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Global Warming is Energy Surplus in a World Primarily in Deficit

Jim Baird's picture
Owner, Thermodynamic Geoengineering

inventor,Method and apparatus for load balancing trapped solar energy Ocean thermal energy conversion counter-current heat transfer system Global warming mitigation method Nuclear Assisted...

  • Member since 2018
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  • Sep 26, 2022
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Where demand-pull inflation describes an imbalance in aggregate supply versus aggregate demand.

Where the average inflation rate for July for the G7 countries was 8.4%.

Where Europe and the Asia-Pacific economies face an escalating energy crisis, global warming should be an economist’s dream.

It is a global surplus of heat energy chasing too few ways of either converting the heat of warming into work or for migrating that heat away from the surface.  

With the result, the Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the rest of the planet, which caused an albedo decrease that increased radiative heating of  6.4 ± 0.9 W/m2 between1979 and 2011.

In part because the poles cover a third of the surface of the equator, which limits their capacity to radiate heat into space.

But mainly because the heat capacity of the atmosphere is a quarter the heat capacity of the oceans, which have 3,700 times the mass.

Plus, the fact ocean heat is trapped, principally, in the top 100 meters, or about 3% of the ocean’s surface thereby increasing the thermal stratification of the ocean.

Increasing ocean stratification over the past half-century

Which limits the vertical exchanges of heat, carbon, oxygen, and other nutrients vital to life. That when mixed make global warming a nonissue.

Thermal stratification is matter of buoyancy. Hot water rises to the surface, but water isn’t the only medium that moves heat. A heat pipe moves heat through the phase changes of a low-boiling-point working fluid and isn’t affected by gravity so, it can move heat from the surface into deep water.

Per the following, it can also move vapor or in the case of carbon dioxide, a supercritical fluid, through a heat engine to produce work.    

The waste heat of these conversions, which in this example is 92.4% of the heat will rise through diffusion back to the surface where it can be recycled.  

The oceans cover about 361,000,000 km2  of the Earth’s surface and the tropics, where heat is in surplus, is about 26% of this or about 93,860,000 km2 or  93,860,000,000,000 m2. Resplandy et al. quantified the ocean heat uptake between 1991 and 2016 at 1.29 ± 0.79 × 1022 Joules of heat per year, which is 409 terawatts. Divided by 93,860,000,000,000 m2 is a 4.36 W/m2 surface cooling and effective albedo increase.

Resplandy also estimated that about 28% of atmospheric CO2 was a consequence of the warming of the tropical surface, which is removed by 4.36 W/m2 of surface cooling.

Which also has consequence for sea level rise because thermal expansion of water is dependent on  temperature and pressure per the following.

And heat moved into deep water is unavailable to decrease polar albedo or melt ice.

In a world where energy prices have increased as much as 34.6% in a single year, it is perverse that the conversion of global warming into productive work is discounted 100%. The climate ramifications notwithstanding. 

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