At a glance - Greenhouse warming 100 times greater than waste heat

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Greenhouse warming 100 times greater than waste heat". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

Fact Myth Box

At a glance

There are various kinds of climate science deniers out there, but one grouping can usefully be classified under the acronym ABCD - Anything But Carbon Dioxide. These people appear to accept the climate is heating up. Flailing around to try and identify something other than CO2 causing the heating, they will seize upon all sorts of candidate causes. This is one of them. There are many others.

All the energy we use dissipates into the environment post-use, be it a driftwood fire on the beach or the heart of a busy metropolis, on the go 24-7. So it should come as no surprise that 'waste' heat does have a role - a minor one - in heating the planet. Humans have always been fond of fire since they learned to ignite things and there's nothing better than sitting round a blaze of a night with a few friends. No need to feel guilty about that. It's harmless in the overall scheme of things.

Waste heat is of course a much studied subject. After all, more sophisticated heating systems, compared to that fire on the beach, are energy-intensive and that translates as expensive. Ways to minimise heat loss and thereby improve efficiency form an active research topic. In that sense, a number of studies have looked at the bigger picture: just how much waste heat is there?

Unsurprisingly, cities, where huge numbers of people work, rest and play, are megacentres of heat wastage. The term, 'Urban Heat Island', acknowledges this. But the planet is a big old place and cities occupy relatively small parts of it. To find the warming contribution of waste heat, you need to have two figures: the total energy lost and the surface area of the planet. Doing the maths you can then derive the amount, expressed in watts per square metre. You can then compare it to other heat sources.

All studies of waste heat have arrived at a similar conclusion. There's a lot of waste heat over cities but the total, global amount, expressed as watts per square metre of the planetary surface, is a tiny fraction of the heating caused by the greenhouse gases. So while it's highly desirable to find better efficiencies in energy use and conservation, thereby saving money, when it comes to temperature it's greenhouse gas emissions we have to hold firmly in our focus. ABCD indeed. Next.

 

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


Click for Further details

In case you'd like to explore more of our recently updated rebuttals, here are the links to all of them:

Myths with link to rebuttal Short URLs
Ice age predicted in the 1970s sks.to/1970s
It hasn't warmed since 1998 sks.to/1998
Antarctica is gaining ice sks.to/antarctica
CRU emails suggest conspiracy sks.to/climategate
What evidence is there for the hockey stick sks.to/hockey
CO2 lags temperature sks.to/lag
Climate's changed before sks.to/past
It's the sun sks.to/sun
Temperature records are unreliable sks.to/temp
The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics sks.to/thermo
We're heading into an ice age sks.to/iceage
Positives and negatives of global warming sks.to/impacts
Global cooling - Is global warming still happening? sks.to/cooling
How reliable are climate models? sks.to/model
Can animals and plants adapt to global warming? sks.to/species
What's the link between cosmic rays and climate change? sks.to/cosmic
Is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth accurate? sks.to/gore
Are glaciers growing or retreating? sks.to/glacier
Ocean acidification: global warming's evil twin sks.to/acid
The human fingerprint in global warming sks.to/agw
Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming sks.to/evidence
How do we know more CO2 is causing warming? sks.to/greenhouse
Explaining how the water vapor greenhouse effect works sks.to/vapor
The tricks employed by the flawed OISM Petition Project to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change sks.to/OISM
Is extreme weather caused by global warming? sks.to/extreme
How substances in trace amounts can cause large effects sks.to/trace
How much is sea level rising? sks.to/sealevel
Is CO2 a pollutant? sks.to/pollutant
Does cold weather disprove global warming? sks.to/cold
Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans? sks.to/volcano
How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions? sks.to/co2
Climate scientists could make more money in other careers sks.to/money
How reliable are CO2 measurements? sks.to/co2data
Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2? sks.to/pastco2
What is the net feedback of clouds? sks.to/cloud
Global warming vs climate change sks.to/name
Is Mars warming? sks.to/mars
How the IPCC is more likely to underestimate the climate response sks.to/underestimat
How sensitive is our climate? sks.to/sensitivity
Evidence for global warming sks.to/warming
Has the greenhouse effect been falsified? sks.to/falsify
Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere? sks.to/breath
What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2? sks.to/CO2increase
What is methane's contribution to global warming? sks.to/methane
Plants cannot live on CO2 alone sks.to/plant
Is the CO2 effect saturated? sks.to/saturate
Greenhouse warming 100 times greater than waste heat sks.to/waste

 

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Posted by John Mason on Tuesday, 16 January, 2024


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