Comment King

This is perhaps the clearest explanation of Global Climate Change I’ve ever read. The commenter (on New Scientist online) wrote nothing but heavily evidenced and even mathematically proven statements about why we can’t just pretend like we don't have the capacity over time to make this planet completely unsupportive of "our way of life."


10 comment down on a story from the article headlined, Hybrid fusion: the third nuclear option

Still Adding Energy To Its Overload

Fri Mar 05 12:58:35 GMT 2010 by Peter Thomson

Doctor Singmaster, the Earth and it's biosphere is most definitely not a closed system. It is an open system in an equilibrium state, where the inflow of solar energy (insolation) is balanced by the outflow of low frequency infra-red energy being re-radiated from the planet's surface and atmosphere back into space. The temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere is the temperature at which equilibrium occurs.

I understand your main concern is heating caused by human release of stored forms of energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear. But human energy use is only small fraction of the solar heat balance.
The solar energy inflow to Earth is 174 petawatts, balanced at the atmosphere/space boundary by an equal outflow (if it wasn't we'd be heating up very quickly indeed!) Global human consumption of all forms of energy is 15 terawatts. This is less than 0.01% of the total heat flux of the planet.

This human heat does not continuously build up in the atmosphere. The temperature only rises until the infra-red outflow balances the solar inflow plus the generated heat. At 0.01% of total flux, the direct human-induced temperature rise is insignificant.

The real issue is the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. This 'greenhouse gas' makes the atmosphere look marginally more opaque to low frequncy infra-red, reducing the rate of radiation outflow. This forces the planet to warm up, until the low frequency outflow once more equals the solar flux. Equilibrium is achieved, but at a higher average surface temperature.

Trying to cool the planet by trapping and removing energy from the atmosphere is futile - we can't possibly remove enough heat to make any difference. The real solution is to remove and sequester atmospheric CO2 until the CO2 level falls back to long term levels.
Our future descendents may well thank us if we can capture the carbon from atmospheric CO2, and store it where it is accessible. They might just need to pump it back into the atmosphere in a few thousand years time - to prevent the next Milankovich cycle ice age!

Of course the evidence/proofs are supplied in the comment, but, also of course, it's not a research paper, nor are ur fingers broken. Google what you doubt or are curious about! :) The information is readily available and substantiated and FREE for all to see.

Here're a couple of great places to start.

Real Climate: Climate Science from climate scientists
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)


And please do look out for the highly educated who's only excuse for the degree to which they take their disagreements on extraordinarily well documented climate trends appears to be some slight they received from the, truthfully as the unavoidability of rain in monsoon season, the all too human element of other scientists. There are some folks who claim to compare data, right up to the point where someone tries to compare RELEVANT data.