At 08:51 PM 12/20/2004, Brad Velander wrote:
Yes Abd ul-Rahman,
I did a double-take this morning when reading the original post
mentioning the slowing of the earth's rotation due to wave/tidal power
generation.
By the way, I think I was wrong. I had a lapse of imagination.... The
primary energy behind tides would indeed be the rotation of the earth. Off
the cuff, easily thirty times the energy involved in the moon's revolution....
However....
If such were true one would have to ask, would wind power not also slow
the earth's rotation? I have never heard of any argument for either on
even the smallest measures (from scientist's anyway), but I am no expert
on either system.
Nor I, to be sure; but I find the exercise interesting and educational.
Tidal forces are already resisted. The earth's rotation, if I'm correct, is
already slowing. The rotational energy is being converted into heat, albeit
a tiny amount of heat compared to other sources; however, because there is
no mechanism *increasing* rotation -- to my knowledge -- the effect
accumulates, albeit *very* slowly. Tidal power generation would probably
not increase the friction; it would merely relocate the heat generation.
That is, there would be more heat dissipated in the generating mechanisms,
in the power distribution grid, and at the points of use, and less heat
into the ocean (and shoreline). All of which, it seems to me, would be so
tiny in comparison to heat coming from the sun, that the difference would
be entirely negligible.
Just a thought, would solar power (to the nth degree) reduce or
increase the ambient earth temperature? I would have thought it would
cool not warm. It would reroute that natural solar heat from the earth's
thermal systems to a man-made system and insulate it from the surrounding
environment, thus reducing the earth's temperatures. It would not
actually be removed from the earth's thermodynamics but it would be
rerouted and isolated from the natural system. That was my thought anyway.
Heat and light come in from the sun. Much of the heat and much of the light
is reflected. Solar collectors generally have an albedo lower than that of
the earth surface that they would cover. Increasing the albedo, naturally,
would reduce the collected energy, a bad trade-off. Satellite solar power
would eliminate the effect.
The earth is in approximate thermal equilibrium with space, obviously.
Energy comes in and energy goes out. Trapping some of this energy, whether
it be by solar power or by the age-old way of storing it in cellulose etc,
postpones the release of the energy. When the power is used, the energy is
released, except for what continues to be stored. If, for example, the
energy were used to raise weights, some fraction of the energy used would
be stored as potential energy.
Now, burning fossil fuels is taking energy that was stored a long time ago
and releasing it. Undoubtedly, this warms the earth, but the direct effect
is, I'd imagine, so tiny as to be undetectable; for one thing, raise the
temperature a little, you raise the radiated heat by, what, the fourth
power of the temperature increase? However, burning the fuels has other
effects, most notably on what is in the atmosphere and thus the albedo of
the earth or its radiating efficiency. If raising carbon dioxide lowers the
albedo, or reduces the ability of the earth to radiate heat (I think the
latter is the actual case), the earth will heat, not from the fuel
consumption but from the sun, and this effect would be enormously greater
than the direct effect.
This does point to a possible method of dealing with global warming.
Obviously, we can't run a global refrigerator.... which would just add heat
anyway. But we might be able to take steps to affect albedo or radiant
efficiency. Of course, the easiest step to take may be to reverse the
changes in the atmosphere. And this might actually be urgent, because it
would take a long time to make the change, it will take a long time before
the net change reverses; we can expect the climate change effects, most
likely, to get worse, perhaps much worse, before they start getting better.
If we start right now.
"Conservative" and "liberal" are gross generalizations of political
positions that often end up being the opposite of accurate.
We need political systems that move beyond polarized politics; I think it
can be done, and hence www.beyondpolitics.org, qv. And I wrote quite a bit
about that, and then decided that it should have its own subject header....
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