Earth Equity News

It's Not Just Greenhouse Gases, But Waste Heat as Well. By Bina Venkataraman, BostGlobe, January 25, 2009. "Even if we bring the greenhouse effect under control, says a Tufts astrophysicist, the earth will warm up anyway, thanks to a completely different source of heat that we create ourselves. Over the next 250 years, calculates Eric J. Chaisson in a recent paper [Long-Term Global Heating From Energy Usage, Abstract, PDF 3 pp], the earth's population will start generating so much of its own heat -- chiefly wasted from energy use -- that it will warm the earth even without a rise in greenhouse gases. The only way to avoid it, he says, is to rethink how we generate energy. His paper examines the planet's growing pool of waste heat, a widespread phenomenon that nonetheless has been little studied as a cause of climate change. Nearly everything that uses or generates energy -- chiefly power plants, but also cars, snowblowers, computers, and light bulbs -- squanders some energy as wasted heat. And the larger and more energy-hungry the human population grows, the more waste heat remains in our atmosphere."