RA LengThe reality of global warming has come under constant scrutiny by the lay public and news reporters in the last few months – largely because of some unfortunate and illegal access to private emails sent between scientists foremost in this field and some errors of fact published by the IPCC in their latest reports. The most quoted reference is to the statement that all Himalayan glaciers may have melted by 2030 based on a guess by one Indian scientist who probably was over-anxious about that possibility because of its implications for the livelihoods of the 600 million people that would be affected on the Gangetic plain. Yet, undoubtedly the glaciers are melting and the rivers they feed are so over-utilized for irrigation and other uses that many now fail to reach their destination(sea or lake) during part of the year. Nevertheless, the degree and extent of the criticism has done much to make people less complacent about the dangers of global warming and resource depletion.
In general, global warming is attributed to anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide, methane and oxides of nitrogen, and their accumulation in the atmosphere. These result in increased absorption in the planet’s atmosphere of infrared radiations emitted from the earth’s surface, which in turn had been received from solar radiation.
The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been gradually increasing, driven by the burning of fossil fuels to meet the energy needs of an increasing population and greater wealth. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, energy demand has continuously increased (almost exponentially) and this has been largely supplied by the combustion of the hydrocarbons, coal, natural gas and, most importantly, oil, that had been sequestered in various parts of the world’s crust over millions of years. These reserves are very large but finite and non-renewable.
The greenhouse effect (gaseous atmospheric pollution) has been implicitly blamed for the increase in average global land and sea temperature as it is well established that these gases are warmed by infrared radiation. The effect of burning hydrocarbons on heat accumulation has been considered insignificant and yet, the first law of thermodynamics – that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – means that the energy in all the hydrocarbons burned must be conserved on the planet as heat. Another source of heat is that released when nuclear reactions occur, and when bombs are exploded or nuclear power stations transmute uranium and generate steam to drive the turbines and produce electricity. Worldwide, the burning of hydrocarbons and the application of nuclear reactors generate sufficient heat to account for 74 per cent of global warming, according to papers published recently by Swedish scientists (see Nordell and Gervet 2009). If proven to be true, the amount of heat released in combustion of hydrocarbons has enormous and far-reaching implications.
The first implication is that the thermodynamics of fossil-fuel use and nuclear reactions removes all the arguments of the non-believers, sceptics, or deniers of global warming, the latter often for political or financial reasons. The second implication is for a massive downsizing of fossil-fuel burning and a much more conservative approach to nuclear power stations in the future – and a strong justification for using solar energy to power the future energy needs of people.
Again, if Nordell and his school are correct, there is no such thing as clean coal as the heat of combustion and the energy cost of liquefaction of carbon dioxide for landfill sequestration add to the global thermal load. The definition of renewable energy must be redefined to include the embedded energy requirements of all such systems. For biofuel, this includes the heat generated in crop production and construction of distilleries/mills and transport, and where applicable, in forest clearing and avoidance of pollution. For solar energy (sunlight, wind and wave power), it includes the energy expended in infrastructure including the manufacture of the solar panels, windmill turbines, power lines and support structure.
Smil (2010) has recently drawn attention to the high energy costs of steel manufacture and its absolute dependency on burning coke (produced from coal). One billion tonnes of steel are manufactured annually requiring the burning of about 620 million tonnes of coal. The concept of accelerated dependency on ‘renewable energy’ will require an enormous increase in infrastructure that requires steel, resulting in an even greater need to burn coal. If the concepts of Nordell and others are correct – that heat energy from hydrocarbons is a greater cause of global warming than greenhouse gases – then clean coal or coke is of little extra value.
The heat-emissions theory also rules out nuclear power as a future clean energy source, especially as it has huge dependency on energy from mining of ore to the manufacture of uranium dioxide, and construction and decommissioning of the power plants themselves, and their permanent security needs in addition to the heat from nuclear fission. The heat-emissions theory also de-emphasises the roles of atmospheric methane and nitrogen oxides, but it is important to keep in mind that some 26 per cent of global warming is still from gaseous pollution and could be underestimated (see Chaisson 2008).The need is to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. This will be forced upon the world as hydrocarbon sources are depleted but there will be a dependency on fossil fuels far into the future. This will be catastrophic as the energy returned on energy expended for fossil fuels decreases with the ‘more difficult to extract’ oil replacing the ‘easily accessible’ cheap oil, as occurs following the onset of Peak Oil. This means that it now takes ~20 ‘quads’ to yield the useable energy from oil that was once got in 1 quad – or, for every barrel of crude oil available for industry, about 20 times more CO2 and heat are generated than in the early days of oil exploitation (Hall 2009 ).
The research of Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet invokes the first law of thermodynamics, but the complexity of the calculations of the sources of heat on the planet is such that a great deal more modelling of the heat produced in burning hydrocarbons and producing nuclear power is needed before we can have a more precise partitioning of the sources of the heat. It appears that one major point has been made and that is
‘that the heat generated when fossil energy is used to accomplish work was not accounted for in previous global warming calculations.’
If it is verified that heat from the burning of fossil fuel is a major contributor to global warming, then a different set of priorities emerges and research and energy policies should be redirected. Nordell and Grevetassign 74 per cent of present-day global warming to the burning of fossil fuels, while another eminent scientist Eric Chaisson of Tufts University argues the same scenario but with a much lower proportion of global warming contributed by heat emissions to date, describing it as indiscernible but that it could grow substantially in the future. He argues that with the world continuing in a business-as-usual manner, it has an unavoidable global heating from the burning of nonrenewable energy sources and harnessing of nuclear and geothermal power, of 3 0C – which could develop within 300 years. Such a temperature rise according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the tipping point for massive climate change.
References
Chaisson, E.J., ‘Long-term Global Heating from Energy Usage’,
Eos transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Vol. 89, No. 28, p 253, 2008.
Hall CAS (2009), ‘Peak oil energy return on investment and your financial future’, 2nd Biophysical Economics Conference. http://web.mac.com/biophysicalecon/iWeb/Site/BPE%20Conference.html
Hall , CAS, S Balogh and DJR Murphy (2009), ‘What is the minimum EROI that a sustainable society must have?’, Energies, 2, 25-47; DOI:10.3390/en20100025.
Nordell, B and BH Gervet (2009), ‘Global energy accumulation and net heat emissions’,
International Journal of Global Warming.
Smil, V (2010), The Iron Age and Coal-based Coke: A Neglected Case of Fossil-fuel Dependence http://masterresource.org/2009/09/a-forgotten-case-of-fossil-fuel-dependence-the-iron-age-requires-carbon-based-energy-like-it-or-not
About RA Leng
Ron Leng is a retired Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry of the University of New England. He was a member of the Faculty of Rural Science for 37 years. It was as a member of the faculty that he began his research into the utilization of poor-quality forages by ruminants. His publications in this area found him in demand as an advisor to institutions overseas.
During his career, Ron founded ‘The Institute of Biotechnology’ at the University of New England. He has been a consultant to the governments of more than 30 countries through United Nations Development Programs. In India, Ron worked at the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI) and also with National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in Anand, Gujarat, for a number of years.
The author can be contacted at [email protected].