Contributing Effect of Energy Usage

Without attempting to actually add up everything, I have come across many references over the years pertaining to parts of your question, and the universal views were that it is insignificant to changes in solar heat absorption/reflectance/re-radiation caused by our modifications to the surface of the earth and our effects on the atmosphere, including the water cycle and cloud formation.

Regards, Greg

All the energy we consume may end up as heat but it doesn't just heat the atmosphere, it heats the oceans and land as well. If we just look at it heating the oceans and atmosphere then we can do a sort of very rough and I do mean rough, calculation if we have the following information

Mass of atmosphere = 5.14 x 10¹⁸ Kg = m_air

Mass of water = 1.4 x 10²¹ Kg = m_water

Annual energy consumption = 0.5 Zj = Q

Specific heart of air =1.0035 Kj°K^-1kg^-1 = c_air

Specific heat of water = 4.1813 Kj°K^-1kg^-1 = c_water

Therefore we can calculate the temperature increase as

So it all adds up to about 85 μ°C per year or about 1 °C every 11,718 years. And that's before we take into account the heating of the land and upper crust as well. All means that the energy consumption isn't directly driving the global warming phenomenon. Therefore it must be something more complex that is varying the balance between the incoming and outgoing radiation.

Thank you for your calculation....As cheaper and more plentiful energy sources are discovered and utilized, this contributing factor may become more of a problem...It, together with naturally occuring solar radiation variations would seem to suggest that greenhouse gas mitigation is not enough to guarantee control of global warming...Efforts to control the atmospheric quantities of certain gases is problematic and a daunting task...Successful and timely measures taken by governments worldwide, are dubious and impotent...It would seem that we need a more direct and effective strategy...

As cheaper and more plentiful energy sources are discovered and utilized, this contributing factor may become more of a problem

If we were to increase or energy consumption by a factor of 10 it would still be a thousand years before we saw the sort of change that has already taken place in Australia. Don't forget this doesn't take into account the energy that is need to raise the temperature of the land and upper crust. Ultimately yes it could be a problem but we have at least a millennium before it could even start to show the potential that the current green house gasses.

It would seem that we need a more direct and effective strategy...

I agree with you 100% on this. We need to stop procrastinating and get on with the job of fixing the problem. You might be interested in my blog An Engineer's Look at the Future of Energy where we are discussing the technologies that may be a solution to the problem. If you follow the link on the blog preamble it will take you to a table of contents thread that list all the technologies we are going to discuss and has links to the discussions that have already taken place. If you register with CR4 you will receive the daily mail out that has links to all the new CR4 threads.

CR4 is a very informative site and I am sure you will find it worthwhile.

Thanks for the heads up....will do...

Masu,

The effect of our power usage is negligible on what the sun does. And if greenhouse gasses would change the heat loss of our atmospheric system with only 1% it would mean that we have a problem of 1200 TW. (I assume that the world looses approx as much as she gets from the sun.)

The same article speaks about 15 TW being the world power as consumed by us.

It shows a factor 80 over our energy consumption. Explaining a bit of the greenhouse problem.

It also shows that we don't need to harvest that much of our suns energy. We only need to do it.

Gwen

Hi Gwen,

I agree that our energy consumption is not the problem but rather the pollution we are creating generating this problem.

The worlds total energy consumption is around 500 Ej per year. If we wanted to generate this using solar means realistically we would only get about 8 hours worth of generating per day at any location so that means the total generating capacity needs to be 48 Tw. The average power reaching the ground is about 1 Kw per square meter so if we use the best solar cells around which are about 35% efficient that means we can get about 350 w our of each square meter. We therefore need an area of 136 x 10⁹ square meters or 136,000 Km².

As you said that that's not that large an area as it a block of land roughly 370 Km by 370 Km. That a fair area and a lot of solar panels but there are cattle stations in Australia that have paddocks bigger than this.

Roughly 100 million m² of roof is refitted each year, only in Germany.

just install PV cells on every roof, supply chain problems are the next issue.

OK the surface we need is bigger than Belgium, but it would serve the whole world.

You can deduct the power you get from tidal and wind (handy in the evening, when power needs are higher and wind is blowing a bit harder)

Then you need to find out which portion of the global energy need is heat in a zone that can be done through direct solar heating. Those systems have a way better efficacy, reducing the total surface drastically.

The fact that we make direct use of the solar energy, and not of stored energy from the last 60M years, will also have a positive effect on the global warming picture.

Gwen

Hi Gwen,

There is a new development if solar cell technology call Sliver^® solar power. Basically instead of using the standard silicon wafer as it is produced to make a solar cell they slice it into hundreds of tiny slivers and then connect them in parallel. The result is greatly improved production efficiency and output of the end produce.

Origin Energy have constructed a pilot plant to manufacture these cells and from what I have heard they will be available for evaluation purposes very shortly.

"Therefore it must be something more complex that is varying the balance between the incoming and outgoing radiation."

According to "The Great Global Warming Swindle", Channel 4 Television, 2 weeks ago, the sunspot cycle determines the strength of the solar wind. Solar wind determines the level of cosmic ray flux[CRF]. CRF determines the rate of cloud formation. Cloud cover determines the flux of solar radiation that hits the surface, and solar flux determines the temperature. According to the programme, though atmospheric CO₂ levels are fluctuating, CO₂ is not the driver for Global Warming, as it lags behind surface temperature fluctuations by about 800 years, and the feature that causes the lag is the interchange of CO₂ between the oceans and the atmosphere.

Hi PWSlack,

"According to "The Great Global Warming Swindle", Channel 4 Television, 2 weeks ago, the sunspot cycle determines the strength of the solar wind. Solar wind determines the level of cosmic ray flux[CRF]. CRF determines the rate of cloud formation. Cloud cover determines the flux of solar radiation that hits the surface, and solar flux determines the temperature."

Yes the sunspot activity dose have an affect on the earths climate. Sunspot activity follows an 11 year cycle and is associated with the Sun reversing its magnetic poles. There is no apparent increase in sunspot activity that can be associated with the 1° C rise in temperatures that have already occurred in Australia.

"According to the programme, though atmospheric CO₂ levels are fluctuating, CO₂ is not the driver for Global Warming, as it lags behind surface temperature fluctuations by about 800 years, and the feature that causes the lag is the interchange of CO₂ between the oceans and the atmosphere."

Yes there is a lagging increase that is caused by the mechanism that you are referring to. However, atmospheric CO₂ are increasing nearly 60 times faster than they have over the past 800,000 years. Combine this with the levels being higher than over the same period and the fact that over that period an ice age ended means we are in completely uncharted territory. It also means that nature is not the cause of the current rise in CO₂ we are seeing.

Now I know you are going to ask how do they know what the levels of CO₂ where 800,000 years ago? The answer is simple, they have samples of the atmosphere that go back that far. In Antarctica on the polar plateau the snow traps small pockets of the atmosphere as it is laid down. As the ice never melts and continues to build up these pockets or air remain trapped. Testing has shown that these tiny pockets remain well isolated and are not prone to contamination from either the ice they are trapped in not the atmosphere. As a result they present as a reliable sample of the atmosphere from the time they were formed. By taking ice cores from several places in Antarctica they have been able to built up a reliable profile of the atmosphere over the last 800,000 years.

I havn't got the links to the details of the science behind this at the moment, but, if you are interested I can get them and post them here for you.

Initially I was skeptical about global warming, however, there is just too much hard evidence that the planet is warming and that the most probable cause is human activity. Yes the Earth has been warmer in the past as it has been cooler and it is always in a stat of flux. The problem is, the changes of past have taken place over many millennia. The current changes we are seeing are happening over decades and that is what is worrying.

I believe that we still have time to act and at least we will be able to limit the damage. Yes we may be wrong and the planet may not be warming, however, to not act not to act while we have time and to just hope that the majority of scientists are wrong, would be grossly negligent.

"I believe that we still have time to act and at least we will be able to limit the damage. Yes we may be wrong and the planet may not be warming, however, to not act not to act while we have time and to just hope that the majority of scientists are wrong, would be grossly negligent. "

Quite. The important thing is to establish the highest level of certainty over what is happening and why, because to take the wrong action in a global situation could be potentially disastrous.

What the programme sought to do is to balance the CO₂ leading hypothesis, upon which many of the climate change models are based, with a CO₂ lagging one, which seems more in tune with the evidence. It made thought-provoking viewing. There may be an inevitable lag before the programme reaches the Antipodes, though probably not as long as 800 years.

It is a pitty that the same basic explication needs to be given each time again.

In fact this does not bring us any further down the road.

The small article on tidal current harvesting was interesting.

The link between cosmic radiation and clouds is even more suspicious than the link between CO₂ and human activity. But as humans are not to be blamed for this we accept it very easely.

We might need to invest a serious amount of money on the subject: how to explain the masses that we are to blame?

200 years after Darwin still not everyone is convinced on evolution. Tiny spots on the theory makes it completly rubbish (at least for some of us), spots that Darwin could not have known with the techniques he had.

With the global warming we don't have the time to discuss 200 years.

The UN has asked serious institutes to investigate the issue, they concluded that there is something nasty going on. They will study this for the next decades. Let's accept that they do their job and that the results have been checked, counterchecked and trown in the wastebin for at least 10 times. If they still have the same outcome, accept it.

Let's look for alternatives in energy supply, after all we will need it when we run out of fossil oil.

Why on earth is it necessary to allocate blame (rhetorical question)? Allocation of blame is the bread-and-butter of the legal professions, and engineers are above that.

What is important is to be certain of the causes and effects (science) of what may be going on, so as to take the appropriate action (engineering) to reduce or eliminate the impacts for the long-term protection of all species. What the programme sought to do is to shake the foundations of the CO2-leading case to see how it stood up against the CO₂-lagging case.

That is exactly what I try to explain: why bother on who to blame?

Let's face the future and look for intelligent way's on harvesting and using energy.

Roughly 0.4% of solar energy received.

As said already the problem is not a man made issue, the real problem is too many people seeking to profit from other peoples ignorance and guilt. We are far more likely to be staring down an ice age rather than a hot house.

Pollution should be controlled to protect our health, and to conserve energy supplies.