Energy and the Environment

As is all too often currently presented, energy and the environment need not be an either/or proposition.

One cannot refute the fact that an abundance of energy, primarily from fossil fuels, has been a boon to mankind over the past 250 years. For about the last 35 years however, it has been abundantly clear those benefits have been attended by a significant and mounting environmental cost.

Were it clear we could produce energy without environmental costs, maintenance of the status quo would be tantamount to committing planetary vandalism and homicide.

The World Health Organization  reports that over 150,000 deaths annually can be currently attributed to climate change and climate related property damage has averaged in the vicinity of $200 billion/year most recently.

The latest study by Matthew England et al., Temperatures blown off course, published in the journal nature climate change, presents evidence of how we can do better than produce damage-free energy.  We can match current fossil fuel outputs with environmentally beneficial production.

Notwithstanding an earlier study by British and Canadian researchers that suggested global warming has not actually slowed, measurements simply haven’t been taken where it is occurring, the England study shows how unusually strong trade winds in the Pacific Ocean have buried surface ocean heat in deeper water and offers this burial as a rationale for why the rise in measured surface temperatures has significantly slowed since 2001.

Taking the British/Canadian study into account however; an alternative explanation would be the planet is warming faster than anyone has previously anticipated and thus the need to act is all the more urgent.

These studies are significant in that they address the so called global warming “pause” or “hiatus” that became fodder for climate science skeptics and critics subsequent to the presentation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in September of 2013.

John Church, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report said in an interview with the Toronto Star at that time, “The only place that can store heat in the climate system are the oceans. In the past 40 years, oceans have stored 90 per cent of the heat and much of that is in upper part of the oceans. But now there is indication that in the past decade, the heat is going deeper into the oceans and so even though the surface has not warmed as much, the deep ocean has continued to warm up.  Oceans can trap huge amounts of heat over hundreds of decades and maybe even hundreds of centuries. But how much and for how long is unclear. As oceans continue to warm and expand, the sea levels rise and push against ice sheets. That is a concern in the long-term.”

Indicative of the amount of heat the oceans can store, while accumulating energy at a rate of between 4 and 12 Hiroshima bombs equivalents every second, is the 2012 paper of Levitus et al, World Ocean Heat Content and Thermosteric Sea Level change (0-2000 m),1955-2010, which shows that to a depth of 2000 meters and over the study’s span the oceans have only warmed an average of 0.09°C.

In an interview with the Guardian Dr. England stated,: “Global warming has not stopped. People should understand that the planet is a closed system. As we increase our emissions of greenhouse gases, the fundamental thermal dynamics tells us we have added heat into the system. Once it’s trapped, it can go to a myriad of places – land surface, oceans, ice shelves, ice sheets, glaciers for example.”  Further he explained how the winds help the ocean to absorb heat into the thermocline – that’s roughly the area between 100 metres and 300 metres deep. He says once the trade winds drop – which is likely to come within years rather than decades – then the averaged surface temperatures will rise sharply again.

The planet is a closed system. Of all the myriad places trapped heat can go however the deep ocean is the largest heat sink, where it can be most diluted and do the least damage, the only place where its movement from the surface is an opportunity to produce power in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics and the only place where it would be less of an environmental threat than in its current location. On the surface it drives tropical storms that cause death and destruction and move heat towards the poles and per the following diagram the coefficient of expansion of ocean water at a depth of 1000 meters is half that of the tropical surface.

The estimation of Krishnakumar Rajagopalan and Gérard C. Nihous, in their paper An Assessment of Global Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Resources With a High-Resolution Ocean General Circulation Model is that the global maximum steady-state OTEC electrical power potential is about 14 Terawatts, which is more than all of the energy derived from fossil fuels in 2006 according to the United States Energy Information Administration.

The production of this power with a deep water condenser design would require the constant movement of heat, about 20 times more than the quantity of energy produced, into the oceans at least three times deeper than where it is currently being shifted by the trade winds. This would perpetuate the existing pause concurrently to the generation of sufficient power to replace all we are currently generating from fossil fuels.

The Guardian article shows the following Australia’s CSIRO science agency chart of sea level rise in recent decades and points to the fact that the 2011 decline was due to water being temporarily stored on the Australian land mass following the major flooding and rainfall event of that year.

To a lesser extent this effect would be replicated by the conversion of ocean volume to hydrogen by electrolysis, in order to bring offshore generated power to market, and then the reconstitution of this hydrogen back into water on land either in a fuel cell or a combustion engine that produces power.

If we are not taking any practical lessons from studies such as the ones referenced in this piece, one has to wonder what is the point of them?

To my mind, they point to the fact that the solution to our most significant problem is staring us in the face even as we do nothing about it, least of all for the 150,000 dying each year.

Energy Collective

13 Comments on "Energy and the Environment"

Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 2:47 pm 



fascinating read! AGW has not stopped, instability has increased and a pressure cooker forgotten on the stove

Northwest Resident on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 3:34 pm 



“One cannot refute the fact that an abundance of energy, primarily from fossil fuels, has been a boon to mankind over the past 250 years.”

I suppose that depends on which particular members of mankind we are talking about. Those that had to endure their lands being taken from them, their own deaths or deaths of their friends and/or families, their veritable enslavement to the “oil machine”, and more — they might not have benefited much from the boon to mankind. And if mankind ends up going extinct due to climate change wreckage caused by burning fossil fuels, then how will that have been a boon to makind? For those who have worked like dogs their entire lives, never able to save for retirement, never able to afford proper medical care, never able to share in “the wealth” generated by all that excess cheap energy — where’s their boon? Maybe they would have been better off as peasants working the field, sharing a sense of equality and community with the many others of equal status in their local community. I could go on and on. But let’s just amend that statement to say that the abundance of energy has been a boon to certain elements of mankind over the past 250 years, at the expense of many other elements of mankind. I know that is nitpicking. But in general, okay, I agree that we have increased knowledge, advanced technology, medical capability to keep an individual alive and kicking way past his natural expiration date, along with many other benefits. But it has always been a tradeoff with the environment and morality — all of that “boon” might now be coming back to us with an outstretched hand, demanding payment in full, problem is, we’re flat ass broke.

Makati1 on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 3:38 pm 



Higher ocean surface temperatures mean bigger, more powerful hurricanes and typhoons. More category fives or worse.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 5:04 pm 



From Wiki, (bellow) I would inject oil here but hey it is inevitable isn’t it. You can’t blame a species for exploiting an energy source. It is tragic it was not done differently. Imagine the benefits of optimum management of fossil fuels from the beginning discovery and large scale production knowing what we know now. I can imagine me at 20 knowing what I know now about women and damn life would have been different!
Pandora’s box is an artifact in Greek mythology, taken from the myth of Pandora’s creation in Hesiod’s Works and Days.[1] The “box” was actually a large jar (πίθος pithos)[2] given to Pandora (Πανδώρα, “all-gifted”, “all-giving”),[3] which contained all the evils of the world.
Today the phrase “to open Pandora’s box” means to perform an action that may seem small or innocent, but that turns out to have severe and far-reaching consequences.

J-Gav on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 5:36 pm 



The next El Niño event is also likely to shift some gazes back to the basic fragility we’re all caught in.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 6:03 pm 



@J-Gav, I have been reading about that myself. Trying to get more detailed info on what a strong el-nino event would do around the farm here in Missouri. The effects are many and varied from my googling with no clear effects

J-Gav on Fri, 14th Feb 2014 10:08 pm 



@Davy – Silly me; didn’t expect to be hearing from a guy in Missouri, but that’s what the internet does, and hopefully will continue to do …

I spent one year of my youth in a little town called Richland, Missouri and it was a happy one. Then I was hauled off to live near Richland, Michigan … on Gull Lake. Nothing really rich about either place, financially speaking, but the experiences I gained with and in nature there are still with me.

Davey on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 12:07 am 



Went to cave restaurant on gasconade river just down the road from Richland not long ago. Small world

Davey on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 12:12 am 



J-gav the Richland thing is strange. I guess every state has one. But you are right nothing rich about Richland But nice cattle country all around

Makati1 on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 1:04 am 



NWR, the West has benefited from the energy boom. The rest, not so much, as you said. Now it is the West’s turn to suffer, as the rest manage to keep their much lower BAU levels going longer. Will the average Indian, African or Latino even notice the decline? I doubt it.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 3:09 am 



Sorry Makati, your statement “Will the average Indian, African or Latino even notice the decline? I doubt it” Do you realize they are unable to feed themselves as it is. Do you think an economic contraction is going to increase food production for these folks?

Northwest Resident on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 3:39 am 



Davy — I think that I see the point that Makati1 is making. Those people who have not adapted their lifestyles to dependence on fossil fuel energy are going to find it much easier to “keep on truckin'” in a collapse scenario. It is kind of like the point that Orlov made about the average Russian during the USSR collapse — they didn’t depend on just in time delivery, that had a crappy trade system before collapse and they still had the same crappy trade system after collapse — because their system did not depend on large quantities of fossil fuel input. But your point is also valid, very much so. Wherever large populations base so much of their diet on rice, those people are sitting ducks to die in vast quantities when the oil stops flowing. Reason why, is without urea, a oil-byproduct fertilizer, the amounts of rice being grown in the world will be dramatically reduced. People I think in India, China and other Asian nations will be most hit by reduced rice harvests. It will be terrible for them.

Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 15th Feb 2014 12:08 pm 



@n/r, totally agree! But many of these places Makati mentioned have severely outgrown their carrying capacity pre or post fossil fuel. They have climate issues ahead too. Water, soil degradation, and social strains have made them time bombs like everywhere else. I follow the Amish closely for the same reasons you mentioned