The Energy Advocate
Internal and External Processes
As far as I can tell, there may be 10,000 PhD dissertations already written or waiting to be written about rain, hail, snow, glaciers, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclonic storms, melting ice, sea level evaporation from the oceans, melting snow, melting ice, the movement of air across the globe, the influence of continental drift on weather patterns, and so forth. These subjects and their kin involve internal energy exchanges, and they describe how weather patterns move around the globe.
At equilibrium, the heat that goes into the atmosphere must equal the heat leaving the atmosphere. Disequilibrium cannot exist long, as the total amount of energy “trapped” in the atmosphere is equivalent to one day’s energy passing through it.
At equilibrium, the amount of heat absorbed by the surface equals the amount of heat released.
External Processes
By contrast, the heat balance of the earth as a whole positive if we receive more heat from the sun than we radiate away as infrared (IR), and negative if the outgoing IR exceeds absorbed sunlight depends on precisely threequantities.
First, the amount of sunlight at our orbit is greatest when we are closest to the sun (in early January) and least when we are farthest from the sun in early July. Since we know the orbit, we can calculate the solar intensity at any other place in the orbit, providing that the sun produces constant output. For climate, the year-round average is what matters. Any increase or decrease in year-round average sunlight can result in a positive or negative heat balance. For the heat balance diagram shown, the average solar flux is presently 340 0.1 W/m2 .
The second quantity of interest is the amount of sunlight reflected. Presently, the globe reflects about 30% of the sunlight (albedo = 0.3), but that quantity can change with cloudiness, snow and ice cover, and amounts of aerosols in the atmosphere. In the diagram the present value is 99 1.0 W/m2
The Greenhouse Effect
It should be understood that no God of Vocabulary ever chiseled definitions of terms like thegreenhouseeffect into
The third quantity that helps determine the heat balance of the planet is the amount of infrared (IR) that leaves the planet. It is important that the onlyway for the planet to shed heat is though IR emission to space. The present value is 240 2 W/m2
How Internal Processes Affect External Ones
Internal processes certainly affect weather, but they affect the heat balance of the planet only by affecting either the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet or the amount of IR emitted to space.
Climate scientists have taken to heart the Year Without a Summer (1816) following the 10 April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, which ejected an estimated 37 km3 (8.9 cu mi) of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, thereby decreasing the amount of absorbed sunlight. Climate models therefore predict an increase in albedo meaning less absorbed solar energy due to imagined scenarios in which humans cause particulate matter to be inserted into the atmosphere The increase in albedo is regarded as something to “partially counteract” the imagined warming effects of dreaded CO2 emissions.
The surface of the earth emits a smooth spectrum of infrared radiation (IR) (a plot of intensity versus number of wavelengths per centimeter), but the planet as a whole emits a very jagged spectrum of IR to outer space, as shown in Fig. 1 (For this discussion, the shapes of the curves, not the unreadable numbers, are the important matters.) The change is due to the spectral properties of the IR-active gases in the atmosphere. They are lovingly called greenhousegases
stone slabs. The term has been used by various people with various meanings. Sometimes it refers to the processes involved. Some scientists have used it to refer to the quantity of IR sent to the surface from the sky (345 W/m2 in the drawing). Finally, after only 31 years, in its SixthAssessment
Report(section 7.4.2.1) the IPCC defined the greenhouse effect as the numerical difference between the amount of IR emitted by the surface and the amount of IR emitted to space, assigned it a symbol (G), and assigned it a value: G= 159 W/m2. (The heat balance diagram on the previous page came from the CERES project and its value for Gwould be 158 3.6 W/m2.) Regardless of which definition is used, the underlying cause is the absorptive/radiative properties of the greenhouse gases.
Now, just for fun, let us assume that some villains want to destroy the earth by upsetting the heat balance. Their options are limited to changing the amount of sunlight at orbit (either by changing the sun or moving the earth to another orbit); changing the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet; or changing the amount of IR sent to space.
As it happens, some scientists have proposed a couple of ways to “fight climate change” by changing the albedo (by putting coal dust on glaciers to counteract cooling in the 1970s and by putting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect more sunlight, recently). Others have proposed spreading iron dust over the oceans to increase plankton growth to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Of course, these scientists are wellmeaning; the point is that they understand that only changes in either albedo or the greenhouse effect can affect the heat balance. They do not have grandiose ideas about affecting the sun or changing our orbit around it.
Let us suppose that the villains spread some kind of hot Pixie Dust around the globe to heat the earth. The surface now emits more IR (cooling down in the process), more IR goes to space, and the heat balance is negative until the surface returns to its pre-Pixie Dust temperature.
So, the villains decide instead to increase the greenhouse effect by suddenly doubling the amount of the dreaded CO2 to the atmosphere. The increased greenhouse effect decreasesthe amount of IR going to space. Now, the surface starts heating up, rapidly at first but more slowly as the heat imbalance diminishes toward zero. The eventual surface temperature will be such that the amount of IR to space will equal the amount that existed before the villains doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. (There was no change in either sunlight or reflected sunlight, so the amount of IR emitted to space must match the absorbed solar heat.)
Therein lies an important but very neglected fact about climate. We will get to that momentarily, but first we need to invoke an existence theorem.
“An infrared thermometer is a device that infers temperature from thermal radiation emitted by the object being measured,” says Wikipedia. That is, there exists a well-known relationship between the temperature of an object and the amount of IR it emits. It is known as the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Without that, there would be no such thing as an IR thermometer.
So, given constancy of sunlight and of albedo, at equilibrium an increase in the greenhouse effect will be matched by an increase in surface IR emission. The IPCC says that doubling CO2 should result in a “radiative forcing” (an increase in the ability to absorb IR) of 3.7 W/m2. They also say that the most probable temperature rise will be 3ºC. Brilliant students that they were, they were able to skip freshman physics, where they would have learned the Stefan-Boltzmann law That would tell them that the increase in surface radiation would be about 16.5 W/m2, over 4 times the radiative forcing that is supposed to block that radiation.
A new paper in Science[1] has caught the attentionof many people, because it has a graph of world temperature for the last
485 million years and shows that we are in a very cool period (See Figure 2). Of course, we know that we’re in an interglacial period of the million-year-long Pleistocene Ice Age, but Figure 2 shows that this ice age is almost unprecedented in the history of our planet.
Figure 2: Temperature reconstruction by Judd etal[1] for the last 485 million years.
More interesting than Figure 2 is a fairly strong correlation shown in the paper [1] which plots the reconstructed temperatures versus the CO2 concentration, which is plotted on a logarithmic scale to represent forcing. However, there are two serious omissions.
The first omission is the actual forcing (F) in watts per square meter corresponding to the CO2 concentration values calculated from an IPCC formula:
The second omission is all too common. The amount of additional IR emission from the surface is calculable from the Stefan-Boltzmann law but is missing from the correlation graph.
Figure 3 shows the correlation graph from the Science paper with the missing scales appended. Notice that over the range of the data, the radiative forcing spans about 12 W/m2 , and the change in IR emission spans around 140 W/m2
Figure 3: The correlation graph from [1, their Fig. 4] with missing scales appended.
Judd etalsay [1]:
There is a strong correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and GMST [Global Mean Surface Temperature], identifying CO2 as the dominant control on variations in Phanerozoic global climate and suggesting an apparent Earth system sensitivity of ~8°C.
…Atmospheric CO2 exerts a dominant control on GMST, both today and in the geologic past [Temperaturereconstruction] PhanDA GMST exhibits a strong relationship with atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Fig. 4), demonstrating that CO2 has been the dominant forcing controlling global climate variations across the Phanerozoic.
Their data, to the extent that they are reliable, say the precise opposite. It is physically impossible repeat physically impossible for radiative forcing of ca. 12 W/m2 to restrain ca. 140 W/m2 from going to space.
In other words, the Judd et al reconstruction says in no uncertain terms that CO2 is at best a minor contributor to climate change.
[1] Judd et al. , “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature,” Science385, eadk3705 (2024)
Energy & Poverty
Writing in ClimateNews, Alan Moran raises a couple of very important points and shows a graph to prove his point [2]:
High income low energy nations do not exist. Energy use is closely associated with GDP (a statistical correlation of 0.83). And no poor country has ever generated a lot of electricity and stayed poor.
[2] Alan Moran, Climate News - October 2024, https://regulation economics.com/so/c7P8_qu5n?languageTag=en
Moral Imperative: A/C
Life in many places on Earth is miserable because of high temperatures, especially when accompanied by high humidity. With the 1924 invention of Freon (a.k.a. CCl2F2, dichlorodifluoromethane, R-12 and Freon-12), refrigeration became much easier because the refrigerant was non-corrosive, non-toxic, and non-flammable. The age of air conditioning was beginning. Air conditioners have made Florida and other hot humid places very attractive locations to live. Other refrigerants now found in refrigerators, freezers, and air
conditioners include R-22 (CHClF2), R-134A (common in automotive air conditioners), R-410A, and R-438A (both substitutes for R-22). Early refrigerants were ammonia (CH3) often use for ice rinks and propane (a very good refrigerant, but highly flammable and explosive).
This benefit to humanity has not escaped the attention of the Editorial Board of the WashingtonPost, who now regard air conditioning as a moral imperative, with the justification being, of course, “climate change” [3]:
Air conditioning transformed the world. Cities such as Singapore and Dubai would not have risen without it. In the United States, artificial cooling enabled the blockbuster growth of the Sun Belt. …
And, yet, the cooling technology remains unacceptably scarce. One study found that only 8 percent of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world currently have air-conditioned homes.
The project to combat climate change cannot condemn billions to broil. The moral response to the challenges confronting the world including climate change, but also poverty and inequality must include expanding access to lifesaving air-conditioning technology to billions of people who currently lack it.
Unmentioned by theWashingtonPostis the war against Freon and its relatives on the grounds that the chlorine in them causes the ozone hole over Antarctica to appear every austral winter. Now, of course, there are a few refrigerants that are not banned but are very expensive.
The logic is very curious. Somehow, molecules that are 4 times as massive as nitrogen and oxygen leak from your refrigerator or air conditioner and unerringly find their way to the stratosphere above Antarctica but not the equator to destroy O3
In any case, it is nice to see the newspaper recognize that air conditioning is not only a pleasant but a necessary bit of technology for humanity. Now, what do they suggest as a reliable, inexpensive power source?
[3] “Air Conditioning is a Moral Imperative,” Editorial Board, WashingtonPost,10/05/2024
The Sun Is Shining Somewhere
When the sun shines, solar energy is cheap, especially if the solar collectors were subsidized. When the wind blows hard, wind energy is cheap, especially if the wind turbines were subsidized. The storage systems that would be necessary for solar and wind to be able to make their electricity 99.99% reliable would make the cost far higher than electricity from coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro.
There are always Polyannas with rosy outlooks on everything. For example, Mike Nelson (retiring from a Denver TV station as a weatherman) tells us that solar is not only cheap, but also reliable because the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet. For example, when the sun is setting in California, it’s noontime a few thousand miles out into the Pacific. All we need is solar collectors out there and some wires to bring the electricity to California and to New York and Boston as well. He says [4]:
We can fix this with technologies we have right now. We don’t have to wait for nuclear fusion to be figured out. Wind and solar especially utility-scale solar have become socheap that they are by far the cheapest form of energy. And yes, granted, the sun does not shine in one particular spot 24 hours a day, but it shines on our planet allthetime, bringing us vast amounts of energy that if we just capture it and if we move it from source to need, we can solve this problem right now. And the most important thing is going to be transmission of electricity. As we electrify our society from the cars to the
way that we cook, the way we heat our homes we can do all of this right now. And the next big project and I hope we can come together on both parties on this is to completely reinvent our transmission system across the country an interstate highway for electricity. [Emphasis added]
According to the Energy Information Administration (eia.gov) about 4.4% of the electricity generated in the country is lost in transmission (very high voltage) and distribution (medium high voltage). In other words, the T&D system is 95.6% efficient. Weatherman Mike Nelson wants to improve things by using Unobtanium to increase that efficiency to 100% or even better.
[4] “Fall 2024 forecast, climate and more: Mike Nelson catches up with CPR's Ryan Warner,” https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=6BNsitRIP-I
The Pounding Wind
Picture the wind blowing a rotating wind turbine. The wind exerts force against each of the three blades and against the tower as well. When a blade passes in front of the tower, there is an interruption in the sum of the four forces, hence the force that the tower must exert.
Typically, large wind turbines turn at about 20 revolutions per minute, so there are about 60 thumps per minute one per second that are transmitted to the support in the ground. With an array of wind turbines offshore, the frequency of thumps put into the ocean floor is 10to-hundreds of times as high, right in the range of the sounds emitted by whales and dolphins for communication and echolocation
There are other problems that seem to be related to offshore wind turbines [5]:
When the offshore wind developers came to his ocean, James “Ace” Auteri, a commercial fisherman for 50 years, did his best to cooperate.
Auteri is a pot fisherman. He caught sea bass in pots eight miles southwest of his home port of Montauk, New York. But lobsters? “There are no signs of life at all,” Auteri said.
… Commercial fishermen all around Block Island are telling similar stories. Ever since the wind farms came to the ocean, lobsters are hard to find. Formerly productive scallop beds are dead. Cod have disappeared.
Correlation is not causation, of course. Perhaps the process of installing the wind turbines did something to reduce the populations of lobsters, scallops, and cod. Perhaps something about the wind turbines or the electricity they produce makes the region unsuitable for some aquatic life.
[5] Donna Andersen, “Wind Industry Is Killing Sea Life On East Coast, Fishermen Say,” Sep 12, 2024 https://www.public.news, Thanks to Frederick Willis
STEM Notes
Horoscope readers are familiar with the names of 12 constellations, some of which are very hard to identify in the sky. Missing from the list is the most prominent constellation of all Orion. Why?
Think back to ancient religions when people noticed that patterns in the sky rose in the east and settled in the west, but some bright objects seemed to wander around in those
patterns. The “wanderers” (now called planets) became known as gods, and it was important to know what houses (constellations) they were in and what mischief they were up to.
Stand back and view the solar system from a distance. All the planets go around the sun is elliptical orbits that are not quite in a single plane, but in individual planes that are in a narrow band. Seen from our moving Earth, that band goes across the sky in a certain direction and is divided up into the 12 constellations of the Zodiac. The other 76 constellations, including Orion, are not in that band.
Tipsy Seas
NOAA has discovered a nice thing about a flat earth, which is that “climate change” can tip the whole earth so that the seas will rise the least in the Pacific and the most in the Gulf of Mexico, as shown below [6]:
[6] File:2050 Projected sea level rise - United States coastsNOAA.svg - Wikipedia; graph created from NOAA publication at https://web.archive.org/web/20221129041502/https://oceanservic e.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-reportsections.html
The Energy Advocate
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