Deep warming
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Deep warming
60 years ago
In a 1965 report, scientists warned the U.S. government that continued use of fossil fuels would cause global warming, which could have potentially disastrous consequences for the climate.
Since then, many have debated what to do. Governments worldwide have pledged to phase out emissions and transition to “green energy” over the coming decades. But global temperatures are rising faster than we expected. Some climate scientists worry that these rapid increases could create new problems through positive heat feedback loops that could more quickly destabilise the climate and make parts of the world uninhabitable.
Perhaps by 2050, the large-scale social and environmental changes will help us mitigate the worst effects of our extensive use of fossil fuels.
Scientists tell us that even if we solve the immediate warming problem associated with the greenhouse effect, there is another steadily growing warming problem. This is called the “deep warming” problem. It concerns the increase in the Earth’s surface temperature, but unlike ‘global warming,’ it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and our use of fossil fuels.
‘Deep warming’ is a direct result of our use of energy in all forms (and our tendency to use more energy over time). It is caused by the inevitable ‘waste heat’ (entropy) generated whenever we use energy to do anything.
Yes, the world can transform itself by 2050. Thanks to advanced technologies, carbon dioxide levels can stabilise or fall. But we will still face a deeper problem.
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‘Deep warming’ is not only caused by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; it is part of our relationship with energy itself.
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The second law of thermodynamics
All the energy we humans use—to heat our homes, run our factories, drive our cars and planes, or run our electronics—ultimately ends up in the environment as heat. Initially, most of our energy goes directly into the environment as heat.
A smaller portion of the energy we use is stored in physical changes, such as new steel, plastic, or concrete. It is stored in our cities and technologies. Over time, as these materials break down, their energy also finds its way back into the environment as heat.
This is a direct consequence of the principles of thermodynamics. The second law states that energy transformation always proceeds from more organised and useful forms to less organised and less useful forms. Although the amount of energy remains the same, it gradually changes into less organised, less useful forms.
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The end point of the energy process is waste heat, which is usually unusable. Everything we do generates waste heat.
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Where does all our energy come from?
Contrary to popular belief solar energy comes to us with little residual heat in the form of photons with low entropy.
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Some of it is absorbed by the earth's crust, some is reflected back into space and a small part is dispersed in the atmosphere (higher entropy, higher residual heat) and thus provides heat on earth. The solar radiation that reaches the earth is about 174 petawatts (174 x 1015 watts). This represents the average power of solar radiation that reaches the upper atmosphere of the earth. This is about 10,000 times more energy than humanity uses in a day.
All energy consumption can therefore be traced back to solar energy that we received with low entropy and convert into kinetic (motion) or other types of energy. In this process, residual heat is inevitably released.
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“It is not energy, but entropy that makes the world go round” – Carlo Rovelli
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Renewable energy
Unlike fossil fuels or even nuclear power – which magnify all waste heat – renewables ‘capture’ the low-entropy energy already on its way to Earth.
If we use renewables properly, they don’t have to contribute to the waste heat in the environment. We don’t produce any more waste heat than would have been created by sunlight in the first place.
Consider wind power. Sunlight first stirs the atmosphere by unevenly heating parts of the planet, creating giant convection cells (pressure zones). As the wind swirls through the atmosphere, through trees, over mountains and waves, most of its energy is converted into heat, which is channelled into the microscopic movements of molecules. If we harvest some wind energy through turbines, it is converted into heat, but in a form that we can store and use. Crucially, no more heat is generated than if there had been no turbines to capture the wind.
The same is true for solar power. When a solar panel captures the sunlight that falls on it – which would normally be absorbed by the Earth’s surface – this does not change the amount of waste heat that is produced while they are generating energy. The light that would have warmed the Earth’s surface instead enters the solar cells, is used by humans for some purpose, and later ends up as heat. We reduce the amount of heat the Earth absorbs by exactly the same amount as the energy we extract for human use. We do not contribute to overall planetary warming.
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Efficient use
It is easy to think that we will use less energy if we make technology more efficient.
Economists are well aware of a paradoxical effect known as ‘rebound’, where improved energy efficiency through the use of a technology actually leads to broader use of that technology. And also to more energy consumption.
In his book The Coal Question, British economist William Stanley Jevons described already in 1865 a classic example of this: the invention of the steam engine. This new technology could extract energy from coal combustion more efficiently, but it also made so many new applications possible that the use of coal increased.
Avoiding ‘deep warming’ means reducing our waste heat and bringing it into balance with natural entropy.
This means that renewables have to be choosen. Unlike energy from fossil fuels or even nuclear power, which increase our waste heat burden, renewables intercept energy that is already on its way to the earth rather than producing additional waste heat.
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Chaisson summarised the problem quite clearly in 2008:
I’m now of the opinion … that any energy that’s dug up on Earth – including all fossil fuels of course, but also nuclear and ground-sourced geothermal – will inevitably produce waste heat as a byproduct of humankind’s use of energy. The only exception to that is energy arriving from beyond Earth, this is energy here and now and not dug up, namely the many solar energies (plural) caused by the Sun’s rays landing here daily …The need to avoid waste heat is indeed the single, strongest, scientific argument to embrace solar energies of all types.
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However, this requires caution. For example, covering deserts with solar panels would contribute to global warming because deserts reflect a lot of incoming light back into space, so it is never absorbed by the earth (and therefore produces no residual heat). Deserts covered with dark panels would absorb much more energy than the open desert soil, further warming the planet.
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An economy based on renewable energy
We are capable of many things that make us human: learning, discovering, inventing, creating. For every useful new technology that comes into use and starts to consume a lot of energy (e.g. digital storage & ai), the energy consumption must be balanced elsewhere with the renewable energy received from the sun. That way we can continue with the future that is constantly new and possibly better.
Every step towards an economy based on:
- Refuse
- Rethink
- Reduce
- Reuse
- Repair
- Refurbish
- Remanufacture and Repurpose
- Recycle
and
- RENEWABLE energy
must be fully supported!
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Sources
- Mark Buchanan – Deep warming
- Frank Wilczek - Fundamenteel. Tien sleutels tot de werkelijkheid
- Eos, Vol. 89, No. 28, 8 July 2008 - Long-Term Global Heating - From Energy Usage
- N. Cowern & C. Ahn - Thermal emissions and climate change: Cooler options for future energy technology
- Presidents Science Advisory Committee – Report of the Environmental pollution Panel