GREENHOUSE GAS ACCUMULATIONS CHANGE THE WEATHER
Globally, heat waves during the last decade have
killed more persons than tornados, hurricanes, and lightning combined.
by Roy McAlister
GREENHOUSE GAS ACCUMULATIONS CHANGE THE WEATHER |
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Globally, heat waves during the last decade have
killed more persons than tornados, hurricanes, and lightning combined.
by Roy McAlister
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Regardless of everything
else you have heard, Earth’s atmosphere is a giant heat engine. Like all heat
engines it operates by receiving heat, doing work, and rejecting heat that has
not been converted into work.
Solar energy heats Earth’s atmospheric engine and heat not converted into work
is radiated to the cold black vacuum of space surrounding our planet. Work
accomplished by Earth’s atmospheric engine includes evaporation and transport of
enormous amounts of water from the oceans and continents to other locations
where it precipitates as snow, hail, and/or rain.
Closely related to astonishing amounts of water transported is the enormous work
of moving air masses by what we observe as breezes, winds, tornadoes, and
hurricanes. Earth’s atmospheric engine also powers generation and discharge of
electricity, sometimes by astoundingly hot plasmas we call lightning.
Compared to our Sun, the spectrum of radiation wavelengths from stars is shorter
at higher frequency from hotter stars and longer at lower frequency from cooler
stars. In other words the higher the temperature of a radiation source, the
shorter and more energetic the average radiation. Most radiation reaching the
Earth is from our Sun, the closest star, and is called solar energy.
Radiation reaching the Earth consists of a spectrum of wavelengths that relate
to the astronomical temperature of the Sun’s surface. About 4% is in a band of
wavelengths that are too short to be detected by sight. And about 44% is in a
band of wavelengths that are too long to be detected by our eyes. The remaining
visible spectrum is the rainbow of colors that are separated by refraction when
sunlight passes through a prism.
Civilization now depends upon burning more than one million years’ of fossil
accumulations each year. Mining and burning Earth’s fossil reserves after being
stored for some 100 to 600 million years changes the atmosphere by additions of
carbon dioxide, methane, oxides of nitrogen, and particulates. We add even more
methane but lesser percentages of carbon dioxide from anaerobic decay of our
sewage and garbage, feedlot wastes, and forest biomass. Analysis of Artic and
Antarctic snow cores show that Earth’s atmosphere now has 30% greater
concentration of carbon dioxide and over 100% greater concentration of methane
than at any time in the 160 thousand years preceding the fossil-fueled
Industrial Revolution
Greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere allow most wavelengths of solar
radiation to pass through the atmosphere to impinge upon and heat Earth’s land
and water surfaces. But the temperatures achieved by radiative heating of such
surfaces are far cooler than the temperature of the Sun. Thus the wavelengths
of radiation from such sources are far longer than solar radiation. Greenhouse
gases selectively absorb substantial amounts of these longer wavelengths and
cause the enormous atmospheric engine to gain more energy than before greenhouse
gases accumulated in the atmosphere.
With more energy the atmospheric engine is doing more work. According to
scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and the
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the average annual number of
major hurricanes has doubled since 1970.
Hurricanes draw energy from heat stored in tropical oceans. The cyclonic winds
of a hurricane increase in velocity as heat from tropical waters is added,
largely in the form of evaporated water vapors that are lifted into clouds that
reach high above the surface. As the vapors condense into rain droplets enormous
energy is added to the winds rotating around the eye of the hurricane.
Category 4 and 5 hurricanes reaching extremely dangerous wind velocities have
nearly doubled in the last 35 years in close correlation to increases in
greenhouse gas accumulations and global burning of the Earth’s fossil reserves.
In addition, category 4 and 5 hurricanes are making up a larger share of the
total number of Earth’s hurricanes in correlation to accumulations of greenhouse
gases.
Even if a way to cancel forming hurricanes is developed, such as spreading
polymer films to reduce evaporation from the surface of the ocean, it will not
overcome ominous climate changes. In addition to hurricanes, insurance company
records show other alarming trends correlated to increased air and water
temperatures such as more losses and casualties from heat, drought, lightning,
and floods.
Europe’s record heat wave in
2003 killed more than 35,000 persons. This is 19-times the SARS deaths and
10-times the deaths caused by 9-11-01 terrorist attacks. These heat-wave
fatalities were exacerbated because central power plants could not reject enough
heat to the exceptionally warm environment to enable production and distribution
of the electricity demanded to cool heat-distressed Europeans. (Central power
plant heat engines using radioactive or fossil fuels reject about two units of
energy to send one unit of energy to customers.)
This underscores the
fragility of homeland security and defense measures that are powered by central
power plants. Regardless of whether or not you live in regions where tornados or
hurricanes occur the greenhouse-gas intensified atmospheric engine is
threatening the good life we seek by dependence upon burning Earth’s fossil
reserves.
Globally, heat waves during the last decade have killed more persons than
tornados, hurricanes, and lightning combined. All of these weather-related
events are intensified by carbon dioxide emissions. Vehicles converted to
operation on hydrogen instead of gasoline overcome the problem of annually
emitting over 2-times the weight of the car as carbon dioxide.
Molecule-to-molecule comparisons show that methane absorbs about 23 to 27 times more radiation than carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide still causes more atmospheric warming because it is in far greater total concentration but methane concentrations are rapidly rising along with many other volatile carbon compounds released by human activities.
One
hundred and twenty-five year studies show that summers are being extended by
warmer fall and spring seasons. October of 2004 was the warmest October in the
history of temperature measurements, which began in 1880. March also broke the
record for the warmest March in recorded history. February of 2004 was the
second warmest.
This warming trend means
there is more energy trapped in the atmosphere to melt glaciers and polar ice
caps, evaporate the oceans etc., and is correlated to greenhouse gas
accumulations in the atmosphere. As noted, greenhouse gas accumulations are also
correlated to increased occurrence and severity of weather events such as
hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning strikes, floods, ice storms, and soil erosion.
Our
planet receives more solar energy every day than all the energy stored in fossil
oil produced on Earth from 600 million years ago to the time oil was first
extracted to begin the Oil Age. This clean, dependable, friendly, solar energy
can be harnessed to produce hydrogen and/or electricity to replace present
dependence upon burning the fossil equivalent of more than 200 million barrels
of oil each day.
This enormous amount of solar energy arriving daily is increasingly trapped in
the atmosphere by greenhouse gases such as halogenated hydrocarbons, methane,
and carbon dioxide. Weather extremes due to greenhouse gas accumulations also
remind us of the enormous power of solar energy and that there is plenty of
renewable wind and wave energy to harness, even in areas that do not receive
large amounts of direct solar energy.
References: Space Studies
report at
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Temp/2004.htm. For
additional trend data see
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Temp/Temp_data.htm. Also
see Kerry Emanuel’s study of hurricane energy in
August 2005, Journal of Nature.
Another recent reference is a 19 Sept 05 entry on hurricane severity and
frequency at: http://usinfo.state.gov.
Also see article correlating hurricane severity to global warming by Thomas K.
Knutson and Robert E. Tulea of Geophysical fluid Dynamics Laboratory (FFDL) in
the Journal of
Climate, September 2004
Originally printed at: http://www.clean-air.org/ Please visit the American Hydrogen Association.