Comment by stuaxo
3 years ago
Generating a load of heat, when part of the what renewables are for is averting climate change seems counterproductive.
3 years ago
Generating a load of heat, when part of the what renewables are for is averting climate change seems counterproductive.
At Earth scale it's not human generated heat that's the problem.
The problem (simplified) is that vast amounts of energy from the Sun fall daily across the globe.
An amount of that energy generates a great deal of heat at the land surface and ocean layer.
Much more heat by magnitudes than humans create.
Some of that heat warms the land, water and lower atmosphere, a great deal of that heat radiates outwards toward space ..
A balance was struck that's been more or less "just right" on average for some 200K years.
We have altered that balance by increasing the insulating properties of the lower atmosphere via increased CO2 (with worse flow on effects from increasing methane and water vapor).
This additional trapped energy is causing more powerful atmospheric events and increased mean tempretures.
But the cause is insulating in very large amounts of energy, not generating small amounts of energy (at the appropriate relative scales).