Abstract
In Chap. 4 we learned that we are rich in good part because energy is cheap and abundant. But the party cannot go one forever (Chap. 9) and there are substantial costs that we are currently ignoring. Chief among these is the fantasy that pumping billions of tonnes of carbon into the air does not affect us or the climate. In this chapter we will look at the real costs associated with burning coal and oil. We then examine the effects this has on energy flow through the environment, and hence on the climate. Finally, climate models and their predictions are examined.
“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
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Notes
- 1.
One often sees figures for carbon emissions or CO2 emissions. Since carbon has an atomic weight of 12 and oxygen has atomic weight 16, 1 Gt carbon is equivalent to 44/12 Gt CO2.
- 2.
Anthropogenic means “made by man”.
- 3.
Similarly, one speaks of the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and so on.
- 4.
Recall the estimate of 100 Gt/yr we made for this in Sect. 4.4.2
- 5.
Typical albedos are: bare soil (0.17), grass (0.25), sand (0.40), snow (0.85).
- 6.
They can become important if their electronic structure is disturbed by collisions, which can happen at sufficiently high temperatures and densities.
- 7.
Forty slices are taken in the vertical direction, while the horizontal direction represents squares of size 2∘× 1∘.
- 8.
Except plate tectonics and volcanism.
- 9.
To be precise, in the eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession.
- 10.
The paper does not specify the computational resources used, but the CDC7600 was a typical supercomputer of the day. This had 1/1000 the memory and speed of a modern smartphone.
- 11.
Virtually certain. It is possible, for example, that increased snow fall in the Antarctic will remove net water from the oceans.
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Swanson, E.S. (2016). Climate. In: Science and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21987-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21987-5_7
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