It's really really hard to warm the globe

I guess this is kind of a continuation of my last blog, but I wanted to drive home a point. The energy it takes to warm the globe, and by that I mean the atmosphere and water in the oceans, is a lot more than you think. So here are some facts: The mass of the atmosphere is 5,3000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (1). The mass of earth's oceans is 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (2). From here on out I'll use scientific notation to shrink the numbers :) The next thing you need to understand is specific heat capacity. Think of this as the amount of energy you need to heat up something to a certain degree. In our little experiment, the heat capacities of air and seawater are 1.005 kJ/kg.K and 3.93 kJ/kg.K respectively. For our experiment we are only going to raise the temperature of the earth 1 degree Celsius. Now, we'll multiply the specific heat capacities to the mass and add them together. (Pulls out and dusts off scientific calculator) And the answer is you need 5.5 x10^21 kJ of energy. (That's 5.5 Zettajoules for all you geeks out there) Now if you're the sun you have no problem producing that kind of energy, since we get 3.85 ZJ per year from the sun. But for us humans? We would have to outperform THE SUN for about a year and a half just to accomplish the task of a global temperature increase of 1 degree. Our biggest power plants that we have produce about 5 gigawatts of power each year. We would need about 2.5 billion of them running each year to match what the sun puts out every second! Seeing as how the sun runs on the very effective and efficient method of nuclear fusion (making hydrogen atoms into helium atoms) and we run on burning fossil fuels which is extremely inefficient by comparasion, I'm just not seeing how we can do it! I really do think that global warming is just hype and hysteria. You want to be green and save energy and not pollute, great, but don't try to tell me that my 100w light bulb is going to "warm the globe".

Hey Al Gore, Where's the Global Warming?

I'm having a hard time remembering when it was above FREEZING outside. December 1st, 2007 saw a snow storm hit the Salt Lake Valley, and we've been buried ever since. Normally I don't mind the snow so much, but it is so friggin' cold outside! Last night it got down to 3 degrees Fahrenheit! That's -16 degrees Celsius, for everyone outside the US. And I have to be in it! One of my duties in my other job is to check a backup generator to make sure it's still running and has enough fuel in it. After plowing through 2 feet of snow to get to it I get to climb into it and look and all the gauges. I try to hurry as fast as I can, otherwise I'll feel Mother Nature's icy embrace in full force until I can go back inside the building and warm back up.

It makes me think of the episode of the Simpson's called Mr. Plow. To sum it up, after Homer and Barney work together in a snow removal business in the middle of a cold winter, they challenge God that not even he can stop them. A stern "Oh no?" from the heavens later and all the snow melts, effectively ending their business. The reporter Ken Brockman sums up exactly what I'd like to feel: "Could this record-breaking heat wave be the result of the dreaded ``Greenhouse Effect''? Well, if 70-degree days in the middle of winter are the`price' of car pollution, you'll forgive me if I keep my old Pontiac." I think I should start driving my old Yukon some more.

Anywho, I really don't buy into the whole Global Warming hype that everyone is afraid of. A decade ago it was all about "Greenhouse Gases", now it's "Global Warming". Funny thing is just a few decades before that people were worried about "Global Cooling" and the next ice age. The Earth naturally has warmer years and colder years, and there is nothing we little humans can do about it. Sure, I'm all for not trying to add more pollution to the air, since I like to breath it, but to think that we as a species, with the exception of nuclear weapons, have the means to considerably alter our planet so that it becomes an uninhabitable sphere is inane. And even if there were nuclear war, eventually the planet would heal, with or without us. So to all those that are worried sick about Global Warming and melting ice caps and all that drivel, please send your heat this way where it will be well received.