Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: … But what if sufficiently abundant energy caused heat to be produced on earth faster than it could radiate off, shifting the overall temperature in and of itself? It’s not enough to say that greenhouse-gas-related climate change is mitigated…

But you are actually speaking of two different things and they have two different solutions. The Earth is actually a big spherical radiator that easily handles thermal inputs in the 122 petawatt range. This is closely balanced by solar input… more or less… and the planet stays habitable for us.

But with GHGs we’ve essentially been painting that radiator black and we have created a feedback loop that has the temperature skyrocketing. But [em]we[/em] are not generating that heat ourselves… the [em]Sun[/em] is. We need to stop painting and let the black paint flake off. The Earth will gradually cool on its own… if we’re not too late…

But here’s the important part: the Earth will still be a radiator with a frickin’ huge capacity and the heat generated by FF units will still be radiated to space either directly or indirectly.

Dropping the use of all carbon fuels means that even with [em]increased[/em] total human energy usage via FF the temperature will be dropping back towards the normal Earth energy budget. That means both ice ages and hot spells. Both of which are eminently survivable by humans even without fusion power.

As for heating the planet via FF… if it’s ever going to be an issue it will take a very long time for human energy usage to build up to that level. When you’re talking enough FF units to affect the heat balance of the planet you’re talking of a entirely different level of human existence. It can only be guesswork at this point

But I’m silly, so… without the “black paint” effect feeding back on itself it should be easy to make needed modifications in time to avoid problems. One such might be installing radiators at large FF complexes as auxiliary cooling units for use at night… radiating much of the nightly heat output directly to space. And also by then we should be able to generate and dismiss clouds on command…

… and if nothing else we can always paint the roofs white* 🙂

*One of the suggestions for dealing with global warming was painting the roofs white… that was analyzed and found to be both insufficient and inappropriate to the problem of climate change… but should be fine for FF direct heating issues in that future time.