| ??? 03/26/10 20:44 Read: times |
#174540 - Don't build the power plants near the poles, then. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
Not at all. All local warming is added on top of the base temperature. If we assume that the sun shines 1kW heat/m2, then 1GW of waste heat is enough to double the amount of energy for a square kilometer or increasing the amount of heat with 10% for ten square kilometers. And it doesn't take too much temperature changes to drastically change the situation for animals and plants. If you have 2 degrees global warming, then you have a 2 degree smaller window allowed for local warming. Well, the major problem with global warming isn't that it's getting hotter. The problem is more energy in the atmosphere, more extreme weather, changing weather patterns, and of course melting pole caps. None of these are local problems. Also, _temperature_ rises roughly with the fourth root of heat input. And thirdly - the sun is dumping energy on Earth at a rate of ten thousand times the primary energy consumption of humanity. The anthropogenic heat simply disappears next to that. We are a long way from being able to build efficient battery-powered vehicles - especially airplanes. If we have enough power, we can just synthesize hydrocarbons - if necessary from CO2 and H2O, even. The processes have long been known, but with plenty of hydrocarbons to harvest, no one has bothered using them yet. |
