LONG RANGE GLOBAL WARMING

摘要

This paper explores one of the causes of global warming that is often overlooked, the direct heating of the environment by engineering systems. Most research and studies of global warming concentrate on the modification that is occurring to atmospheric air as a result of pollution gases being added by various systems; i.e., refrigerants, nitrogen oxides, ozone, hydrocarbons, halon, and others. This modification affects the thermal radiation balance between earth, sun and space, resulting in a decrease of radiation outflow and a slow rise in the earth's steady state temperature. For this reason the solution to the problem is perceived as one of cleaning up the processes and effluents that are discharged into the environment.In this paper arguments are presented that suggest, that there is a far more serious cause for global warming that will manifest itself in the next two or three centuries; direct heating from the exponential growth of energy useage by humankind. Because this is a minor contributor to the global wanning problem at present, it is overlooked or ignored. Energy use from the combustion of fuels and from the output of nuclear reactions eventually is manifest as warming of the surroundings. Thus, as energy is used at an ever increasing rate the consequent global warming also increases at an ever increasing rate. Eventually this rate will become equal to a few percent of solar radiation. When this happens the earth's temperature will have risen by several degrees with catastrophic results.The trends in world energy use are reviewed and some mathematical models are presented to suggest future scenarios. These models can be used to predict when the global warming problem will become undeniably apparent, when it will become critical, and when it will become catastrophic.The trends in world energy use are based mostly on historical models. Extending these models into the future is subject to assumptions of population growth as well as the accuracy of the basic data from which the projections are started. In this paper attention is given to the effects of uncertainties in the projection data. It is shown that with only a five percent error in the rate of projected growth, the error in predicting a global temperature change of two degrees can span fifty-two years.