Earth's heat budget

[Ian Abrahams]

Less of a BOC-L thread, more of a Kim Stanley Robinson novel! :)




________________________________
From: M Holmes <fofp at HOLYROOD.ED.AC.UK>
To: BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2009 6:09:15 PM
Subject: Earth's heat budget

I looked it up for y'all. Now wikipedia isn't exactly academic
references. OTOH this page isn't a kick in the arse from the last
figures I did read. If anyone has anything significantly different though,
let's have a gander...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget

So lessee:

Solar radiation (incoming) 99.978%

Geothermal (coming up from underneath): 0.013%

Fossil fuels (us burning shit): 0.007%

Nukes will add a little to that, but nothing significant.

So: Geothermal energy is producing twice the heat we produce and the Sun
is giving Earth something over ten thousand times as much heat as we're
producing. As I said: we have a long way to go before we're a player in
that game.

For the record, the IPCC (the scientists who worry about global warming
by running computer models about what things might be like in the
future) have *never* *ever* claimed that the heat produced by humans is
a problem.

They have claimed that human production of waste gases is significantly
or even largely responsible for increasing the proportion of those gases
in the atmosphere and that this causes global warming by trapping more
heat from the Sun. 

Some scientists outside of the IPCC agree that global warming is
happening, but disagree that human industry is a big part of the reason. 
Patrick Moore of Sky At Night fame has noted that temperatures on Mars,
Titan and a couple of Jupiter's moons have also risen.  He notes that
this is not caused by humans and that he believes there will be much
surprise when one of the solar cycles turns in the 2030's and things
cool down here, meaning that reality fails to match up to the computer
models of the IPCC.

Relevance to this argument: the original contention was that nuclear
power will increase global warming as a direct result of the heat
produced. Since it'd take us quite a while to ramp up nuclear energy to
anywhere like the energy produced by fossil fuels, and since that in
itself is an insignificant part of the heat budget of the Earth, I
submit that we should find nuclear power Not Guilty and dismiss the
client.

I now await the summing up on the part of the prosecution.

FoFP


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