Reply to Pirates Armada

Excellent point about the ice; I couldn’t agree with you more about this.

However as I was trying to show in my paper referred to in the thread “Energy and global warming”, before that thread was prematurely closed, presumably for political reasons and certainly not for scientific reasons, I believe the source of the energy does matter for the following reason.

If the anthropogenic energy were to come from the enhanced greenhouse gas effect, about which I have serious doubts, then the global warming could be stopped, in principal, by preventing any further emission of these GHG, for instance by increasing our nuclear energy capacity, using cleaner fossil fuel technology and renewables.

On the other hand, if the problem of GW is due simply to the very amount of ENERGY produced by mankind, as I have been trying to explain, then the only viable way forward is to use only the renewables, because this energy is already in the Earth’s system and diverting it for the use of mankind will not add any extra energy to the system.

As a result of helpful comments from a number of people on the web, I have slightly revised my ideas and have now included more explicitly the fact of energy loss by radiation to outer space. Also, on reflection, I have excluded the energy generated by the human population, ie the actual bodies themselves, on the basis that this energy is not a new feature any more than the energy caused by the rest of the biosphere, and the Earth will long ago have reached a stable equilibrium temperature which includes these effects. Regrettably, as I said, I was prevented from putting the record straight on this forum, but I shall soon be modifying my initial publications on other popular sites such as “open2.net” and “theenvironmentsite”.

Aubrey E Banner, Sale, Cheshire, UK