The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat
| March 19, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Global Warming, Off Topic |
Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2003 completed the deployment of 3000 oceanic robots that dive 1 kilometer deep and record the water temperature. The unexpected result is that the robots have found that the ocean cooled slightly in the past 4 years. Willis also says that the oceans contain almost ten times the amount of heat as the atmosphere so the ocean temperature is much more critical to watch. Compounding the mystery is the fact that the oceans have risen by one centimeter in the past 4 years which is much more than was forecast. A cooling ocean should be falling not rising. He says the fall is offset by icemelt in Greenland and Antarctica but the meltwaters aren’t nearly enough to account for the rise. In another refreshingly canded admission Willis says that global climate models do not adequately account for the effect of clouds and they have no current instrumentation to measure global cloud behavior. He suspects that clouds act as a thermostat to limit how warm and how cold the earth can get. I’ve read elsewhere and have blogged it here that global warming models don’t account for precipitation and increased precipitation might also be a thermostat – when the atmosphere warms up we get a faster water cycle, a faster water cycle means more evaporation, and it takes a lot of heat to evaporate water. Increased rainfall essentially acts like a global swamp cooler.
The long and the short of all this is that blaming CO2 for any negative or potentially negative effects at this point in time is just a lot of hot air (figuratively not literally). In the meantime we do know three things that are undisputed:
1) a warm wet world is better than a cold dry world
2) food crops grow better and faster when given more warmth and carbon dioxide
3) reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere is a costly undertaking that will put further strain on the global economy
So there exists a very real possibility that attempts to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere will have far worse consequences than doing nothing. It will certainly cost a lot to do it starting right away. If it can be done at all it will take 50 years before any benefits start kicking in. If it can be done in 50 years it might be disastrous to the world food supply, especially if the climate cools (for whatever reason) simultaneous to the CO2 reduction. At the very least the whole situation needs to be studied a lot more before action is taken. If we take action based on incomplete climate models we’re just asking for trouble. Look before you leap.
Read more here: The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat by Richard Harris
35 Responses to The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat
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BarryA
“We are a long long long way from where it would make economic sense to spend trillions on an alternative to fossil fuels.”
The problem is that we will rapidly “spend trillions” on oil if we don’t. e.g. US oil imports cost > $350 billion/yr x 30 yrs >>$10 trillion > US National debt – assuming it was available.
More of a challenge is the limitations on how fast it takes to develop and implement alternatives. See publications by Robert Hirsch: The Hirsch Report
DLH and DaveScot,
I think your exchange drives home the point that no one can predict well how technologies will converge in ten or twenty years. Not to say you shouldn’t debate what will work and what won’t, but I don’t think firm decisions on such matters should be made early on. Not only do apparent non-starters sometimes turn out to be sensational successes, but failures in strange regions of the space of feasible technologies sometimes generate information that turns out to be enormously valuable later on.
I say we are more likely to get several sensational technologies with exploration of 1000 iffy technologies than by focusing on 100 “promising” technologies.
Perhaps it’s obvious, but I’ll say outright that I think in terms of the evolution of technology. Simulation studies conducted by David Fogel and associates indicate that when two species, one of which has offspring with higher mean fitness and lower variance of fitness, and the other of which has offspring with lower mean fitness and higher variance of fitness, are in competition, and both generate many more offspring than can survive, the species with the lower mean and the higher variance dominates (i.e., in population size).
Our society can afford a great many technological trials. I am essentially saying that to get super-fit technologies, we should go with high risk (variance of returns) and low mean return in state-sponsored R&D.
The following paper reveals a major cause for the appearance of “global warming”.
Global Warming Data Affected By Land-Use Change, Study Says
December 04, 2007 – News Release
DLH
re; land use
1% now (possibly) but our needs grow. We need 10x the amount of energy today than a century ago. A century hence will we need to utilize 10% of the earth’s surface to capture enough solar flux? There is no practical limit to how much solar energy we can capture in space.
Also, you haven’t yet addressed my point about distribution grids. While it may be possible to cover the Mojave with enough solar panels to meet the current needs of the United States how do we distribute the power from the Mojave to everywhere else? Our power grid is already failing. When one local power plant goes down and power is rerouted from elsewhere to make up for it we get massive cascades of shutdowns because the grid gets overloaded. Several massive blackouts like that have occurred in the past few years. Distribution of energy is as critical a problem as is generation.
re; floating power plants
Floating solar power plants have several big problems. The first is distribution. How do you get the power from where it is generated to where it is needed? Floating tranmission lines? The second problem is that saltwater is corrosive. Maintenance costs go up dramatically and useful lifetimes go down dramatically in saltwater environments. The third problem is stability. You need a very stable platform to keep mirrors or panels aimed at the sun. Floating structures on the open ocean lack this stability. Keep in mind it also has to withstand the extremes of weather on the open ocean without breaking up.
One last point. We currently have about 650 megawatts in solar power plants in the Mojave desert producing electricity at $0.12/kilowatt hour. This is equivalent to a single medium size nuclear power plant which generates power at about $0.06/kwh. We’d need about 500 times more than that to meet the current electrical needs of the United States. Why don’t we just do it? For the same reason we don’t build a thousand nuclear power plants in the Mojave – distribution. When all the power is produced in one place it still has to be distributed to where it is needed. Transmission lines are expensive to build and maintain, have a significant ecological footprint, and have increasingly large losses over increasingly large distances. I think you are basically ignoring the distribution problem which is in fact just as big as the generation problem. At one time it was thought that superconducting transmission lines would come to the rescue but despite decades of research it hasn’t yet become workable. Solar power sats solve both the generation and distribution problems. Land based solar doesn’t solve the distribution problem even if it does solve the generation problem.
DaveScott
I agree that distribution is a critical issue. I would much prefer distributed generation for security. Distribution needs to be considered in the overall mix.
See Rocky Mountain Institute on Energy Security.
You suggested: Why don’t we just do it? – Because of distribution problems.
I suggest there are many far larger reasons. e.g., California monopoly practices and pricing structures, comparing mature fossil/nuclear with nacent solar, tax structures etc. We have yet to see serious aggressive solar thermal design and pricing.
Yet within that context:
See near term potential for Sahara solar power to Germany at 6c/kWh
Distribution losses can be accommodated at whatever the scale.
Economists happily wax eloquent on optimal pricing of transmission:
Electricity Transmission Pricing:
How much does it cost to get it wrong?
Richard Green
For popular info,
(wikipedia citing)
PRESENT LIMITS OF VERY LONG DISTANCE TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS
By L. Paris, et al.
Issues are:
1) Pricing structure to provide timely distribution with the reliability people ae really willing to pay for.
2) Pricing to pay for using the redundancy of backup generation etc.
3) Technical structuring to provide rapid, fail safe, isolation.
4) Dealing with those unhappy activists living SE of Europe.
On ocean stability, submariners do not get seasick, and the navy manages to hit targets from rolling platforms. That is just a economic/technical issue that appears manageable in the larger context of providing economic power and fuel.
On future demand, consider optimal energy services rather than current wasteful practice. E.g. energy use can frequently be reduced 40% and possibly 80% if you work at it. See Rocky Mountain Institute.
Distributed energy storage could also be very important in stabilizing the grid.
What if we could install 1,000 solar thermal power stations across the SW and So US with numerous distribution lines and 20% excess capacity at 5c/kWh?
See the National Academy for Engineering Grand ChallengeMake solar energy economical
Please pursue your Satellite Solar, and I will happily pursue terrestrial solar to that goal. May be best design win.
If you think you can come anywhere close economically, by all means point us to how that can be done.
e.g., see
Solar Energy Resources – Orbiting Solar Power Satellite G. L. Kulcinski, 2004, National Research Council
This is a good challenge in current “Intelligent Design” (rather than the distribution system “evolving” with numerous “mutations” with corresponding consequences)!