Many are crying out loud for replacing our energy consumption based on fossil fuels with recycables such as solar, wind and tidal. What happens if we do?
The global annual emissions of CO2 from fossil carbon is ca. 30 Gt(1), equivalent to 11E+13 kWh of thermal energy. Recycable energy comes from the Sun, hitting the Earth with ca. 350 W/m2, a miniscule fraction of the radiation from the Sun but still totalling an incredible 1.0 E+20 kWh(2).
How much is used for basic terrestrial processes? Food production per year as photosyntesis consumes ca. 8.3 E+14 kWh(3). The annual global precipitation is ca. 500 000 km3, or nearly 1400 mm. It takes about 3 E+14 kWh to evaporate this amount of water, a process vital to the climate on earth, through the distribution of vapor and precipitation.
The fossil based energy is thus nearly 36% of the energy needed to ”create” weather, and it will make a major impact on global climate if this amount of energy is taken out of global circulation of water and energy.
(1)Carbon dioxide info centre. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html
(2)http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/climate/sun_radiation_at_earth.html
(3)Food and agriculture organization. http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7241e/w7241e06.htm
(notation: E=exponential; E-1=0.1, E+0=1, E+1=10. 1 Joule=2.78 E-7 kWh)
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