John Hageman wrote:
"I think the comparison shows the triviality of man's influence on heating the
earth's environment (i.e., thermal pollution)".
John, you are missing the boat on this one. Solar energy input is fairly constant. It is the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is the key here. Think of the atmosphere as a sieve which allows a portion of the infrared, long wave, energy emitted by the earth to escape into outer space to maintain a certain heat balance producing the climate we now have. (We also have albedo effects from clouds, snow, and other reflective masses as well as ocean current which move the heat around.) The CO2 formed during the combustion of coal, oil, natural gas, etc. effectively plugs up some of the holes in the atmospheric sieve thereby trapping heat. Now, some of this heat will be compensated for by the deep ocean currents which are near 4 degrees C. But when this natural cooler has been dissipated, what do we have left to cool the earth?
For the last 450,000 years, based on deep-sea sediment cores and on Antarctic ice cores (from the Vostok station near the South Pole) there is an excellent correlation between temperature and the concentrations of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. We can not dump billions of tons of carbon, which has taken millions of years to be removed from the geological cycles, and dump them into the atmosphere over a period of a couple of hundred years and expect not to have an effect on the dynamics of the atmospheric system. In addition to this, the oceans and the Arctic have surprises waiting for us. As the tundra warms up, the large amounts of methane now trapped in these soils will be released into the atmosphere and methane is 16x more powerful at trapping long wave heat radiation than CO2. Then, we have the oceans where shifting currents due to the melting glaciers and alteration of the present oceanic currents could uncover the vast amount of methane now trapped in the ocean sediments. There are vast deposits of these methane containing sediments near the Blake Plateau which is located off the coast of the Carolinas. For years the oceanographers have been telling us about the consequences of releasing this trapped methane and about the disruption of the ocean currents which now cool the plant.
So I suggest that it would be a smart move to go with the experts in the field of oceanography such as Wally Broecker at Lamont-Dougherty Geophysical Observatory at Columbia University and others in the field of atmospheric sciences who have devoted many years in studying and writing about the potential disruption of our present planetary cycles from the continued emission and build up of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Kjell Johansen, Ph.D.
Point Beach Nuclear Plant
Two Rivers, WI
kjell.johansen@wepco.com
Just my own ideas from years as a radiolimnologist and not necessarily the opinion of my company which runs several dirt burners.