A Simple Evaluation

We're all going to die!

Eventually true in all cases.

The thing I don't get from the chart, is where the other 30% of incident radiation is going. I only count 70% back out into space, on but wait, that other 30% never made it to the surface to begin with. OK, now I get it.

The earth receives 100%, of which 30% is immediately kicked out.

Of the 70% received at the surface, all 70% is eventually radiated back out.

The earth receives energy from the sun. The hotter the earth is, the more energy it will radiate. Earth will reach the temperature at which the amount of energy radiated is the same as the amount received.

See #5

The energy used to generate erosion and power wind and storms doesn't disappear, it merely gets converted to heat, which is eventually radiated.

The only exception to the energy balance that I can think of is the energy generated by radioactive decay (primarily potassium, uranium, and thorium) within the earth and primordial heat left over from the earth's formation. This is orders of magnitude below the energy received from the sun.

There are some exceptions to the energy balance that occur. Consider coal and peat bogs. CO2 was taken from the atmosphere along with water and sunlight was converted over time to coal and peat.

If the peat bog or the coal vein burns, heat is released as it reverts to CO2 and water. Therefore we know that heat was removed from the system in the original conversion to peat and coal. There are other processes that similarly store energy in chemical bonds removing it from the system. Limestone probably represents a significant sink.

As the peat and coal and other similar sinks are protected from reversion some energy is removed. I don't have a quick way to estimate how much heat is being currently removed and does not quickly revert.

The sun's power hitting the earth is about 174000 TW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy

Average power generated by humans (2013) is about 12.3 TW, not all of which is due to combustion of fossil fuels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Average power production would be a better figure, but my estimate somewhere else in this thread of 25 TW, was indeed high.

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I am a little puzzled by your response to this comment in particular...

Are you sure how many orders of magnitude that is, seems I recently heard somewhere that scientists may have underestimated heat from earth's core by a considerable amount. Please do not shoot the messenger of such dire news. It could be the pressure of hell is increasing, thereby increasing the temperature.

This could indicate that previous comments about hell freezing over have been greatly exaggerated.

"Earth's internal heat powers most geological processes^[3] and drives plate tectonics.^[2] Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation.^[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget

Even if underestimated by a considerable amount, it wouldn't amount to much.

I was mainly trying push your buttons.

"Even if underestimated by a considerable amount, it wouldn't amount to much. "

Lets see, 174,000 x .0003 = ~52 TW or about 4x (2x minimum depending on who's numbers you go by) all human power output combined.

Even more relevant is the fact that the 174,000 number even at and extremely accurate +-.1% margin of error puts said error value at over 10X our estimated human maximum output thus rendering our efforts to be very validly attributed to be listed as sub aggregate level system noise.

I keep wondering about the internal energy from the earth. A major contributor to particulate in the atmosphere as well as massive heat discharge (to the surface, which is what we are concerned about) is volcanic activity. How is that included in a balance?

In the above graph it is not included. But again the short comings of this graph are plenty. If you can dig up one that includes volcanic activity post it here. I guess the impact is minuscule similar to human activity.

Just as a side note. If you are talking about surface temperatures then there is a slim chance that you do not get enough data since the climate hypotheses is using atmospheric temperatures. The realisation should be that these are not the same since direct solar impact heats up the surface while the air takes heat away through convective cooling. If we measure the air temperature we still have not measured the surface temperature.

But Entropy says the Earth as a whole is cooling. I don't think this accounts for everything. Is there something there for the radioactive decay for minerals contained in Earth?

Drew K

Like Redfred says there is so many other things not accounted for that I am asking myself why do we accept these graphics in climate science?

We should at least see the difference for different times of the day (night, high noon more...) We also should get a part for over sea and over land. and why not one complicated one over the coastlines.

There is no dynamic in this like there is in reality. Ever asked yourself how Earth can be warming if one side cools down a fair bit every day and over the seasons?

The answer is only statistically is Earth warming and we all know what this means.

Yes, it means that right now we have unsophisticated people in society spouting all these anecdotal stories about how "it's too hot for this time of year", or "it's already cold this year", too little rain, too much rain, wild storms, etc. ad infinitum.

Science is not a "stand up and testify" sort of sport. It is an "observe, observe, observe, ...think, deduce, observe some more, think some more, deduce, then in a preliminary way only - conclude. After another round of thousands of observations, the initial conclusion may be confirmed or the ruling on the field overturned.

Today it is cold in my office, and outside too. That is not significant observation, but it does affect me.

You must be a heretic...if you don't buy the "Scientific Consensus" of ALL Thinking (?) thousands of top notch scientists. When did we start doing science by consensus?

There are countless examples where stupidity trumped reason. Here are but three memorable times where the public tried to quash science:

• The death of Socrates
• The Galileo affair
• The State vs. John Scopes

Why do you think me a heretic sir? I am a believer, and washed in the sacrifice of Jesus, and redeemed by His resurrection.

I am also convinced of a great wealth of science, that I rely upon and utilize for my needs and things that are not needs, but that I am trying to make happen.

I do not swallow the so-called "consensus" of opinion, because I do not believe the vast community of these so-called scientists have enough common sense to pour urine out of a boot. If one possesses not the wisdom nor the power of logic and mathematics to reason for themselves, how then do the intend to settle matters in any arena of science?

Are scientists now to resort to the use of magic wands, maces, and swords? I submit the pen as the most lethal instrument to be wielded in any arena, mush more so in science. With the pen one may arduously convince even the weakest mind that has been polluted with popular banter, anecdotal incident, and false publications appearing as a "truth". It is clear to me that when politicians put themselves forth as scientists, they totally lose all relationship to truth.

As you say. This is from the Nasa website.

But besides the short comings of the diagram there is still value in it if not quantity but in quality. It shows the fact that the atmosphere radiates away energy which can only be done by green house gases which in fact is the main cooling mechanism of Earth. Nothing else to show here really!

It was probably designed for the huddled masses, not so much for scientific elites.

Obviously any planet with heat or light input (i.e. not totally and completely dead) is a system far from equilibrium just as our living and breathing bodies are far from equilibrium.

We always must consider the time-dependent parts of the differential equations of the system. Otherwise, what are we really attempting to model?

"I thought this place was for engineers."

Really?

That's ALEGED engineers. Nobody's proved nuthin' yet.

This is an English language communicating community. As such please stick to words that are part of the English language, especially if you RAISE YOUR VOICE.

'Aleged' is not an English language word. I found 'alege' as a Romanian word meaning 'chosen', but there is no conjugation resulting in 'aleged'.

The problem with this graphic is that the time factor is missing, and variable I might add....Though the heat reaching the surface may all eventually be irradiated back into space, how long it lingers on the surface could be catastrophic....I can go lay out on the beach, and come back home at some point....the amount of sunburn can be nothing to 3rd degree burns depending on the time factor....

Yes that's where Thermodynamic comes in.

An average temperature is meaning less as well, if you think that you can find a night temperature that compensates for 100 deg C day temperatures to maintain 15 deg C average temperature on Earth.

The claim that gases like CO2 cool the earth because they radiate over 60% of the so-called 'energy budget' is true...but only in a _superficial way. Without them all this plus the absorbed heat would be radiated away. The absorbed heat is, of course, the kicker; its % has and continues to go up. This is a tiny % but the balance is very delicate. Less than one degree and the ice melts, initiating several feedback loops. In addition, the sun is not the sole source of energy. Billions of humans collectively pour huge amounts of 'new' 'old'(ie sequestered) heat into the system daily.

That set of facts is very reassuring.

You are missing the point that if the surface would have to radiate the same energy away that the atmosphere does, it would have to be much hotter than it currently is.

There is no feedback loop in the diagram and the sun is the only source of energy.

The short comings of the graphic are clear but the quality of the anwers we get from it is not affected.

You have a good point.

Temperature may have a linear relationship with average thermal energy, but that isn't the important relationship that drives temperature in this system.

If less heat is being radiated away or (otherwise removed) than is being input, temperature rises until heat removed and heat input are balanced.

Stefan-Boltzmann law provides a decent place to start; blackbody radiation being proportional to the 4th power of thermodynamic temperature. This suggests a temperature increase from 300 K to 301 K should cause more than a 1% increase in blackbody radiation.

But Stephan-Boltzman law gives one the total black body radiation (energy) per unit of surface area not the total black body radiation of the body. This works very well with a solid or liquid body. We've established from this simplistic diagram that the atmosphere is the dominant radiator to space. What is the total surface area of the atmosphere? I expect that it would be larger but how much larger.

As I said before, this is an overly simplified diagram to a very complex topic.

On large scales the area of atmosphere radiating could be reasonably modeled by a spheroid surface at some altitude. The emissivity changes but the proportionality to the fourth power of temperature should not change.

It would probably be more accurate to model thin shells of atmosphere that are at similar temperature.

I'm going to take a close look at this info. Something isn't right about the assumption that 60% of the energy radiated to space is coming from the atmosphere. The bulk of the atmosphere is at much lower temp than the surface of the planet, so it doesn't make sense that such little mass could stay cool and reradiate so much more than the surface. Maybe the energy is not absorbed and reradiated, but just reflected?

How about being transmitted by, scattered, reflected, etc. then transmitted some more?

Gaseous molecules can change quantum states rapidly, so watch closely and stand fast on something.

And we'll all be dead before any of it matters.

Since when is the atmosphere a surface? Where to define the surface for the purposes of making it a "black body"? Hmmm?

I'm sure you can define a couple surfaces comprised of the atmosphere. I'll give you one; the atmosphere shares a surface with the land and in other areas with the sea. Cloud surfaces can be distinct and fairly well defined. I suspect the surface of highest utility for this disussion is likely one chosen for computational expediency and not one that might be intuitively obvious.

"...the sun is the only source of energy."

Is there another source that somehow is not accounted for?

As was noted earlier the "new" energy "created" by humans is simply energy of the Sun over the millennia that has been sequestered..

As for the value of the diagram the title "A Simple Evaluation" is kind of self-explanatory.

When we talk about the diagram then the sun is the only source of energy. Nothing else is considered. It was said earlier that there is a lot of missing things in it but none of it was important for the point I wanted to make.

'...Is there another source that somehow is not accounted for?...'

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Yes, indeed. Significant contributions are made that are not a result of the energy radiated from our star incident on this planet, now or in the past.

Decay of long lived radionuclides is one clear example.

Greasy,

if your are familiar with the concept of energy and temperature then you understand that at any given time when the temperature drops down (night time, winter time) all the precious energy is gone. There is nothing retained in the atmosphere. It just goes whoooooosh, out, its gone, kaput.

Every day is a thermal cycle of warming and cooling. There is no delicate balance when the temperature changes daily and seasonally by over 40 deg C.

I just read somewhere else that a cat over the course of a year puts as much CO2 in the air as a car that is driven for 20000 km a year. (Sorry Del I had to use the cat as example as this is the original source)

Siberian tigress nursing two offspring? I bet so. Pregnant lioness in the Serengeti? Odds are good.

House cat? Sure, as long as that describes a cat as big as a modest human dwelling.

I think that the typical domestic house cat would overheat.

According to the wide wide wide it includes the food source/meat production in the calculation. Sometimes you just got to love it.

OMG. Hahaha. I wonder how much it would be if they included the nuclear fusion required to produce light omnidirectionally, such that sufficient light was incident upon the plants needed to feed the eventual processed meat for cat food.

I bet the stellar explosions that generated the higher atomic number elements vital to plant growth took a lot of energy too. Shoot, even just the c-n-o cycle takes a significant amount of energy.

That cat must never be able to cool down.

Ideasmith,

Greasy is talking about the energy held captive in the bonds of molecules, most of them organic. This is energy collected over hundreds of millions of years and stored in the fossil fuels we are extracting now.

Think about it. 100 million years to collect it. 100 years and we've released one heck of a lot of energy. Unfortunately, it's also released a huge amount of CO₂.

Maybe putting a snorkel on the exhaust stacks of power plants, and directing all that CO2 back to greenhouses, algae ponds, vertical grow algae bags in greenhouses, et cetera could remove just enough of the gas to make America Great again?

Allam cycle is even better, as long as what is turning coal to gas fuel does not belch or have fugitive emissions.

There are ways to solve this whether HCCC is a thing or is not a thing. Bill Gates wants mass numbers of new nuclear generating plants. Elon Musk wants everyone to drive a Tesla, have a big Li+ power pack in the garage, and solar roof tiles.

I prefer a rounded approach where in the limit, there is a transition away from CO2 emission intensive activities. This will not stop the Chinese from making magnesium, silicon, iron, and steel by gobbling up vast amounts of carbon and emitting even vaster tonnage of CO2. It will never work with just one player following these new "rules". Everyone on the planet will have to agree on how industrial scale processes that produce basis chemicals gets done.

If that is so then he might want to read post 14# again. Numbers talk.

Actually the heck of a lot of energy over the last 100 years when compared to natures annual or especially entry level energy budgets doesn't even count as statistical aggregates on even the most conservative of estimates of the overall energies in play in said time spans.

We're not even the blinking LED on the dash of your vehicle compared to the headlights. It's not that we don't exist or put out but in comparison to what natures tossing around we are way way smaller than mainstream media and the typical person can ever begin to relate to.

For example from NOAA itself,

Energy output of one average hurricane.

"Total energy released through cloud/rain formation:

An average hurricane produces 1.5 cm/day (0.6 inches/day) of rain inside a circle of radius 665 km (360 n.mi) (Gray 1981). (More rain falls in the inner portion of hurricane around the eyewall, less in the outer rainbands.) Converting this to a volume of rain gives 2.1 x 10¹⁶ cm3/day. A cubic cm of rain weighs 1 gm. Using the latent heat of condensation, this amount of rain produced gives

5.2 x 10¹⁹ Joules/day or
6.0 x 10¹⁴ Watts.

This is equivalent to 200 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity - an incredible amount of energy produced!"

And that's just one of dozens of mid level hurricanes and tropical /seasonal storms that happen every year of which in themselves are just one smaller part of the overall atmospheric heat engine system which on a standard scientific measurement comparison we are several magnitudes of order below the base average mean value of any single point of reference.

~15 TW compared to multi tens of QW's isn't much when you do the numbers.

Hurricanes are not a separate energy addition.

The energy of the hurricane is just am effect of the energy being added to the Earth by the sun. As you say, a heat engine. It converts a difference in heat to motion and then back to heat again.

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Some solar storms could contribute energy, but that really could be considered just additional energy radiated from the sun.

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If you want some sizeable heat contribution, other than

solar radiation,

conversion of rotation to heat via tides pulling the. Moon around faster,

Primordial and radioactive decay in the core

You could consider cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

Another sizeable contribution would be the conversion of kinetic energy of meteors as well as chemical energy liberated burning up in the atmosphere.

the contributions may be pretty large in total yet still miniscule compared to sunlight.

If gamma radiation (or cosmic ray) bursts were incident at any levels even remotely comparable to incident solar radiation, everything on planet surface would die from muon exposure, according to a presentation I recently saw about "10 ways to extinct humanity", or something to that effect.

Even the creatures living within about the first mile of ocean depth would die.

'Remotely comparable', that is the wrong yardstick. Of course they are comparable. Locally or remotely, these are comparable without complication in general or specific.

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At any rate, I was not suggesting that heat from cosmic rays approached (even remotely) the heat from incident solar energy.

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A mile is a lot of sea water as shielding....

Muons are apparently very deadly. No building, airplane, or even being a short distance underground is sufficient shielding from these muons from gamma ray pulses from outer space.

What I meant by "remotely comparable", is that the power levels required for death are many orders of magnitude different.

Sometimes, things get TOO simplified, such as rounding PI to just 3 (wink,wink)

Obviously the system is far more complex than that 4th grade science fair chart shows.

In reality even if just .0001% of all the solar energy that ever hit the earth stayed behind over the last 4.5 billion years we would be a molten ball of rock now.

Do the numbers and tell me I am wrong.

We just need to build a wind tower 5 km high....vacuum all that heat up...

You know, that is a pretty tall order, even for Texas. We might have to delay having that out until next month.

Maybe a solar shade in orbit.....

Works for the car....

Thats what we have clouds for!

SE, my understanding is that nature already vacuums all the heat up. No need to build a tower as long as warm air rises.

I have no idea what you mean by this. Are you trying to say that mother nature uses her Eureka or Dyson vacuum cleaner to remove the dirt from heat before it gets placed in a tower? That sounds more like a Monty Python skit. At any moment I expect to see John Cleese saying:

I do not see why you do not see that SE wanted to vacuum all the heat up while this is a process that is already happening.

You probably know what the lapse rate is.

Are we talking Sharknado?

Yes, except leave the sharks in the pool.