I'm imagining it as incremental amounts of a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that arrives daily on the planet from the sun.
I'm guessing the amount of energy is less of an issue than the cascading transformation chains the daily solar energy allocation bounces through, less of an issue than increasing insulation factors in the atmosphere, etc.
Well I was just thinking about how much time and energy it takes to warm a large building. This system is warming things up for thousands of miles. It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
Having a building heating amount as a base unit is likely an error of scale - not incorrect, just not particularly useful or enlightening when it comes to making a model of energy flows and cascades about the planet.
> It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
The entire US grid? Entire global electricity grid? Probably?
Have a shot at putting numbers and units to some of this ... Total amount of daily solar energy fall, total amount of daily energy radiation to space, daily residual energy at sea / surface layer, historic and current human energy consumption (broken into electricity, heat, ??) etc.
The Sun imparts about 7.6 kWh/m²/day at the equator.
Suppose the area of the equatorial oceans is about 100M km².
That's 2.41e21 J/day potential of hitting oceans, but not entirely absorbed. Put another way: about ⅓ the energy of all natural gas reserves as solar radiation per day.
I'm guessing the amount of energy is less of an issue than the cascading transformation chains the daily solar energy allocation bounces through, less of an issue than increasing insulation factors in the atmosphere, etc.
Would that be about right by your reckoning?