential over time.
Now then, in the Earth’s climate, as you pointed out, it is how the energy received is transported back into outer space that is the work. But what powers the work? The difference of pressure at one point and the other. Lots of pressure at the equator where most of the energy arrives. Very little pressure at the poles where little energy arrives and much is reflected. But according to the ever present global warming hypothesis, the poles will warm up faster than the equator. What this means is that the pressure difference between the equator and the poles will lessen and there will be much less “weather” happening and at a much slower rate.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a self destructing hypothesis which should have been defeated in debates in the late 1980s and done so easily.
You surely are not engineer. Your choice of word is messy. What do you mean when you write “ability to perform work” ? Power ? Potential energy ? Force ?
You indeed can “Consider voltage the same as pressure in a pipe”. But more volts, more pascals (pressure unit) do NOT necessary means higher power output potential over time.
There is not “Lots of pressure at the equator”. Actually winds, which indeed flows from high to low pressure, are going toward equator. Equator is low pressure zone, all year long.
There is not “Very little pressure at the poles”. Giant anticyclones (high pressure) form there, which, when conditions are met, “fell” (latitude wise) toward Canada-USA or Russia-Europe, bringing in winter (precisely when close to zero sun energy reach pole) huge mass of very cold, very dry, high pressure air (and clear weather along).
“Any drop in albedo due to melting polar ice”
Seems to me that tropical albedo would pack a bigger punch than arctic albedo most of the year, given the angle of insolation. The melting of arctic ice seems to be more relative to oceanic oscillations than insolation. Albedo of land areas in the middle-to-upper latitudes seems to be the major factor, looking at past glaciations.
+1