(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide)
Objection: We all live on a thin crust that floats on a huge ball of molten iron, and at its core, the Earth's temperature is over 5000 degrees C! It's pretty far fetched to think a few parts per million of CO2 can have a bigger effect that all that heat!
Answer:
Although there is nothing wrong with the statement that the Earth is truly very hot at its center (actually as hot as the surface of the sun) the notion that it is a significant source of heat at the surface is easily dismissed with a little critical thinking. If the inner heat were really the dominant factor, then surely the day-night cycle would not be what it is, nor would you expect such variation in climates over seasons and latitudes. How can the south pole be covered with thousands of meters of ice with all this heat supposedly bubbling up from the surface? Why would a little lower angle of sunlight cause the average temperature to drop from +20°C in the summer to -20°C in the winter?
The fact of the matter is, solid rock is an extremely good insulator and the heat from the mantle propagates up very slowly and diminishes very quickly (at about 20°C/km) to almost nothing by the time it is at the surface. At the surface, the earth is releasing less than one-tenth of one Watt/m2. If you could somehow capture all of the energy coming up from the earth's core into the foundation of an average-sized home, you might have enough to power one 15W light bulb! Not a lot of of juice when you compare it to the sun, which provides on average some 342W/m2 of energy to the earth's surface.
And let's not forget that what we are talking about is climate change, not just climate. So we need some kind of change in this heat flux if we wish to explain a change in the global temperature. Scientists have calculated that increased greenhouse gases have resulted in a radiative forcing of 2.43 Wm-2 which means we need that many Watts/m2 of change to account for the current warming. Back to geothermal, this means the energy flow from the earth would have had to jump by over 200 times to be the cause of the approximately 0.8°C temperature rise.
It is pretty hard to imagine not noticing that!
This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.
"Global Warming comes from within" is also posted on A Few Things Ill Considered, where additional comments can be found, and where the author, Coby Beck, is more likely to respond.
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
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Comments
View as Flat
dobermanmacleod Posted 4:10 pm
21 Oct 2008
Wind a solenoidal coil around a magnet, and apply electricity. The magnetic field is amplified, and the magnetic gradient can be exploited to yield more electricity than was used powering the solenoidal coil. A private California company called Magnetic Power Inc ( http://www.magneticpowerinc.com ) exceeded breakeven (i.e. produced more electricity than it used) with a prototype in late 2004.
Frankly, most people (especially those with a scientific background) are very skeptical, labeling it a "perpetual motion machine." MPI will introduce their solid state power generator onto the market in about a year. I am not associated with MPI, but I just wanted to comment that this losing battle of arguing with global warming deniers (it is an IDEOLOGY) is mute.
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dobermanmacleod Posted 4:27 pm
21 Oct 2008
"Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a '70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That's because -- news flash! -- climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference." --David Roberts, The Nation, 24 February 2008
"The pro-carbon lobby is looking for gaps in climate science the way creationists are questioning Darwinian evolution. These people are no "skeptics". Real skepticism, inherent in science, makes no prior assumptions and is evidence based. The view of the atmosphere as a legitimate open sewer for human-generated carbon gases, makes the prior assumption no anthropogenic global warming takes place, then proceeds to look for errors, real or imaginary, in climate science." --Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, Australian National University
I make it a point never to argue with a drunk (or a person with diminished judgment) --Brad Arnold, author of this posting
P.S.
Without clean coal, any carbon dieting scheme is doomed:
Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide -- a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he stressed."
Greens frequently underestimate the cost of carbon dieting:
"Japan, like the European Union, hasn't let its failure so far to meet Kyoto emissions-reductions targets stop it from setting even more ambitious goals, like a 50% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. But how to do that? If getting within shouting distance of Kyoto's targets could cost Japan $500 billion, how much would it cost to cut emissions twelve-fold more?" --Keith Johnson, WSJ, 19 March 2008
I could go on like this all day. Without that solid state power generator by MPI it is very unlikely we will avoid either abrupt climate change or runaway global warming. The global warming deniers just add insult to injury.
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:38 pm
21 Oct 2008
Why is it always the battle of the models.
Does anyone in this "Science" ever have any real data and experiments?
Sorry I asked!
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stinkycheese Posted 10:00 pm
21 Oct 2008
A simple way to check these things is to remember: Energy In > Energy Out. Always. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If these people were onto something in 2004, the rest of us wouldn't be learning about this from a blog comment-- and these things are always at least "a year away."
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 11:47 pm
21 Oct 2008
There's no bailout for the next crisis
Monday, October 20, 2008 The Oregonian
The recent haggling over how to solve the nation's economic crisis seems to have done little to ease the anxieties of either Wall Street or Main Street. And with good reason: Intuitively, we know we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
Watching a lifetime of stock options head south? Worried about where you'll find the money to pay for college or about the spiraling costs of health care? Certainly nothing could hurt worse than a foreclosure, could it? Well, maybe it could. If $700 billion sounds like a lot, try fathoming $9 trillion -- roughly 13 times the cost of today's hotly debated bailout. That's the projected cost of letting global climate change go unaddressed within this decade.
The thorough shakeup of today's economic climate foreshadows an even more disastrous global crisis heading our way. The same belief in unlimited, unchecked growth (some would say outright greed) that fattened our economy on a diet of junk bonds and hollow lending is also strip-mining our planet's environment of the currency that nature safely invested for us over millions of years, and upon which all life -- including our own -- depends.
The concept of peak oil is not just some naysayers' delusion. According to the U.S. Energy Department's own findings, commonly called the Hirsch report and issued in 2005, it's an unavoidable reality, one that is hurtling toward us faster than we know what to do about.
But like the blind eye that was turned on the proliferation of high-risk, foolhardy mortgages in the midst of a slowing economy, we've bolstered our bravado in the face of such warnings while enthusing about drilling offshore and in the arctic.
While we've been busy digging our fossil-fuel foundations out from under us with the same kind of naive bluster and faith in infinite growth that gutted the economy, we've also been busy ruining things at the top as our upper atmosphere becomes choked with carbon dioxide, leaving us in an environmental demise of our own doing.
When it comes to the economy, a few sleights of hand and a heavy toll on taxpayers, all partisan bickering aside, can be called upon to help us avert disaster and restore faith in the unlimited expansion model. But when it comes to nature's bank, cashing out is forever. No amount of midnight meetings, government-ordered buyouts or credit freezes can save a habitat laid fallow by years of unregulated dumping of chemical waste, nor can they lower our thermostats to an inhabitable temperature in the face of global warming.
Sound policy and the pursuit of new technologies might ameliorate some of our excesses, helping to slow down the rate of climate change and postponing the date of disaster. But like the banking and credit crisis that arrived to the surprise of so many experts -- despite the many warnings sounded years earlier -- environmental failure is going to rear its ugly head someday.
And when mother earth forecloses on us, there will be nowhere else to go.
Lisa Weasel is an associate professor of biology at Portland State University and a board member of The Greenhouse Network.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
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gzuckier Posted 1:27 am
22 Oct 2008
have you ever had any occasion when the ground was the warmest thing around, except when the sun was beating down on it, like the beach? in particular, in the middle of winter, when solar heating is minimal, is the ground warm? is the ground warm at night when there is no sun? how about at night, in the winter? is there any evidence at all of any heat coming fron the ground when the solar heating is at its minimum? if, like me, you can answer with a solid "no", then how can anyone possibly believe that there is a significant quantity of heat leaking upwards from the core?
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gzuckier Posted 1:33 am
22 Oct 2008
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KenG Posted 2:47 am
22 Oct 2008
With the earths surface being about 510 Million km2 and the solar absorption being about 150 megawatts per square km, it appears that solar heating is about three orders of magnitude greater than internal heating.
Someone better check my math. I'm going from memory and I'm late for a meeting.
Earth Heating
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Duggles Posted 5:20 am
22 Oct 2008
http://exitmundi.nl/quantum.htm
(according to a wikipedia article that I did not write, the quantum vacuum is the same as zero point energy)
So it may be that MPI seeks to save the global village, by destroying the global village (and the universe)!
j/k
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 12:45 am
24 Oct 2008
Please understand that Dr. Lisa Weasel is an honorable scientist. She neither hides, nor hides from, the empirical evidence to which she refers in her letter, "There's no bailout for the next crisis". At least to me, her behavior is exemplary. We need to see her example displayed in the actions of many other scientists who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate what their science tells them is real and true.
So far as I can tell, Dr. Weasel does not formulate policy or engage in action planning. She does the work scientists are supposed to be doing: helping people see the world we inhabit as it is.
Of course, her reporting is off-putting precisely because the message from science is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.
Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. Nothing else will do as an adequate substitute. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine challenges to overcome.
Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, scientists need to do their duty, as Lisa Weasel is doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By avoiding science, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God's gifts to humanity.
Ignoring Dr. Weasel's science cannot be allowed to prevail, even though her reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, Dr. Weasel's science does present our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.
It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally "produce" illusions of the world as it is. Dr. Weasel's research seems to be disturbing in some basic way because her work comes into conflict with certain culturally derived notions held by leaders of our culture about what it means to be human and about the "placement" of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see immediately, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the 'pedestal' from which human beings prefer to arrogantly look upon other creatures and nature. We humans may introject culturally biased and scientifically unsupported transmissions (i.e., memes) that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real or to recognize certain requirements of practical reality. For a very long time cultural transmissions or memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for us to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.
When a psychological practitioner like myself thinks a patient is suffering from a mental illness, that determination is a matter of evidence-based clinical judgment. However, general standards of what is normal are not clinical judgments (and sometimes do not objectively correlate with reality), but are often unverified, specious 'evidence' of cultural norms and social conventions that contain occasional misperceptions of what is real. Because some misperceptions are valued by those who share them, these memes get passed along as if they represented reality.
In cases of deeply disturbed mental patients, they are inclined to distort reality so drastically that their distortions are not widely shared and closely held by other people. Instead, these mistaken impressions are labeled as examples of craziness and disregarded. By contrast, human aggregations in governments, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive and misrepresent reality so sharply, yet distortions of what is somehow real are still taken to be true and shared as if factual by aggregates of people.
A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux cent million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality commonly shared and held by many people in aggregates. One way to define the highest standard of what is normal for the individual and for people in aggregations is in terms of being able to see what is reasonably and sensibly free of illusion, what appears to be real based on scientific evidence. Hence, in taking note of the process of humankind becoming evermore aware in the passage of space-time of whatsoever is somehow real by means of acquiring good scientific evidence, we can track the evolution of science.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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