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

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.

There is more carbon in crystalline methane-ice formations held in the silt and ooze at the bottom of the oceans than all the carbon in continental deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. This is an ominous threat because global warming and earthquakes release such methane to the atmosphere to greatly increase the frequency and intensity of global climate extremes.

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

For more information go to:  http://www.clean-air.org