On 09/09/2016 07:20 AM, Tim Cutts wrote:
2. Surely, we heat up
the oceans regardless of whether it's directly by cooling with the
sea or indirectly by cooling in air, and atmospheric warming slowly
warming the oceans. Ultimately it will all come to equilibrium (with
possible disastrous consequences) whichever way we do it. There was
Actually, it is already at equilibrium (or we'd be in serious trouble).
Equilibrium doesn't mean uniform, but that gains - losses == constant
(at least to first order).
Heat gains: insolation, radiation from decaying elements
Heat losses: thermal radiation (Stefan-Boltzmann) goes as the 4th power
of temperature (assuming the earth is a "black body" in the physicists
language).
AGW would effectively change the reflective properties of the atmosphere
(perversely providing a higher albedo to reflect insolation which would
be a "loss" or cooling mechanism), while potentially altering the
effective heat capacity (Cv) of the atmosphere. The latter is tiny
compared to the heat capacity of the ocean ( Cv("air") << Cv(ocean) ).
This said, if FB dumped all of their data centers into the ocean, and we
all started posting cat videos, and then doing analytics on them ...
doom would be impending ...
quite a nice point made in the late David MacKay's book pointing out
that it doesn't really matter even if we found an abundant source of
almost free energy; the atmosphere still has a finite surface area
from which to radiate the waste heat to space, which imposes a
significant upper limit on how much power the human race can safely
use.
True ... but these limits are way ... way out there, and the loss
mechanisms are quite efficient. We are in a pretty good eq right now,
even if we shift it a little each way ... I have my doubts as to whether
or not we could seriously dump enough waste heat energy into the
ocean/atmosphere to significantly impact the equilibrium.
Happy to be shown to be wrong, but I think we are (many orders of
magnitude) away from that point where it really starts to become a concern.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
e: land...@scalableinformatics.com
w: http://scalableinformatics.com
t: @scalableinfo
p: +1 734 786 8423 x121
c: +1 734 612 4615
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