Thank you, Diane. I'm still marveling at learning that the Sun makes up nearly 100% of the mass of the solar system. And as for my observation, I should add that I think we're capable of responding otherwise - especially at an individual or small group level - but en masse there hasn't been a lot of movement that way. It's another way of framing the entire Anthropocene problem, right? What's the best way to respond to the abundant energy we've learned to provide?
Having spent the majority of my career in photovoltaic R&D, I certainly support those technologies. I also agree with the essay that even renewables require responsible creation and usage. One energy source, however, will not satisfy all applications so I also favor ongoing fusion research., even though its commercial payback may be decades away. Our present problems derive largely from lack of far-sighted planning. Remedies of these must therefore project decades or even centuries into the future.
And of course I agree that overpopulation will negate any attempts to create a healthier and more prosperous future. I thank the author for raising that point.
Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate your specific expertise here amid my generalized speculation. And I very much appreciate your focus on the long-term planning that rarely occurs. As for population, I'm overdue for a focused piece on the topic. I've written a few, but it's been a while.
An essay, tremendously informative, eloquent and making a convincing argument for the use of solar power rather than pinning our hopes on fusion technology coming to the rescue anytime soon.
What troubles me is how do we escape the fundamental equation that any power source we use creates heat energy at the downstream end? What has been concerning us recently in the last forty years or more are the harmful toxic pollutants and greenhouse gas byproducts of our power generation and I think we are well on our way to eliminating them with solar and wind.
But still, whether it be a sewing machine, a microwave, a lithium powered bicycle, an elevator lift, we are still generating heat that has to go somewhere. We can't reflect it back into space, we can't geo-engineer it away, we can't sequester it. Our civilization's byproduct is heat no matter what power source we use. And that worries me, as I see no way around it.
Even if we ate nothing but plants, taking the energy they sequester from the sun and using it to power and warm our bodies, the heat we generate just to run our bodies and move around, when there are 8 billion of us, is substantial. Now add the heat byproducts of our civilization and even with no greenhouse gases we are warming up the planet. Just how much is the question. Jason, I think I see a path to a solution but I don't think it is one many will want to take.
Thank you, Michael. I need to understand this long-term heat problem better. I've heard this idea but haven't been able to wrap my head around it. Thanks for the reminder. Stay tuned...
Jason, do you remember reading how in the cold days of winter the medieval European peasants would bring some livestock into their huts at night to serve as a heat source? Even two humans can heat a room significantly just from their body heat in winter. Now multiply that heat by the size of our current herds and our own numbers.. We'd reduce the heat problem significantly by becoming vegetarians! And of course reducing our own numbers.
All those eggbeaters, elevators, bicycles, and smartphones we so rely on, have to be manufactured, they don't grow in nature awaiting harvesting. And that fabrication process involves an enormous amount of heat release and global warming. But to eliminate all these adjuncts is the path no one wants to take. We feel it would reduce us to a brutish Stone Age existence. And it might. But we've learned a little in 40,000 years and there may be ways to solve the problem and keep our civilization. We might just offshore it for one. Bears thinking about.
Funny you should ask Jason my friend. I'm up early at 1am Pacific time here getting a mostly completed draft of an essay on heat ready to go out the door where i mention your Substack and reproduce my two comments with added material. I consider the problem significant but far less pressing or impactful as the necessity of lowering green house gases. What's interesting to me at least is that no one seems to be mentioning it. Already our cities are acting as urban heat islands that change the weather around them. And our cities proliferate and continue to expand in size. This is ominous. Our cars produce heat from their workings over and above the carbon and other toxic gases they emit..engine blocks, exhaust pipes. I've burnt my fingers touching the latter when I was young. I thought hot metal glowed and the tailpipe seemed so cold and innocent! Even the tires release frictional heat onto the road surfaces. The heat released in our fabrication processes (think smelting metals for example) is enormous and the list goes on and on. Surely some academics have attempted quantified estimates of how much heat our global civilization is creating as an invisible byproduct of it's mere smooth operation. I imagine the experts could chart a graph and I would wager that in the last 150 years it is climbing to near vertical.
Now I was going to press on this hopefully today. But you have a much larger readership, a bigger soapbox, and it's a greater good if you take this concept and use your far superior writing skills fleshing it out if you think is worth it. It looks to be a difficult problem to solve completely but I think there are multiple avenues toward ameliorating it. I will put off publishing for now while you mull it over. I don't know any books on the topic but I wasn't planning to do much research..just my usual speculation.
Michael, go ahead and do your thing: write and publish. I have a hundred topics pending and all my old ones to revisit... I'd bumped into this excess heat idea elsewhere and will keep it on my radar, but it's not one I'm going to address anytime soon. And anyway there's only good to come out of both of us, and others, exploring the same topic.
Jason, yesterday our mountain microseasonal temperature dropped from 62 degrees to 34, and felt like 15 with the wind chill. My mind was drenched in an eerie sense of dread, echoes from Helene. I believe the snow you wish for landed in Black Mountain overnight. If I could, I would press 'forward' to Maine. We don't need it as we recover our orphan roads from landslides, and dry out our riparian banks from the floods.
As I write about Kinship this week in a Substack collaboration with Brian Funke, I see, even more clearly, that 'kinship' may soon be tossed around as carelessly as 'ecosystem.' I see the problem in me as I wade through my decision to build a tiny house: the permissions i need to obtain, not from the county, but from the Bears, the Carolina Wrens, and the Squirrels who own the acorns that become Oaks of this land.
Energy choices are very much on my mind. I bow to you for doing the heavy lifting in the science research. Your translation skills are stellar. Thanks, brother.🌱🌿
I'll give you my address for the snow delivery, Katharine. Otherwise, stay high and dry as best you can. As for your tiny house, please bear in mind the scale of what's actually happening and who's causing damage at the landscape scale. It's not you nor your tiny house. Enrich the landscape around the place you call home, and you'll remain far ahead of the curve. Thanks for all you do.
I’m still choosing to worship the sun. From today’s post:
Once the sun re-emerged, however, I felt my spirit re-emerge. Admittedly, I am a sun worshiper—as if part plant, my chlorophyll rejoicing and spinning sunlight into limbs, or part reptile, a poikilothermic creature soaking up the sun’s heat to power my own. [Don’t you love the lexicon of science? Poikilotherm (noun): an organism (such as a frog) with a variable body temperature that tends to fluctuate with and is similar to or slightly higher than the temperature of its environment: a cold-blooded organism (Merriam-Webster).]
Glad someone's out there celebrating the light, Wendy. And yes, the multilingual depths of scientific language can be a real joy. Thanks for being here.
Such a great expression: The sun is the star. Wow
Also your observation, "our usual response to cheap, abundant energy is to create more humans and more stuff." That is the crux right there.
Thank you, Diane. I'm still marveling at learning that the Sun makes up nearly 100% of the mass of the solar system. And as for my observation, I should add that I think we're capable of responding otherwise - especially at an individual or small group level - but en masse there hasn't been a lot of movement that way. It's another way of framing the entire Anthropocene problem, right? What's the best way to respond to the abundant energy we've learned to provide?
Having spent the majority of my career in photovoltaic R&D, I certainly support those technologies. I also agree with the essay that even renewables require responsible creation and usage. One energy source, however, will not satisfy all applications so I also favor ongoing fusion research., even though its commercial payback may be decades away. Our present problems derive largely from lack of far-sighted planning. Remedies of these must therefore project decades or even centuries into the future.
And of course I agree that overpopulation will negate any attempts to create a healthier and more prosperous future. I thank the author for raising that point.
Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate your specific expertise here amid my generalized speculation. And I very much appreciate your focus on the long-term planning that rarely occurs. As for population, I'm overdue for a focused piece on the topic. I've written a few, but it's been a while.
Thanks for your comment. I am glad we agree on these major points.
An essay, tremendously informative, eloquent and making a convincing argument for the use of solar power rather than pinning our hopes on fusion technology coming to the rescue anytime soon.
What troubles me is how do we escape the fundamental equation that any power source we use creates heat energy at the downstream end? What has been concerning us recently in the last forty years or more are the harmful toxic pollutants and greenhouse gas byproducts of our power generation and I think we are well on our way to eliminating them with solar and wind.
But still, whether it be a sewing machine, a microwave, a lithium powered bicycle, an elevator lift, we are still generating heat that has to go somewhere. We can't reflect it back into space, we can't geo-engineer it away, we can't sequester it. Our civilization's byproduct is heat no matter what power source we use. And that worries me, as I see no way around it.
Even if we ate nothing but plants, taking the energy they sequester from the sun and using it to power and warm our bodies, the heat we generate just to run our bodies and move around, when there are 8 billion of us, is substantial. Now add the heat byproducts of our civilization and even with no greenhouse gases we are warming up the planet. Just how much is the question. Jason, I think I see a path to a solution but I don't think it is one many will want to take.
Thank you, Michael. I need to understand this long-term heat problem better. I've heard this idea but haven't been able to wrap my head around it. Thanks for the reminder. Stay tuned...
Jason, do you remember reading how in the cold days of winter the medieval European peasants would bring some livestock into their huts at night to serve as a heat source? Even two humans can heat a room significantly just from their body heat in winter. Now multiply that heat by the size of our current herds and our own numbers.. We'd reduce the heat problem significantly by becoming vegetarians! And of course reducing our own numbers.
All those eggbeaters, elevators, bicycles, and smartphones we so rely on, have to be manufactured, they don't grow in nature awaiting harvesting. And that fabrication process involves an enormous amount of heat release and global warming. But to eliminate all these adjuncts is the path no one wants to take. We feel it would reduce us to a brutish Stone Age existence. And it might. But we've learned a little in 40,000 years and there may be ways to solve the problem and keep our civilization. We might just offshore it for one. Bears thinking about.
Thanks for this, Michael. It's fascinating. I still want to read deeper. Do you have any sources you recommend?
Funny you should ask Jason my friend. I'm up early at 1am Pacific time here getting a mostly completed draft of an essay on heat ready to go out the door where i mention your Substack and reproduce my two comments with added material. I consider the problem significant but far less pressing or impactful as the necessity of lowering green house gases. What's interesting to me at least is that no one seems to be mentioning it. Already our cities are acting as urban heat islands that change the weather around them. And our cities proliferate and continue to expand in size. This is ominous. Our cars produce heat from their workings over and above the carbon and other toxic gases they emit..engine blocks, exhaust pipes. I've burnt my fingers touching the latter when I was young. I thought hot metal glowed and the tailpipe seemed so cold and innocent! Even the tires release frictional heat onto the road surfaces. The heat released in our fabrication processes (think smelting metals for example) is enormous and the list goes on and on. Surely some academics have attempted quantified estimates of how much heat our global civilization is creating as an invisible byproduct of it's mere smooth operation. I imagine the experts could chart a graph and I would wager that in the last 150 years it is climbing to near vertical.
Now I was going to press on this hopefully today. But you have a much larger readership, a bigger soapbox, and it's a greater good if you take this concept and use your far superior writing skills fleshing it out if you think is worth it. It looks to be a difficult problem to solve completely but I think there are multiple avenues toward ameliorating it. I will put off publishing for now while you mull it over. I don't know any books on the topic but I wasn't planning to do much research..just my usual speculation.
Michael, go ahead and do your thing: write and publish. I have a hundred topics pending and all my old ones to revisit... I'd bumped into this excess heat idea elsewhere and will keep it on my radar, but it's not one I'm going to address anytime soon. And anyway there's only good to come out of both of us, and others, exploring the same topic.
Will do! My drafts folder is getting pretty stuffed and it's high time to move some essays out of it
Jason, yesterday our mountain microseasonal temperature dropped from 62 degrees to 34, and felt like 15 with the wind chill. My mind was drenched in an eerie sense of dread, echoes from Helene. I believe the snow you wish for landed in Black Mountain overnight. If I could, I would press 'forward' to Maine. We don't need it as we recover our orphan roads from landslides, and dry out our riparian banks from the floods.
As I write about Kinship this week in a Substack collaboration with Brian Funke, I see, even more clearly, that 'kinship' may soon be tossed around as carelessly as 'ecosystem.' I see the problem in me as I wade through my decision to build a tiny house: the permissions i need to obtain, not from the county, but from the Bears, the Carolina Wrens, and the Squirrels who own the acorns that become Oaks of this land.
Energy choices are very much on my mind. I bow to you for doing the heavy lifting in the science research. Your translation skills are stellar. Thanks, brother.🌱🌿
I'll give you my address for the snow delivery, Katharine. Otherwise, stay high and dry as best you can. As for your tiny house, please bear in mind the scale of what's actually happening and who's causing damage at the landscape scale. It's not you nor your tiny house. Enrich the landscape around the place you call home, and you'll remain far ahead of the curve. Thanks for all you do.
I’m still choosing to worship the sun. From today’s post:
Once the sun re-emerged, however, I felt my spirit re-emerge. Admittedly, I am a sun worshiper—as if part plant, my chlorophyll rejoicing and spinning sunlight into limbs, or part reptile, a poikilothermic creature soaking up the sun’s heat to power my own. [Don’t you love the lexicon of science? Poikilotherm (noun): an organism (such as a frog) with a variable body temperature that tends to fluctuate with and is similar to or slightly higher than the temperature of its environment: a cold-blooded organism (Merriam-Webster).]
Glad someone's out there celebrating the light, Wendy. And yes, the multilingual depths of scientific language can be a real joy. Thanks for being here.
Yes to the light! 💫✨
To one of my favorite people on Stack,
Dear Jason,
Wishing you a wonderful gathering of friends and family on this Thanksgiving day,
“Gently the dark comes down over the wild, fair places,
The whispering glens in the hills, the open, starry spaces;
Rich with the gifts of the night, sated with questing and dreaming,
We turn to the dearest of paths where the star of the homelight is gleaming.”
~ L.M. Montgomery
Thank you very much, Lor. Really appreciate the gift of these lines.