| So I would love to get some feedback from this group on my takeaway from what I've learned of global warming. The general consensus seems to be that gasses like carbon dioxide and methane heat cause an increase in global warming. I don't dispute that, but out of fun a few years ago on earth day I started crunching some numbers regarding our direct thermal pollution. In the US our current consumption of gasoline alone is as 142.98 billion gallons per year[0]. At an average of 120,429 BTUs per gallon [1] that puts the US at ~17.219 quadrillion BTUs a year (in gasoline consumption alone) Does this matter? Well at that scale we're talking about a Hiroshima Nuclear Bomb level event (15 Kilotons of TNT or ~60 Billion BTUs) every 0.54 minutes all day every day in this country when just considering American consumption of gasoline alone. If volcanoes are your thing, Mt. Saint Helens produced 24 megatons of thermal energy in its 6 years of eruptive activity. The US on the other hand produces the thermal equivalent of that every ~2.1 days... and again, that's just gasoline. Most of our heat comes from gas which is converted directly to thermal energy. And then we have coal power... Regardless of how "clean" you make it. We're talking about burning things to create energy so the basic law of the conservation of energy comes into play. And as hot air rises, it doesn't just magically become cooler... it dissipates that energy until it reaches an equilibrium. Thereby transferring energy into the geosphere. And then when you explode things like natural gas or coal use, it's sometimes being used to heat, but even when it's being used to cool, we're not getting 1-to-1 efficiency. Air conditioners output more heat than they dissipate. And if people use ACs more as atmospheric heat increases, we're talking about a positive feedback loop without even taking into account the thermal pollution of creating the energy by burning stuff in the first place. (Even nuclear plants tend to use ocean water for cooling - thereby directly heating the oceans) I'm not saying carbon dioxide and methane aren't potentially catastrophic, but I don't think it makes sense to discount our direct thermal pollution as a potential cause. I only based figures in my argument on US gasoline consumption. That's a minor piece of the global energy pie. Either way, reducing personal wattage through efficiency and reduced use seem to be pretty productive in terms of reducing my personal thermal impact so it seems like a step in the right direction whether thermal pollution is directly related to global warming or not. [0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10
[1]https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_ene... |