{"id":11943,"date":"2015-09-07T07:52:23","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T12:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11943"},"modified":"2015-09-07T07:52:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T12:52:23","slug":"global-warming-how-much-heat-exactly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11943","title":{"rendered":"Global warming: how much heat, exactly?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Global warming: how much heat, exactly?<\/a><\/h3>\n

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It is often difficult to visualize what we are doing to our planet. But a simple calculation shows that the greenhouse effect generated by fossil fuels can be seen as the equivalent of turning on more than a hundred 1 kW electric heaters for each human being on the earth. And we can’t turn them off!<\/i><\/div>\n

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If you look at the way climatologists describe global warming, you’ll see that they use a lot the term “forcing”; that is, the additional effect of human activities to the natural heating from sunlight. Not all\u00a0forcings<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0increase temperatures, some tend to reduce it; for instance, atmospheric particulate. The overall result is called “imbalance” or “net forcing.” You can think of a forcing in terms of someone trying to budge a person who doesn’t want to move. If the person pushing is stronger, the net force will cause the person being pushed to move. In the case of climate, the warmingforcings<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0are stronger than the cooling\u00a0forcings<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>, and the net result is a rise in temperature.<\/p>\n

As we keep emitting CO2 and other gases, the greenhouse forcing effect increases, as you see in the figure below (Hansen 2011).<\/p>\n

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In this figure,\u00a0forcings<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0are measured in terms of W\/m2 (watts per square meter), as it is generally done in climate science. Unfortunately, it is a kind of unit that doesn’t convey a feeling of the magnitude of what we are doing to our planet. A few watts per square meter are approximately equivalent to a single Christmas light, and that doesn’t look worrisome. But, if you take into account the effect on the whole planet (510 million km2), then the overall forcing is gigantic: from Hansen’s figure you obtain something like 1500 TW (terawatts<\/span><\/span><\/span>, or trillions of\u00a0watts) for greenhouse gas forcing and around 500 TW for the net forcing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Global warming: how much heat, exactly? It is often difficult to visualize what we are doing to our planet. But a simple calculation shows that the greenhouse effect generated by fossil fuels can be seen as the equivalent of turning on more than a hundred 1 kW electric heaters for each human being on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[113,141,8270,1004,369,386,3512,2692],"class_list":["post-11943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-climatology","tag-co2","tag-global-warming","tag-greenhouse-gases","tag-resource-crisis","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11944,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11943\/revisions\/11944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}