The serenity with which she made the joke about crematoria by saying "it's the only fat-burning workout that really works" made me fall out of my chair.
2476 "known" nuclear weapons testing, daily "conventional" explosions, land mines, Agent Orange.... What could go wrong? Btw, the carbon /toxicity boot print of the elephant in the room aka the military industrial complex anybody?
When I was 16, I brought this issue up to my physics teacher, "we are basically covering the earth with radiators" in regards to human expansion around the planet, with our homes and such, and made a point about all that heat. But he basically laughed me off and mumbled something about how it's too small to ever matter. On this day, I feel vindicated.
Why is heat such a bad thing? The most diversity of life and this plan is was when it was warm. The only thing that decimates life is ice and cold. It’s kind of hard to have life, if all your freshwater is tied up in ice cubes
@@Ont785 Heat is not a bad thing. The problem is when there's too much heat. Or too little, like you pointed out. The warming of the atmosphere already causes problems, and if the temperature continues to rise, we'll eventually face more problems and they'll be more severe. "The only thing that decimates life is ice and cold." Simply not true. Overheating, fire and drought also do the same.
@@lclMetal We are a long way from having an ecosystem that we used to! The is the reason why the a dinosaur fossils all across northern Canada. The only thing keeping humans from migrating were the glaciers. If your freshwater is tied up an ice, there are no animals and there are no people. Gee, what would Canada do if we had a longer growing season and more animals foraging northwards? Stop the fear mongering
I did the same during my uni study and I was told "it is negligible". Well it seems negligible for now, but it is a more fundamental problem rooted in the second principle of thermodynamics than the increase of CO2.
This is a problem I've been pondering over the last few years. Our fridge dumps waste heat into the house. The house is then conditioned (summer) and waste heat is dumped outside (via AC). Every conversion comes with losses and thus wasted energy. In the Winter (for those climates) -- something like a fridge could be almost directly coupled to the outside. Housing needs a better system to move heat around a living space with minimal conversion steps to minimize losses from each conversion.
in cold climates it's already cold, the fridge isn't doing much work anyway. In summer, try to open the door as briefly as possible, to keep hot air from coming in. Insulation will minimize the work done by the fridge. Think about this: if you cover the windows from outside, the sun hits those covers and they heat up. This is the same amount of heat produced if you let them in, only now it's inside. If you use AC, you pump the same heat out. What's the added heat? only the waste from operating the pump. Properly insulated houses cut down on a LOT of energy usage. Outside blinds too. Pump less, that's all. Cut down on energy use and the waste heat of our machines. Next step? properly designed airflow: natural cooling and natural heating just by thinking about airflow during design (hard to do once it's built).
@@MadsterV - That depends on how the temperature in the house is set. If you kept the environment in the home at the same temp (we'll say 20'C) all the time, the fridge will have to do the same amount of work all the time to keep the set temp. It always transfers the load to the HVAC of the home. But I would still be curious to see a stufy that explores "by how much".
@@benjammin1001 oh, I get it, yeah. From what I understand in many extreme cold climates, the "freezer" is just leaving stuff outside. Over here we don't do AC too often, because it doesn't dip too far below freezing but I could see myself unplugging it during the winter if it got worse, and just having a box outside.
Thought about it. It's a much, MUCH smaller volume of air to cool, and it's usually much better insulated too. The fridge will pump heat out only every once in a while (you can hear it when it does), not constantly like AC. You'll never notice your kitchen being hotter just because of the fridge. Also, unlike with AC, there is nothing inside the fridge generating heat, but human bodies produce heat constantly. On the other hand, we're talking about HEATING the house (in winter), so when the fridge pumps heat out, it's actually REDUCING the amount of work the AC does (by a negligible amount), In summer......I'd bet the difference would be hard to measure.
Thank you, Sabine! Educomedy at its best. If only we could use the hot air from politicians to power things, we would really make a dent in this problem.
"Educomedy has been a thing in the USA for a long time. The most politically informed on average there get it through comedy programs like The Late show.
Agreed... and just to help out - they can take the methanogen problem or whatever it is I have/my gastrointestinal tract has to blimp up and float away!
12:48 we are unable to take out CO2 at a scale that would affect the growth of plants, if we wanted to "cool" the planet. Plants just grow larger or more leaves if they need to (they already do this indoors, because of relative lack of solar radiation. So if you put your indoor plant outdoors during the warm season make sure to shade in in the beginning. It will get a sunburn and the too large surface area does not help either). Plants dealt well with 280 ppm - like at the end of the last glaciation - vegetation took back the areas where the ice retreated quickly. And we are now at 410 ppm and plants can cope (they suffer from the extremer conditions caused by the heat, like torrential rains, cold snaps, draughts - but NOT from the higher CO2 levels). So while CO2 is essential for plant life - it is one need that plants can satisfy easily all over the planet and throughout the eons, no matter the levels. If a plant has poor soil, is shaded and gets too little or too much water, and is exposed to constant wind - CO2 is the only thing that will always be in good supply.
"No matter the Co2 level" is quite frankly false. You mention the 280 ppm AFTER the ice age. Now look up how low it was DURING the ice age (below 200 ppm) and how low that number can go without plants starting to starve. Add to that how lower co2 also means a colder atmosphere, and you eventually get to a point where most vegetations simply disappears for lack of food and through harsh climate.
My dog produces so much methane gas, she's definitely a gross polluter. But on a serious note. I was always amazed by the temperature of a City compared to outside the city by maybe twenty or Forty Miles. Same elevation, same land type and same wind current. Those big cities are radiating so much heat.
theyre made of concrete with no plants providing shade or converting the photons into sugar. With masses of humans and machines generating heat. So theyre giant heat engines and batteries. Another reason cities are horrible for the environment
“The energy that comes from the sun is free energy. The plants can use it to grow and we can use it to power lawn mowers to cut the plants”. Pure genius.😂
Mechanisms of cause are multiple. We actually are also cause by doing something right. Imagine earths atmosphere is the dirty stuff on the glass windows. It has so2 carbon pollution all stuck on it. Be it from fires city pollution or volcanic eruptions. It means the windows are dirty and the suns light streaming in is not so great. Like the drapes are closed during a very bad volcanic eruptions. We get nuclear winter like cooling. Well when that stopped happening 3x per century ie late 19th century. Plus the sun itself dialed down to solar minimums Dalton minimums and the Muander minimums that lacking in addition to very large eruptions just 400 years before that in Europe plus 536 Krakatoa left the earth with both dirty windows and really low solar output. Which is cold 🥶. Now the last four solar cycles have been since then have been very high. Big volcanic eruptions stopped and we cleaned up our polluted air quite quickly. So the opposite is now happening. We are hotter. Variable 3. Plastic particles in the ocean change the water chemistry to go from heat turnover to heat insulation. Both the heat from the ocean floor changes because that giant power source the core radiates heat to the crust. The water cools the crust. Well not so much anymore. It is also not cooling well enough at the surface because more sun light reaches the waters. Because the windows are clean and the sun is very active in this solar cycle. Variation 4. The windows are not only super clean now it is also 35% open. Meaning the earth’s magnetic field has a reduced strength of 35% allowing more radiation to flow through the shield and create solar forcing at the poles. More of that as the polar excursion continues to deviate further from the actual poles the weaker the shield gets. The polar vortex moves in since with the magnetic pole. Its new berry center is over Siberia. Same with the southern hemisphere however not as much of a deviation. That changes the jet streams pattern and heat distribution. Variability factor 5. Not understanding how quick changes on multiple fronts effects the global electric current and how that effect atmospheric circulation. Variable factors 6. Non linear progression of excess heat energy with vapor loading on now clean air capable of holding more vapor, building lower cloud density slows down jet streams and increases air pressure volatility gives us more extreme weather events. Variant 7. Ice Sheet melt diluting the Atlantic currents more rapidly for many reasons out of our control will lead to shut down and every single time it did both the magnetic fields were greatly reduced and polar ice flow increased to cause it. 400 years from now if not sooner we will not be boiling we will be about as cold as we were when Europeans discovered America.
7:51 "Now It's unlikely that we'd get that far because we'd all die before that, which ought to slow down the economy a little." haha! Love her sense of humor!!!
Actually that's what the author Thomas W. Murphy Jr has pointed out (at least in his blogposts from a decade ago, as well as in his 2021 book and 2022 article) : «steady» exponential growth - as we have known it since the beginning of the Industrial Age - cannot possibly continue, because it quickly runs into absurdities like this one, which we might be able to deal with, but then it keeps getting... exponentially harder as we have to keep building bigger and bigger «air conditioning units», then leave Earth, then Earth becoming a tiny fraction of the economic output... then our whole galaxy (only 1350 years to equal it with only star power !)... and at some point we might even run into (what we at least currently consider to be) a fundamental limit of trying to grow the surface available to us for dissipation to the outside universe faster than the speed of light ! Or on the other hand into the economic paradox of energy becoming an arbitrarily small (and exponentially shrinking) fraction of the economy, which is not a stable situation because at some point some group controlling a microscopic fraction of the economy would be able to corner the whole energy market, at which point they can increase prices arbitrarily high, at which point its fraction of the economy would stop exponentially shrinking - rather the inverse - etc.
One of the largest wastes that has always bothered me is how we design all homes with isolated wast heat generation. For example, refrigerators, water heaters, stoves, ovens, dishwashing. clothes washers etc. They all use energy to work and products large amounts of waste heat, that often we then use more energy to cool the home to compensate. All of those devices which radiate waste heat should be tied together via a common thermal bus. devices that can use the heat like heat pumps or heat pump based water heaters, that can extract the heat from the bus would lower their own energy consumption while performing their work, and lessen the waste heat produced. In larger settings like apartment buildings the overage of waste heat could be pumped through large geothermal grids installed below the building. If the heat is trapped below the building in cold months residents could tap into this like any geothermal system. Other potential uses, could be water purification. There are devices on the market now that take 5v power and with water and salt product sodium hypochlorite, aka bleach (for anyone who doesnt know). So for 1.250w you could make a small quantity of bleach for cleaning or sterilizing. I'm certain other simple reactions could be used to capture waste heat via peltier devices and be used in a home setting.
That's a really tough problem to try and solve. We currently don't even capture "waste" natural gas from oil wells, it gets flared off instead of saved and used. That's a relatively easy problem to solve compared to what you just suggested.
G'day, Oh, I say ...! Why hath nobody ever thunk of such a thang before thus, then, one wondurrz. Perhaps EVERYBODY who already knows the answer will sit silent while YOU go ahead and build one functioning Unit, for all those still wondering to observe your Results. My guess is that you WILL encounter a variety of the Principle of Elbarsoles, Arselbows, and even ElbArsEyeBalls... En Elbow is easy to design, and so is an Arsehole, but to build an Elbow which can also work as an Arsehole is as difficult as making a simple Arsehole which will function as an Elbow..., and an Elbow that works as an Arsehole, Eyeball and Testicle is really really difficult to imagine. So, if you can figure out how to retrofit your House so the Waste Heat from your Toaster and Hair Dryer, Computer and Microwave, with that from your Refrigerator and Air-Conditionining is recycled to produce your Electricity, while furnishing all your hot Water... After that, you might like to show us how to use the Waste Heat from your Road-Vehicle to operate your Washing-Machine. Ready...? Get set....,; Off You Go Then....! Double-Quick Olde Bean, Time is of the Essence ! Such is life, Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !
Unfortunately actual experiment disproves that hypothesis because we all died September 2019 owing to not much sea ice that year according to a "Guy McPherson" and the 0.00001% human billionaire psychopaths in bunkers can't possibly have been doing it all themselves for 3 years, so I think it's reached a Critical Social Tipping Point my British Railways mate Richard told me in 1976 where they calculated they only needed 12% more office staff at British Railways Reading and then they could remove the trains & track and the office staff could continue doing exactly what they'd always been doing, seamlessly without interruption or notice. I think this Critical Social Tipping Point has been passed by human species.
Doomsday cult freaks. There's a 100% chance the interglacial epoch will end returning Europe and of Canada to year round winter. Could happen in 500 years, or maybe 5,000. But it is inevitable, the warm periods are shorter than the cold periods... We have 4 seasons per year, throughout a 70 year lifespan. The earth however, has its own cycles that are 10,000 - 20,000 years long, a 100,000 year cycle, and also a millions of year cycle. If it's too hot for your taste, just wait a thousand years. And don't worry, none of these things will bring about the rapture where all the air conditioned sinners are brought before the great climate gods where they will be judged and punished in the afterlife. Armageddon has been used so successfully to control populations for thousands of years. It's hilarious and disturbing to watch this happen during a time when anyone can read the actual science online for free. Even the ICC stuff is online and the cult members don't even read that stuff despite it being their own religious doctrine.
The total power that reaches the earth from the sun is about 110,000 terawatts or 7,600 times more power than all of humanity produces, even assuming all of that power eventually became waste heat. Magnitudes matter.
Yes but sometimes she goes too far . This time for exemple, I really thought she was taking this exponential thinking to the letter …. I viewed up to the end but couldn’t get this nagging out of my mind . Exponentials always have limits in real life …. That is so obvious… so why even consider a model based on exponentials ?
@@thierrylandrieu7441 You are correct. Sabine was Foul with the 1st part of this video and most especially by far the sickening clickbait title in order to get eye balls of both the coal-oil-gas-wealth Shill-Troll Junk-Science Liar-Imbeciles and also of the Guy McPherson General Purpose Imbecile set. Just to keep her Business Model healthy. I'll likely never think much good of her ever again.
@@grindupBaker I think I agree . Still there are some good videos …. And some people really think it would be good to cool the planet . Just thinking that makes me sick …. We were headed towards a cooling anyhow , and the carrying capacity of the planet 20 000 years ago was so small …. You know Peter’s law ? If something can go wrong it will , so a planet cooling system ….
I've never seen someone present scientific topics with such simple explanations for the layman, as well as keeping it fresh and interesting by interspersing some truly golden comedy in between. I truly wish I could have had you as my teacher, Ms. Hossenfelder! Keep up the brilliant work.
There wasn't really any scientific topics in this video. Just rambling about waste heat, and if you think waste heat is a complicated subject, no wonder you believe this.
„You phone gets warm while you use it … but it’s not because it likes you so much.“, that’s why I love this channel, but also because of the intentional information of course.
I’m very surprised this is never talked about. I used to think it was because that heat was very insignificant and globally irrelevant, but intuitively it was difficult to believe. You just made an interesting confirmation of that point
because climate scientists - at least those who believe in "green growth" - don't like to talk about that. those who do are mostly ignored (like timothy garret "civilization is a heat engine") or ridiculed as alarmists (like guy mcpherson; although he probably deserves that).
Also if the ambient temp rises we need to use less power for heating (and more power for cooling). Overall, at temperate latitudes, more warmth is better.
Not only is Sabine. Hossenfelder an excellent communicator of complex ideas, but is also a gifted humorist. The dry, wit and the deadpan delivery has me listening so closely I find my mind enriched and stretched. Thank you for challenging my presumptions and misconceptions and for doing so in such a well composed manner. What a gift to the topic of physics and to our general cultural evolution.
True, there is no current global solution to waste heat or greenhouse gasses, but the most important thing to any technology making a significant contribution to the solution is that it is incorporated into our daily lives or standard business processes and not an external expense. Adding high-sulfur fuel in airline aircraft to burn at altitude could be incorporated in months. Let's try it and see if it's feasible. For zero risk mitigation, the SkyCool panels Sabine mentioned will work, and even cheaper are broken glass bubble pigments which do the same thing with broad-spectrum light. I live in the Phoenix metro area, where every roof should be white.
"Plants can use it to grow, and we can use it to power lawnmowers to cut the plants down which is okay, because physics isn't concerned with the meaning of life" so brutal.
@Peter Leonard Gates, it seems you're confusing the (mostly) British comedy troupe "Monty Python", who indeed, did not tell jokes, with "the monty pyton" (definite article, lower case m, lower case p, no h in pyton) who did. Also, please don't confuse "the monty pyton", with monty pytonn (with 2 "n"s) most famous for their dead toucan skit!
And this is why we need to start using only heat pumps in homes. Because a heat pump doesn't create much heat of its own, merely uses electricity to transfer heat between two isolated bodies of air. And does so with decent efficiency. And why we have to abandon the steam cycle for energy, and convert X-rays from PB11 fusion directly into electrical current with the photoelectric effect. But we don't need to worry Sabine, because the future runs on ultra-efficiency! (Or it doesn't run at all.)
I never comment on videos but I'll make an exception here. I just discovered this channel and I am amazed by the quality of content and the teaching style. I have studied this topic of so called "anthropogenic heat emissions" a while back and no one seemed to care about this, glad someone is putting this out there!
@@jomamma1750 Sadly, I have to agree with you. Normally Sabine makes excellent and even handed videos, but not where the subject of climate change is concerned. Academics need to be a bit more cool-headed. For sure, I am all for reducing fossil fuels (we still need plastics) and reducing any pollution including CO2 (currently rising yet long term still modest at 0,04% of our atmosphere). I can also have some sympathy for NGO/government promoted ‘exaggeration of fear’ for the good cause. But there are limits. There are people within our (un)elected leadership with a lot of influence who cannot distinguish between facts and exaggerated fear and they literally see humanity as a threat they need to deal with now. All software induced hockey stick models and theories from academics aside, we should first focus on UNBIASED measurement data sets. If it comes to temperature, ancient ice core measurement is the only thing free from academic modelling and bias. We thus need to look at the GISP2 Greenland data and recognise Earth’s climate is inherently cyclical. Climate has always changed and always will. The current changes are NOT out of long term bandwidth. As for short term changes in temperature; the most UNBIASED measurement is the rise of worldwide ocean water. It is monitored and currently stands at 1.8mm per year average, which is EXACTLY the average of ocean water rise since Pleistocene. Notice, the club of Rome 50 years ago predicted a 4 metre rise for 2025. Now in 2023, almost 50 years later we measure…. 9 cm actual increase. Let that sink in and lets collectively feel ashamed. IPCC even very ashamed. Again, yet we need to make the fuel transition but videos like these are of no help to humanity. As for Sabines Q increase due to increased human need of energy. It is historically insignificant to the solar radiation output fluctuations (scheduled to take a downturn next year). It is well withing the parameters Earth’s biosphere can stabilize. A higher Q in general means higher altitude cloud formation, thus higher albedo (thus more solar input shielding) and the higher CO2 in combination with higher Q output is a positive for plant life in general and specifically at higher altitudes, thus more absorption of CO2, downscaling Q. But regardless. Yes, we need to be careful and make the switch to nuclear faster. But no, CO2 and current fluctuations are well within parameters Earth can handle. Earth’s population is heading downwards after 2060. We can feed all and each individual is worth-while and welcome on this planet. We will be fine as long as we take good care of the environment. Earth will be fine in all cases longer term, long after we are gone. And if you still suffer from anxiety after watching Sabine’s video, pls be sure to also check out George Carlin’s ‘saving the planet’ for some relief.
@@RWin-fp5jn You've been reading the propaganda as well. I used to work at a science station, the actual Ocean rise between 1995 and 2015 was .020 of an inch total or 1 one-thousandth of an inch per year. Quit believing ANYTHING that these people say. It is ALL propaganda.
I think we are so advanced that we now try and shape the world to our liking and that isn't normal we are the only species evolved enough to do that, this us very off topic btw but I feel the earth will undergo its natural cycles and changes over the next 10 or 20 thousand years and by then at least one event would have caused 99% human population decrease, not total extinction but there's so many of us that if 1% survived or even just like 1 million people, the human race would rise and again just as we have over the last 10000 years, my point being we tend to separate our selves from nature from the universe but we are the universe, we are made up of the universe and the universe and earth doesn't care about humans it'd gonna undergo its natural order so it prospers until it's end, so instead of trying to manipulate the earth. I've decided to take enjoyment out of looking the inevitable truth in the eyes, whether I'm here to see it or not the earth won't be here forever, nothing will and humans are just a moment in time just like the moment u just look to read this, life is just a collection of moments and we are trying to sway away from that truth and trying to make a new one, a truth where we can live forever and control planets and whatnot but maybe we were never meant to understand and conquer maybe we weren't meant to simply experience life, no one has experienced life in 100% the same way that you have, so what do you make of the world?
The thing about air conditioning is it doesn't magically make heat energy go away, it just moves it from one place to another (Inside your home to the outside, inside the refrigerator into your ktchen, etc.) and in the process creates even more heat like all electrical devices that aren't 100% efficient (which is all of them)
Yes, but it moves heat more efficiently than anything else we've tried; vapor-phase-change refrigeration gets you 3:1 joules moved versus joules required to do the moving.
Finn here, I was surprised to hear that byproduct heat from power plants isn't used for municipal heating by default everywhere else. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, so why not?
Propably because it serves capitalism better to invent a problem and sell the solution; Or as in this case, there's excess heat coming from power plants (solution to a problem of needing to warm up houses), so instead of recycling, let's let it all go to waste and then come up with a solution that requires additional circulation of money (effectively inventing a problem from the ashes of an old solution).
I've been thinking about this issue myself for years. I always wondered: "But what about all the added up heat of everything producing it, aside from any greenhouse gas effect?". Glad to see a video about it.
This problem is actually very easy to solve. We just need to nuke the ice cap on the north pole and use a fleet of big ships to push the pieces of broken ice in the atlantic and pacific oceans...
Heat pollution already has a significant local impact for big power plants, and on rivers and lakes used for cooling. Anti-renewable energy and pro-nuclear sentiment, built up over decades through PR, strategically dismisses the subject.
So the question becomes, why has the temperature only increased 1.1 degrees Celsius in the last 250 years then? Why isn't the temperature increase accelerating as quickly as we create more waste heat year over year?
This is a foul junk-science video title about apparently a paper crafted by imbecile scientists who predict that humans will use 10,000 times as much energy as right now in just 400 years. Absolute garbage, precisely matching your so-called brain.
@@kayakMike1000 This is a foul junk-science video title about apparently a paper crafted by imbecile scientists who predict that humans will use 10,000 times as much energy as right now in just 400 years. Absolute garbage, precisely matching your so-called brain.
@@ole86 The electric car exports much if its waste heat to the power station condensers, cooling towers, and exhaust stacks. A diesel engine vehicle is easily 40% efficient. Our thermal steam-electric generating stations are on average only 38% efficient, then add transmission losses, then the losses of charging and discharging batteries.
@@o0alessandro0o Well, what I was thinking was that if we survive 400 more years that problem will have likely either been solved through technology or human adaptability. Also, if human society somehow collapses either by war or social upheaval, this will still not likely be THE problem 400 years from now. So we will either have the technology to offset the warming, or we will be producing less waste heat.
I visited friends in California. They had a swimming pool and air conditioning. The previous owners had not thought of running the pool circulation water over the hot roof in tubes to cool the house and heat the pool. They ran electric air conditioning, and electrically heated the pool !
yes its trasfer of latent heat energy from one source to another. Did you know the earth can be a heat battery? Pipe the hot water from the heat exchanger into earth pipes 300 feet down then over the summer it heats up the earth to supply warm water all winter long. The total power consumption is to make up for the remaining 10% or 20% to heat the house or non at all.
@@spyder2383The asphalt shingles on the roof reflect heat while the pool water retains the coolness of the night. By circulating water through pipes which cross the roof the water is heated by the reflected heat and the sun. So it will pull cool water from the pool, and return hot water. It can be turned on and off depending on water and air temp This allows the pool to be used during the months when pools are generally too cold to swim in.
Yes. I made a solar heater for my pool in Vegas with $20 in black plastic drip tubing. I spread the coils out on my metal porch cover and using elbows hooked it to the spigot on the side of the pool pump. The other end went in the pool. Then I ran the pool pump from 10 till 2 instead of the middle of the night. The water comes out of the pipe at 110°. Free heat.
The practice of using waste heat to heat homes is as old as the industrial revolution. I used to live in Erie PA, and there are still wooden pipes (basically tree trunks that had been split in half, hollowed out, and then banded back together) underground there that used to delivered steam from a coke plant (coal that has been heated in an oxygen free atmosphere to be used in steel furnaces) to homes for heating.
For the black body to emit in atmospheric window its temperature should be around 0C So the best way to exploit this window would be to build power plants in places where ambient temperatures are low and stable around -10C so any exhaust can be cooled to that temperature before exposing it to the outside.
In "3001: The Final Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke this problem is mentioned as happening in the 21st century and fixed by covering half the Earth with reflectors. I didn't pay much attention to it, until now.
Seems like an easier solution would be to just stop relying on a growth-based economy. We've only been rapidly increasing our rate of consumption, our population, our environmental impact for a few hundred years. Population growth is already ending -- we could choose to end the other 2 as well. Any way you slice it, capitalism is bound to be a relatively short-term temporary affair.
@@dr.zoidberg8666 No growth means that new technology doesn't develop. Population growth means more people to think of solutions to cancer and energy, or to design new video games and clothes. When the world's population was 1 billion, everybody lived in extreme poverty.
@@williamanthony915 No, it doesn't. It means consumption doesn't increase over time. Almost all technological development is done by the public sector, not the private sector. It turns out that profit is a terrible incentive for actual innovation because real fundamental R&D is very costly & uncertain.
@@dr.zoidberg8666 So the government made the personal computer, not Steve Wozniak? The government made the iPhone, not Steve Jobs? The government made re-usable rockets, not Elon Musk? Prior to 1900, the government didn't fund energy research, and things like electricity and the steam engine were invented. If we left phone R&D to the government, do you really think it would've been as beautiful as the iPhone?
@@dr.zoidberg8666 I personally invest a lot of money into small modular nuclear reactors (in a private company research and developing them). It's an uncertain investment, and the whole process is very costly, but there's a chance it will produce a lot of money for me, which is why I do it.
The chimney could incorporate a turbine to produce a little energy to try to make it a little more economicaly viable, plus there are devices that produce electricity when provided with a differential in temperature, they could fit in/on the walls.
I'm absolutely stunned. Your knowledge is impressive and the way you present it without even flinching is truly addictive. Thanks for doing this, you're amazing!
I've never thought about the use and just a delay in the waste heat from solar power, excellent discussion. Those sure were some huge numbers being thrown around for mitigation schemes. Seems like that would buy a lot of solar panels.
Solar isn't that great because solar panels are only 25% efficient and plus you'll have to use them to charge batteries. Some solar plants have been abandoned because they're crap.
@@chompchompnomnom4256 The abandoned plants are not solar panels but the mirror to heat molten salt idea, which was badly implemented. Solar panels are fine, you are correct that storage is a issue most don't appreciate fully but with the advancement of numerous battery technologies we are probably going to have solved that in the next 5 years (will still take 20 years to deploy probably).
9:18 Actually, using wind has a net cooling effect on the forcing. The thermal radiation is proportional to temperature to the fourth power. Collection of wind energy impedes mixing, and by keeping hot parts hot, increases total radiation. 9:18
Also, solar panels are far darker than the average piece of land on which it would be placed, which means that less sunlight is reflected back into space.
@@noergelstein yes. Some studies show that covering a significant amount of the Sahara with solar panels could totally change the climate in the region.
Good point. This might actually have an effect. resulting in more heat on the surface. More effect then anything Sabine talks about but still nothing compared to all other global and astronomical forces. For example: Earth was greening since it got warmer and more CO2 is available, thus the dark green color increasing globally will render all the streets an deforestation and cities insignificant in comparison.
It adds up globally, sure, but these features have a greater effect on local warming than on a global scale (yet. We're not done paving, tho!) That's because of entropy... we still need to "spread the wealth" in order to turn the entire world into an urban corridor. Mwahahahahahaha!!!!
@@SolidFake The heat does not stay in the atmosphere, it will always go out and get lost in outer space. the atmosphere only delays this cooling. The 0,04% CO2 does jack Sh*it here, even if some photons are send back to earth, in a fraction of a second they will turn back towards space. All these effects are dominated and overwritten by water vapor, clouds and so on.
Man-made tornado: What could possibly go wrong? That comment along with the observation about fat-burning had me laughing out loud. What a great way to attract attention to a topic that I have always wondered about. Great job Sabine!
You know, with the man-made tornado's we could have the flying cars without a source of "free energy" to move the car. We also could having the flying pigs and , as a result , the solar shield bult on the moon. I feel like the new Elon Musk already ! 😂🤣
Don't worry Sab! When the air is saturated at 100% it works its way to Northern lattitudes and becomes snow which reflects sunlight and heat, cooling the atmosphere further and adding to snowfall and glaciation. Hot oceans guarantee an impending glacial period
I love the humorous interjections Sabine delivers with complete deadpan expression in her lectures. If Jack Benny had been a physics professor, his lectures would be like Sabine's.
I know nothing about science and randomly stumbled upon this channel a few months back, but I enjoy the content and hints of sarcastic humor included in each video. Thank you for being so informative on things I know nothing about! I find it refreshing to watch alongside my usual RUclips binge watch sessions :)
@eriktempelman2097 95% of all politicians. A Yank politician who is on the "I'm with science" team, not the "my money's from mega-money-burning-carbon" crowd said "Greenland lost 12.5 BILLION gallons of water in a SINGLE DAY ! Can you believe it !???" It was actually 12.5 billion tonnes of water in 1 day, which is only 4.1 times Greenland's regular daily Spring+Summer ice loss since hundreds/thousands of years ago and the "spectacular" 12.5 Gt on that single, absurdly unusual, July day is now just 2.7 times Greenland's regular daily Spring+Summer ice loss. Politicians. LOL.
I'm from north africa's desert, the sahara, and the cirrius clouds are a serious problem in summer, basically the infrared temperature of the sky raise alot and the nights doesn't cool down the ground
If your concern is from aircraft contrails they have a temporary effect on the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) from the Earth's surface,but it is not a significant long-term effect. During the daytime, contrails can actually have a warming effect by reflecting sunlight back to the surface, which can increase the surface temperature but also reflect energy back into space. However, at night, the contrails can act as a barrier to outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth's surface. This can temporarily trap some of the radiation and lead to a slight warming effect. However, this effect is typically short-lived, as contrails are relatively short-lived themselves and dissipate within a few hours. Probably, the overall impact of contrails on the Earth's energy balance is relatively small compared to other factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and natural climate variability. Therefore, while contrails may have some temporary effect on OLR, they are not a significant factor in long-term climate change. I also think somehow the earth will boil this soon is not exactly correct as essentially all local energy is ultimately from the sun regardless of our sourcing and we are still emerging from and ice age no time to panic yet.
12:08 dumping waste heat into domestic buildings seems a good idea for areas where heating is required for the longer period of the year. However when the homes don’t use the heat, you have to get rid of it anyway. This is a similar problem to balancing the feeds into the electrical grid, albeit with a much larger time constant probably.
True, but people still want to have hot water available all the time. So using at least some of the available heat seems to make sense, if it's economically viable. Friends of mine moved to a newly built apartment block a few weeks ago. I was quite surprised to learn, that all of the heat needed for hot water supply and a substantial part of the heat needed for the colder seasons, comes from the data centre of a local telco that is sitting in the basement. Also, a lot of heat is needed for industrial processes, that aren't really coupled to seasonality. It's probably a good idea to at least consider colocating "waste heat" sources with nearby heat consumers.
@@lupf5689 Sadly if the datacenter closes the books he's back to running cold showers. Which is why you would need heat networks fed by a variety of industrial heat sources and supplemented by a number of collective heat pumps. If you could add in some mass as a heatbattery (large watercistern or something) to run your heat pumps off that would be bonus.
Dear Sabine, I found your channel about a month ago and I LOVE your videos. They're absolutely addictive. In addition to their great educational value I also appreciate your reserved humor you perform with a straight face. :) You are awesome!
🇨🇦/🇺🇸... I've been wondering about this for DECADES! I even wrote to and asked the host of Canada's CBC radio's science program "Quirks & Quarks" and they were quite "duh??" about it. They couldn't believe that anyone would ask such a question! Thanks for addressing this!!
The SkyCool systems mentioned around 17:30 can be made at home if you're an enterprising DIYer, as a spray paint is available which radiates infrared very effectively; I'm unsure if it's a metamaterial (edit: It's a mix of two metamaterials in particle form, one to reflect broad-spectrum sunlight, and one to emit infrared in the range of 8-13 micrometers). Tech Ingredients used the paint to make one such radiative cooler in his video from Feb. 8th, 2023! (the most recent video as of this comment)
@@soniagheza391 With a bit of web searching, I believe it's described as self-cooling paint, the first brand of which comes up in a quick search is PARC (which stands for PAssive Radiative Cooling). The company website says it's specifically designed to radiate infrared into the sky. There may be aftermarket resellers or off-brands of the stuff, I don't know where to get it. It doesn't seem to be sold in spray can form, you'll need a paint sprayer.
Sadly, she sais unscientific things that fit the political agenda. We can easily start an ice age (bring dust to stratosphere with a controlled nuclear winter. Now what will she do in ice age, when a glacier approaches her house? (spoiler: she thinks, that loosing her grants funding is much more real, than the global warming, ice age, etc).
And they say Germans have no humour... There's a Mercedes which obeys spoken commands. "Windscreen wipers on" etc. To the command "tell me a joke" it responds, "this is a German car. We do not tell jokes! "
09:27 - Tidal power ("... partly comes from the pull of the moon ...") would also become waste heat even without human intervention, by friction as the water both has friction with itself (turbulence) and the river/sea beds.
Great observation...truly renewable usable free energy that's otherwise waste heat. Golly, that's energy imparted to earth by sun and moon gravitation. We're gonna burn...ha ha.
I love the idea of filling balloons with hot air in order to be able to send the hot air up in the atmosphere! Everyone knows that hot air won't go up without a pretty balloon :)
I've been wondering about why I have never heard anything about the waste heat causing a temp rise of the earth since I learned that energy is not destroyed just dissapated. About 60 years ago.
1:13 Actually, green house gases don't exactly add heat. They prevent heat from being radiated away from Earth, but not all heat radiation is prevented. We'd know since we'd feel slightly overcooked by now, if it did.
11:22 Aalborg is my town's "twin/sister town". Here in my town in Holland we also use heat waste from a nearby power plant. Downside is that Vattenval is the only provider in this area, so the prices are kinda high (also pre-2022), but at least it works.
I'm glad you tackled the problem of waste heat. I had not realized someone had calculated the magnitude of the issue. I've long argued the promise of nuclear fusion as a source of unlimited power is not possible, as it ignores the issue of waste heat. I must admit I had grossly underestimated the magnitude of the problem. I thought of it as a fraction of solar irradiance rather than the human caused forcing.
@@viktorm3840 More like a molehill... All the spent nuclear fuel assemblies ever produced by every reactor on earth have less volume than a 30 meter cube AND spent fuel can be recycled and reprocessed which removes the highly radioactive shorter half-life elements to go into new fuel rods, as well as other things like medical equipment and smoke detectors, and the remaining "depleted" uranium has a half life that is so long that it is barely radioactive at all and the actual hazard is that it is a toxic heavy metal. And speaking of toxic heavy metals and radioactive elements, guess what in the ash left over from burning Coal in power plants that produce ACTUAL mountains of ash every year?! Literally tens of billions of tons! That not only contains radioactive Uranium and Thorium, but also arsenic! Lead! Thallium! Mercury! And more! That just sits in piles out in the open uncontained, with enough becoming airborne that it causes more disease & kills more people EVERY YEAR than in thE ENTIRE HISTORY of nuclear energy production! Guess what's actually replacing the "EVIL" and "SCARY" nuclear power plants that people like the German Green party are having shut down!
@@viktorm3840 Setting aside the fact that the concrete industry is itself environmental catastrophic in the same order of magnitude as coal power production of not quite at the same level, there are still 2 problems with the growing usage of coal fly ash as a concrete additive. 1. When one attempts to discover why the EPA has decided to allow the use in concrete of a hazardous waste product containing toxic heavy metals (including several with significant radioactivity), instead of heavily restricting it's usage to only certain applications they way that asbestos reinforced concrete is restricted, you will happily be directed to a number of studies which appear to show that: " When securely encapsulated into the concrete matrix the toxic material exposure remains within safe limits, around only 3 times higher than background levels." While this claim is almost certainly true, I can't help but remember that, decades ago, similar claims were made regarding the use of asbestos... I suspect that those claims also being true, provided that the asbestos remained similarly safely encapsulated in the concrete, was of little comfort to those who developed debilitating illness after exposure to dry asbestos concrete mix powder during construction or asbestos laden concrete dust during demolition. 2. While concrete on it's own is capable of lasting thousands of years when well maintained, REINFORCED concrete has a lifespan of 50 years or less, before it begins to deteriorate, and even with good maintenance is very unlikely to last 100 before it becomes unsafe and must be torn down. This means that any hazardous material used in reinforced concrete will one day no longer be encapsulated, and WILL become a long term hazard. Just as structures built with reinforced concrete containing asbestos during the era when understanding the hazards of asbestos and the short lifespan of reinforced concrete was limited, are now presenting a hazard for demolition and disposal, I strongly suspect that the widespread usage of coal fly ash in concrete will one day create similar problems. (Except worse, because asbestos is mainly an inhalation hazard and doesn't also leach toxic/radioactive elements into soil and groundwater, while the ashcrete also exacerbating the problem of safely storing toxic coal ash by adding in the additional mass of all the pulverized concrete contaminated with coal ash.)
I love Sabine's humor. This was brilliant! She does a 22 minutes long 'xkcd what if?' style exposition and she never gives away the game! P.S. Maybe a little too much. Judging by the comments, maybe viewers did not catch it either. The original commentary is a critique, using reductio ad absurdum, of current economic dogma.
Actually, the content is such that it seemed to me she was taking the obviously 'ad absurdum' projection seriously. She never dropped out of character to note that her comments were tongue-in-cheek.
Very good point that until today I have only heard in a presentation by Stefan Rahmstorf - and nowhere else! Please don't forget the cooling albedo. If we exchange reflective surfaces with PV, then more energy of the sun will take effect (which is not so likely but has to be stated). Another point is that nuclear power plants in the end are thermal engines which produce far more than 50% excess heat. So also in this category, renewables are to be preferred.
Excellent video indeed. I am a sustainable engineer and these subjects (heat recovery, exergy, gibbs free energy and entropy) are key parameters to conceptualise solutions for decarbonization. Dissipated heat is indeed the 80% energy "trivial" of Pareto`s relationship. Maybe not 80%, but 72% iin a conventional coal power plant it certainly is, as efficiency of the Brayton cycle alone (i.e. combustion turbine) is roughly 34%, while other parasitic energy losses (primarily in the form of heat) here and there it becomes easy to grasp that overall efficiency of a coal power plant can be in the order of 28%. That means that if every hour 600 MWh of electrical energy that is generated is sent to the grid, the heat dissipated into the atmosphere in the form of hot humid air coming out of the cooling towers will be 1,542 MWh during the same hour; some 2 and a half times the amount of electrical energy. Bottom line, we need to figure out how to bypass the cooling towers and harness all that heat...
Her wrong assumption is exponential energy use and thus waste heat increases. The pattern drawn from the past is the exponential human population growth this is slowing and will trend to moving to extinction in less than a century. Development will increase existing population energy use but that will flatten as the population does. So prediction on heat use continuing to expand exponentially is wrong because it a population and technology based trend. Still going to cause some increase before population shrinking will solve a good deal of it. As even the rich don't have enough kids to replace themselves this not a economic problem it cultural we stopped putting pressure on people to have children. This will have to be reversed eventually but no rush overpopulation still the current problem except for like Japan which is one huge tribe they going to go radically different sooner or later on getting women to have more children and start way earlier so they don't find inability to have children in their way. I refer mostly to the wait past 30 crowd but as in Japan they still maintain 25 as get married by time that will be a tad easier but it the married people still waiting a problem Birth defects increase every year older a woman gets from puberty, chance of getting pregnant goes down. Curse of having all the eggs already made to be subjected to radiation and oxidation. Men's sperm creating cells have some ability to repair so sperm quality drops slower and many men retain ability to get pregnant into old age. Birth defects also go up but no where as much a very unfair bit of biology but this why traditional societies wanted very young wives but often thought older men better as their genes must be better and degradation of quality not as much a problem.
@@milferdjones2573 We could supply the contraceptive pill to all women of child bearing age free of charge. Not forcing of its use, entirely voluntary. This would dramatically reduce global warming and do it relatively quickly. The religious Right will never allow it but I suggest sooner rather than later we tell them to go to hell before there's hell on earth by their making. Unfortunately as population declines a reordering of wealth distribution will need to occur, lest we're headed for an agrarian Pol Potist type dystopian future. Population decline has dire consequences for all economic aspects of humanity however there's still a mindset of science as a panacea - which it is not since it is too slow. Given time, then perhaps, but without time pressure then nothing much gets done. No one aspect is going to fix this. A multi pronged approach is required.
@@milferdjones2573 If / when waste heat became a major problem, we'd have other, major sustainability problems. Namely where the heck we're getting all that free energy from in the first place. Photovoltaics are, aside from potential maintenance problems, the obvious way to get effectively unlimited energy from the ball of fusion at the center of our solar system, and *if* we ever started to get anywhere near the limits of solar power generation on earth (to the severe detriment of plant life and ecosystems et al), it would obviously make sense to just expand into space, and other planetary bodies instead. Unlimited exponential growth on earth (and in our solar system) is obviously unsustainable, and burning limited / finite resources to get there anyways (incl fissiles, hydrocarbon reserves, unrestricted geothermal tapping, and even artificial fusion technology), would be a spectacularly short-sighted folly (a la extracting + burning all easily accessible hydrocarbon reserves and fissiles on earth, now) - w/r the future of our species and the (very) long term continuation of life within this solar system. And w/r population, yes, *every* species follows s-curve population dynamics w/r the carrying capacity of its ecosystem. Humans are not exempt, and are in fact influenced by modern population pressures (and carrying capacity) including *economic* (ie. scarcity) factors w/r jobs, education, employment, housing, and, fundamentally, land + resource scarcity and costs / pricing. Incl ofc the opportunity costs of having + raising children, and when, if ever, to do so. Basic resource scarcity is effectively a non-issue (or, really just an engineering, technology, and manpower issue), but those other factors will continue to limit carrying capacity on Earth, regardless. And likely in the rest of the solar system, particularly in environments that *are* much more resource constrained. That said an obvious failing in the modern popular consciousness is a failure to imagine how we *will* survive (and adapt) over the next millenia, let alone next million, or billion years.
Isn't the Stefan-Boltzman law says that the intensity of Radiation emitted is directly proportional to fourth power of temperature. And at lower temperatures isn't most of the emitted wavelength is in infrared band. So the question is will it not keep earth in equilibrium? Only effect we have to worry about is CO2?
For the first time I was able to watch and understand the entire video. Thanks Ms. Hossenfelder for your sense of humor to keep things rolling along. Let's do this.
Speaking of the cirrus clouds, a study that was started before 911 in the US, found the sunlight striking the earth in this area increased as planes, which leave contrails, were restricted from flying across the Midwest US, where the study was being conducted. Really look forward to your videos and saw you quoted in my subscription of Science News, which gave me a laugh.😄
also the banning of high sulfur bunker fuels for ships , basically burning asphalt, reduced particle sin the atmosphere which increased solar warming by not blocking the sun.
@northvegassailrabbit3642 Yes indeed. You authors couldn't determine whether the night time cooling because less cirrus cloud was greater than the day time warming or less than the day time warming. They stated that right at the start of the published scientific paper. Ever since then liars everywhere have been ignoring that crucial finding and lying that fewer contrails will increase global warming and by some absurd junk-science amount like a large fraction of a degree, all based entirely on lies and nothing at all. We even had a liar on our CBC Canada "science show" pronounce that huge lie out to the Public on our national radio (bit like living in Ruzzia eh).
It bugs me...planes flying above thirty thousand feet cross us (San Antonio, Texas) hundreds of times daily, not landing here. What should be clear sunny winter days are often overcast with spreading contrails by eleven AM. Can it be for safety, in case a plane got into trouble? I doubt it. But with an open mind of the moment, I think it is a coordinated effort to shade the surface transportation traffic emissions to hold down the NOx and Ozone (smog). Thence, my problem in the afternoon as the "saved" smog precursors and the city island heat dome extend out northward to where we live...MyRadar app notifies me that the air is less than healthy, bad for poor breathers, or downright bad for anybody.
@@danielmcwhirter there is no "coordinated effort" to produce contrails. It just happens depending on the temperature and water content of the air. Apparently there are now efforts to redirect planes to areas or altitudes where contrails are not created to "save the climate" (which is nonsense as it is just water that will rain down quickly enough).
The total input from the sun is around 5x10^23 watts, the amount we generate is about 8x10^15 watts, there are eight orders of magnitude before we compete with the Sun, I don't think waste heat is going to be a problem.
Another triumph by Sabine. All the talk about free energy and entropy reminds me of A-level chemistry with the Gibbs free energy equation:- The Gibbs free energy change :- ΔG = ΔH − TΔS where ΔG is free energy (in joules) ΔH is enthalpy, T is the temperature in Kelvin and ΔS is the change in entropy.
The town where I grew up used to supply heat to most businesses down town and some residential customers with waste heat from the local electricity generating plant. That system was in place for several decades but was discontinued when the power plant was shut down in the early 70's. Who knew they were ahead of the curve on something ;)
The problem was that the district heat/electric power plants burned coal and were rather polluting. But rather than retrofit them with a cleaner energy source they shut them down and left building owners to build their won heating systems. The power/heat plant for my large university campus and adjacent parts of town used to put out quite a plume of black smoke from its smokestack.
@@franklittle8124 Agreed. This was a coal fired plant. But it was such a small plant that it wasn't economical any more no matter what you may have done to it. The city did try to keep the building heating system in place by converting the boilers to burn garbage after the power plant itself was torn down. That worked about as well as you'd imagine but it did give businesses a little time to install their own heating systems. The university I went to used to burn lignite in their power plant. That made quite a plume back in the day and lignite being a very dirty coal lead to a lot of burning eyes and throats when conditions were right. They converted over to gas years ago though.
Do I correctly understand: if we build a lot of huge wind turbines and put an electric heater next to each wind turbine that converts all the kinetic energy of the air that turns the wind turbine into heat, this would not warm the planet because the kinetic energy of the air originally comes from solar energy?
The Virginia town in which I live has, I'm pretty sure, the highest number of data centers per acre on the planet, and they just keep building more and bigger ones. Thus if anyone gets toasted by big data hot air, we're first in line. More seriously for anyone genuinely curious: No, all this heat does not make our local climate noticeably warmer than that of the broader Washington, DC, USA area. (Less seriously, that's not a fair comparison since the US Congress these days produces enough hot air to keep the whole region warm... :)
Just watch your computer, it requires a good fan to keep it cool and running correctly . The transistors cause a lot of heat hence the statement so it is literal as well as being funny.
Great video. Just missed the effect of absortivity, or albedo, on the heat balance. Solar panels might increase the forcing if their coefficient of absorption is larger than that of the original surface where they will be mounted. Might have been the case for desert tech.
I dont know for the other renewables mentioned at 9:10, but isn´t their an addional effect for pv which wasn´t accounted for: PV modules reflect around 3-5% of incoming flux directly back into space. Grass, forest and sand reflect 25%, 15% and 40% respectively. From this PV modules should be installed on Water (0,06% reflection)? Additionally i think the geothermal example is more complex than one thinks. At least for an surface collector, I don´t see a problem at all. You´re just exchanging the heat, meaning the temperature of the earth cools locally and radiates less. In principle this should also hold true for deeper geothermal harvesting plants on a balance sheet, but ofc there the time delay is way bigger.
Alternatively, from an idealistic optimist's pov, if fusion becomes widespread and scales down, we would have access to so much more free-energy this would become liberating... while the waste heat increases, and I imagine we'd be mitigating that more soon, we would be able to do things that are currently economically prohibitive to help solve both the thermodynamic waste-heat and CO2 issues... mega-engineering projects that we can only dream of today. Ideally, that is.
@@markzambelli this kinda touches on the point that the true cause of climate change is our parasitic top down economic system, which is inherently inefficient. Some would call this capitalism
Waste heat from cars, industrial plants, etc. is something I have thought about for years but no one ever seemed to think it was an issue at all. Great video.
Actually, I believe that it has been known that the wide use of air conditioning in some big cities does increase the outside temperature by a few degrees in summer. When you walk next to the outside grouped fans of a big air conditioned building, you can really feel the heat that comes out of it ....
It's not a big deal unless those projections of increase occur. Flaw in projections they from great increase in human population that is slowing and will stop and reverse to population shrinking in the future. Tech development in third world will increase the heat as well but go flat and decline with population as well. I think of it as a minor deal but still good idea to stop wasting money letting waste heat escape forget warming there is money being wasted.
If I remember correctly, this is the problem of the alien in Larry Niven's Ringworld. Their civilization is so advance, but they cannot solved the entropy problem in their home world, so they built the Ringworld.
Not quite, it was the Puppeteers that destroyed the superconductors on the Ringworld as they were moving five (six?) planets away from the exploding centre of the galaxy. They produced so much waste heat that they didn't need sunlight.
@@jimmysuryadi3017 It's in the **book** _Ringworld._ The puppeteer explains that they'd moved their six planets (one devoted to agriculture) away from their original star, but there's enough waste heat to keep them warm.
the solution is to go full renewable, renewables are already being powered by that ambient heat + what comes from the sun + what comes from the center of the earth, as we turn the motion into electrical energy we use some of that energy for work and some of it goes back as waste heat from electrical resistances and cinematic motion, seems like renewable energy-fed work is a good ambient heat battery.
I've wondered about this concept. I've debated with professors in the past about waste heat building up. I've always been told it was negligible, so don't think about it. But if we just keep making more, it doesn't disappear. Thanks for covering this!
Look up "Earth's Energy Budget" and "Stefan-Boltzmann law". We have to worry about climate change because changing the composition of the atmosphere changes the equilibrium temperature, but as the Earth's temperature increases it loses more heat to space through radiation (and the rate of radiation goes up rapidly with temperature). The Earth's surface used to be molten, it solidified due to heat loss through radiation.
@@marciacsr it isn't that simple ;(. See a question in Quora: "Why isn't colder air of the upper and middle troposphere steadily flowing down to the surface?" TL;DR: Air density and molecules decreases the further we go away from the surface. Atmosphere is divided into layers depending on exactly this and its temperature range. (From low altitude to higher): Troposphere= 20°C to -60°C Stratosphere= -60°C to -20°C Mesosphere= -20°C to -90°C Outer Space= -100°C and up So this all depends on the law of physics, specifically "Ideal gas law". So it's not just going up and exiting the globe. CO2 for example has a very hard time exiting the earth (mostly present only on the troposphere) so it ends up contributing to global warming.
Because it IS irrelevant. Heat by itself has a number of negative feedback looks that prevent it from building up. For example higher evaporation, which causes higher albedo, which causes more heat coming from the Sun to bounce off and never reach the surface, which ultimately results in cooling. This video was mind-numbingly stupid _(most of Sabine's videos that are related to climate change are similarly mind-numbingly stupid, but her other content is fine),_ so instead of just blindly taking it at a face value, consider thinking about the issue objectively.
Actually, the waste heat DOES disappear. The Earth radiates an enormous amount of heat into space. During clear nights in winter, it radiates MUCH MORE because the drier air doesn't hold heat.
I'm yet to finish the video, but so far, I believe this is the best and most valuable video you ever did! I read and think a lot, but it would've never dawned on me, that this effect might get noticable at one point in time 😯
I can give a real concrete examples of using "waste heat." I built a new office/studio 2 years ago. It is 6 layer insulated. The room about 200 square feet. And I heat the entire office with my computer, 1 very large monitor and 2 smaller monitors, and 3 very large LED lights. So when it's 22F outside it's 69F inside my office with no other heat source. When I say "six layer insulated" here is what I mean. Layer 1 is radiant barrier facing OUT against the outside surface, 1" of stucco. Layer 2 is 6" of rock wool, layer 3 is a 2nd layer of radian barrier (facing OUT), then a 1/2" air gap, layer 4 is radiant barrier facing IN, Layer 5 is 3/4" OSB, Layer 6 is drywall. There is also a 2' air gab between the ceiling (std acoustic tiles) and the attic which has about 6" of insulation there. I only have 1 window and 2 doors. Both double paned and one the window has very heavy curtains as well at one of the doors. In fact the only "loss" I have is the concrete/tile floor. But I did that on purpose since it helps cool the room during summer and it does not hurt that much during the winters. (earth being around 50F). During the summer I have one very small evaporative cooler and I only run it on low (80 watts). (In the SW desert of the US.) Another example is in my garage I have a full size freezer and a 2nd fridge. But they are right next to my hybrid water heater. So the heat expelled from the cooling appliances is used by the heat pump in the hybrid water heater. I'm trying to find an economical way to port the fridge inside the house to the garage as well. Another thing I do is I have a 2500 gallon water tank in an enclosed building (well house, it's about 200 sq ft. Water comes out of the ground at about 60F. During the summer the water tank absorbs the heat from the uncooled bulding (well house) and preheats the water in the tank to nearly 80F. So that reduces my energy used to heat water. It also keeps that completely uncooled wellhouse to 85F when it's 110F outside because the water is so good at absorbing the extra heat. The next building I build will have an entire wall of 2500 gal. water tanks (7 of them) on the west wall of the building to absorb that heat to help cool the building and preheat the water for the bathrooms. These things can be done. But you have to plan it all out and link "heat creators" with "heat absorbers." In regards to meddling with the atmosphere and blocking the sun, that is an INSANE idea. We are babies when it comes to understanding the complexity of the the climate. We could spend $20,000,0000,000,000 and send the planet into global glaciers. DO NOT MESS with things you don't fully understand. Same thing with cloud seeding. Also it's MUCH cheaper and easier to COOL things rather than HEAT them up. So a planet a few degrees warmer would be much easier to deal with than a few degrees cooler. Just make things more efficient using the waste heat. Leave the atmosphere alone!
The serenity with which she made the joke about crematoria by saying "it's the only fat-burning workout that really works" made me fall out of my chair.
Artificial tornadoes: "what could possibly go wrong?"
Cremation is my last chance at a smoking hot body.
Ditto!
There are layers here...
Now accepting Soylent Green volunteers (IT'S PEOPLE!!!) 📗📗
She actually said "it is probably the only fat burning exercise that really works."
Not a very good joke from a German.
I'm doing my part to cool down the planet by leaving the door of the refrigerator open
Hahaha, way to make extra heat. Not that this is a real problem.
If the outside temperature is above the fridge temperature , what then ?
@Thierry Landrieu well Eskimos use refrigerators to keep stuff from freezing.
Ever check out how hot the backside of the fridge is?! lmao!!
@@lestermarshall6501 I can’t imagine how eskimos ate before fridges were invented . I must say I prefer warmer climates .
'So maybe one could just create artificial tornadoes to improve surface cooling. What could possibly go wrong?'
Made my day. lol
We already are suffering from global warming.
What could possibly go wrong?Everything.
Look into geoengineering, ionospheric heaters, NEXRAD
I thought she was going to say it is a self-correcting problem!
2476 "known" nuclear weapons testing, daily "conventional" explosions, land mines, Agent Orange.... What could go wrong?
Btw, the carbon /toxicity boot print of the elephant in the room aka the military industrial complex anybody?
Attempting to solve these issues with more efficient power plants runs into the Jevons Paradox: efficiencies create incentives to consume more energy.
When I was 16, I brought this issue up to my physics teacher, "we are basically covering the earth with radiators" in regards to human expansion around the planet, with our homes and such, and made a point about all that heat. But he basically laughed me off and mumbled something about how it's too small to ever matter.
On this day, I feel vindicated.
They've already solved the problem. There are plans to use infrared emitters to convert heat to infrared and just beam it out into space.
Why is heat such a bad thing?
The most diversity of life and this plan is was when it was warm.
The only thing that decimates life is ice and cold.
It’s kind of hard to have life, if all your freshwater is tied up in ice cubes
@@Ont785 Heat is not a bad thing. The problem is when there's too much heat. Or too little, like you pointed out. The warming of the atmosphere already causes problems, and if the temperature continues to rise, we'll eventually face more problems and they'll be more severe.
"The only thing that decimates life is ice and cold."
Simply not true. Overheating, fire and drought also do the same.
@@lclMetal
We are a long way from having an ecosystem that we used to!
The is the reason why the a dinosaur fossils all across northern Canada.
The only thing keeping humans from migrating were the glaciers.
If your freshwater is tied up an ice, there are no animals and there are no people.
Gee, what would Canada do if we had a longer growing season and more animals foraging northwards?
Stop the fear mongering
I did the same during my uni study and I was told "it is negligible". Well it seems negligible for now, but it is a more fundamental problem rooted in the second principle of thermodynamics than the increase of CO2.
This is a problem I've been pondering over the last few years. Our fridge dumps waste heat into the house. The house is then conditioned (summer) and waste heat is dumped outside (via AC).
Every conversion comes with losses and thus wasted energy.
In the Winter (for those climates) -- something like a fridge could be almost directly coupled to the outside. Housing needs a better system to move heat around a living space with minimal conversion steps to minimize losses from each conversion.
in cold climates it's already cold, the fridge isn't doing much work anyway. In summer, try to open the door as briefly as possible, to keep hot air from coming in. Insulation will minimize the work done by the fridge.
Think about this: if you cover the windows from outside, the sun hits those covers and they heat up. This is the same amount of heat produced if you let them in, only now it's inside. If you use AC, you pump the same heat out. What's the added heat? only the waste from operating the pump.
Properly insulated houses cut down on a LOT of energy usage. Outside blinds too. Pump less, that's all. Cut down on energy use and the waste heat of our machines.
Next step? properly designed airflow: natural cooling and natural heating just by thinking about airflow during design (hard to do once it's built).
@@MadsterV - That depends on how the temperature in the house is set.
If you kept the environment in the home at the same temp (we'll say 20'C) all the time, the fridge will have to do the same amount of work all the time to keep the set temp.
It always transfers the load to the HVAC of the home.
But I would still be curious to see a stufy that explores "by how much".
@@benjammin1001 oh, I get it, yeah.
From what I understand in many extreme cold climates, the "freezer" is just leaving stuff outside. Over here we don't do AC too often, because it doesn't dip too far below freezing but I could see myself unplugging it during the winter if it got worse, and just having a box outside.
Thought about it. It's a much, MUCH smaller volume of air to cool, and it's usually much better insulated too.
The fridge will pump heat out only every once in a while (you can hear it when it does), not constantly like AC. You'll never notice your kitchen being hotter just because of the fridge.
Also, unlike with AC, there is nothing inside the fridge generating heat, but human bodies produce heat constantly.
On the other hand, we're talking about HEATING the house (in winter), so when the fridge pumps heat out, it's actually REDUCING the amount of work the AC does (by a negligible amount),
In summer......I'd bet the difference would be hard to measure.
Yes, if we could use the cold outside to cool our homes that might help offset what goes on in the summer.
But there is always waste heat
Thank you, Sabine! Educomedy at its best.
If only we could use the hot air from politicians to power things, we would really make a dent in this problem.
🧂
"Educomedy" added to my dictionary - must use it.
"Educomedy has been a thing in the USA for a long time. The most politically informed on average there get it through comedy programs like The Late show.
Politicians, like fossil fuels, are a problem we can do without.
Agreed... and just to help out - they can take the methanogen problem or whatever it is I have/my gastrointestinal tract has to blimp up and float away!
12:48 we are unable to take out CO2 at a scale that would affect the growth of plants, if we wanted to "cool" the planet. Plants just grow larger or more leaves if they need to (they already do this indoors, because of relative lack of solar radiation. So if you put your indoor plant outdoors during the warm season make sure to shade in in the beginning. It will get a sunburn and the too large surface area does not help either).
Plants dealt well with 280 ppm - like at the end of the last glaciation - vegetation took back the areas where the ice retreated quickly. And we are now at 410 ppm and plants can cope (they suffer from the extremer conditions caused by the heat, like torrential rains, cold snaps, draughts - but NOT from the higher CO2 levels).
So while CO2 is essential for plant life - it is one need that plants can satisfy easily all over the planet and throughout the eons, no matter the levels. If a plant has poor soil, is shaded and gets too little or too much water, and is exposed to constant wind - CO2 is the only thing that will always be in good supply.
"No matter the Co2 level" is quite frankly false. You mention the 280 ppm AFTER the ice age. Now look up how low it was DURING the ice age (below 200 ppm) and how low that number can go without plants starting to starve. Add to that how lower co2 also means a colder atmosphere, and you eventually get to a point where most vegetations simply disappears for lack of food and through harsh climate.
"Big data is a particularly source for hot air". The truest thing Sabine ever said.
Too bad her channel would get shabow banned if she mentioned the elephant in the room aka the military industrial complex...
@@lorenzoblum868 I'm sure Sabine would never fall so low!
*Politicians have entered the chat
@@WeighedWilson government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex ~ Frank Zappa.
@@lorenzoblum868 That's one of the funniest things he ever said - one of them. Oh, I wish!
My dog produces so much methane gas, she's definitely a gross polluter. But on a serious note. I was always amazed by the temperature of a City compared to outside the city by maybe twenty or Forty Miles. Same elevation, same land type and same wind current. Those big cities are radiating so much heat.
theyre made of concrete with no plants providing shade or converting the photons into sugar. With masses of humans and machines generating heat. So theyre giant heat engines and batteries. Another reason cities are horrible for the environment
I work in a city but live 45 minutes away. The temp drops at least 5 degrees when I leave the city.
maybe so but the surface area of earth covered by these hot spots is a drop in the bucket compared to the entire surface of the earth.
kill everything that isnt humIn
@@garymcmullin2292 this isnt remotely true. City "heat islands" are a huge problem
"The probably only fat burning exercise that actually works" - You made my day.
Love the dark humour
@@johnransom1146 I love all her humor.
I vote this as Sabine's best line so far in 2023.
It is cheaper to reduce the human population than to become space civilisation.
It's possible that you never bicycled 420 km / week at a fair clip for a few years.
“The energy that comes from the sun is free energy. The plants can use it to grow and we can use it to power lawn mowers to cut the plants”. Pure genius.😂
@disregardedkitchen scapegoats or space goats?
They're called herbivores.
Mechanisms of cause are multiple. We actually are also cause by doing something right.
Imagine earths atmosphere is the dirty stuff on the glass windows. It has so2 carbon pollution all stuck on it. Be it from fires city pollution or volcanic eruptions. It means the windows are dirty and the suns light streaming in is not so great. Like the drapes are closed during a very bad volcanic eruptions. We get nuclear winter like cooling.
Well when that stopped happening 3x per century ie late 19th century. Plus the sun itself dialed down to solar minimums Dalton minimums and the Muander minimums that lacking in addition to very large eruptions just 400 years before that in Europe plus 536 Krakatoa left the earth with both dirty windows and really low solar output. Which is cold 🥶. Now the last four solar cycles have been since then have been very high. Big volcanic eruptions stopped and we cleaned up our polluted air quite quickly. So the opposite is now happening. We are hotter.
Variable 3. Plastic particles in the ocean change the water chemistry to go from heat turnover to heat insulation. Both the heat from the ocean floor changes because that giant power source the core radiates heat to the crust. The water cools the crust. Well not so much anymore. It is also not cooling well enough at the surface because more sun light reaches the waters. Because the windows are clean and the sun is very active in this solar cycle.
Variation 4. The windows are not only super clean now it is also 35% open. Meaning the earth’s magnetic field has a reduced strength of 35% allowing more radiation to flow through the shield and create solar forcing at the poles. More of that as the polar excursion continues to deviate further from the actual poles the weaker the shield gets. The polar vortex moves in since with the magnetic pole. Its new berry center is over Siberia. Same with the southern hemisphere however not as much of a deviation. That changes the jet streams pattern and heat distribution.
Variability factor 5. Not understanding how quick changes on multiple fronts effects the global electric current and how that effect atmospheric circulation.
Variable factors 6. Non linear progression of excess heat energy with vapor loading on now clean air capable of holding more vapor, building lower cloud density slows down jet streams and increases air pressure volatility gives us more extreme weather events.
Variant 7. Ice Sheet melt diluting the Atlantic currents more rapidly for many reasons out of our control will lead to shut down and every single time it did both the magnetic fields were greatly reduced and polar ice flow increased to cause it. 400 years from now if not sooner we will not be boiling we will be about as cold as we were when Europeans discovered America.
Honestly I think growing grass, spraying water all over it and then cutting it is absolutely moronic.
7:51 "Now It's unlikely that we'd get that far because we'd all die before that, which ought to slow down the economy a little." haha! Love her sense of humor!!!
Maybe the AIs will be running the economy by then, and they'll barely notice our disappearance?
Hi Dave. Not all businesses would suffer. Take undertakers for instance---. Cheers, P.R.
😆😆😆 Yes, exactly, because AI/silicon-based lifeforms would take over
Actually that's what the author Thomas W. Murphy Jr has pointed out (at least in his blogposts from a decade ago, as well as in his 2021 book and 2022 article) : «steady» exponential growth - as we have known it since the beginning of the Industrial Age - cannot possibly continue, because it quickly runs into absurdities like this one, which we might be able to deal with, but then it keeps getting... exponentially harder as we have to keep building bigger and bigger «air conditioning units», then leave Earth, then Earth becoming a tiny fraction of the economic output... then our whole galaxy (only 1350 years to equal it with only star power !)... and at some point we might even run into (what we at least currently consider to be) a fundamental limit of trying to grow the surface available to us for dissipation to the outside universe faster than the speed of light !
Or on the other hand into the economic paradox of energy becoming an arbitrarily small (and exponentially shrinking) fraction of the economy, which is not a stable situation because at some point some group controlling a microscopic fraction of the economy would be able to corner the whole energy market, at which point they can increase prices arbitrarily high, at which point its fraction of the economy would stop exponentially shrinking - rather the inverse - etc.
One of the largest wastes that has always bothered me is how we design all homes with isolated wast heat generation. For example, refrigerators, water heaters, stoves, ovens, dishwashing. clothes washers etc. They all use energy to work and products large amounts of waste heat, that often we then use more energy to cool the home to compensate.
All of those devices which radiate waste heat should be tied together via a common thermal bus. devices that can use the heat like heat pumps or heat pump based water heaters, that can extract the heat from the bus would lower their own energy consumption while performing their work, and lessen the waste heat produced. In larger settings like apartment buildings the overage of waste heat could be pumped through large geothermal grids installed below the building. If the heat is trapped below the building in cold months residents could tap into this like any geothermal system.
Other potential uses, could be water purification. There are devices on the market now that take 5v power and with water and salt product sodium hypochlorite, aka bleach (for anyone who doesnt know). So for 1.250w you could make a small quantity of bleach for cleaning or sterilizing. I'm certain other simple reactions could be used to capture waste heat via peltier devices and be used in a home setting.
I like the way you think.
Then imagine 3 or 4 hundred million households adopting the fix. There is no limit to our technophilia.
That's a really tough problem to try and solve. We currently don't even capture "waste" natural gas from oil wells, it gets flared off instead of saved and used. That's a relatively easy problem to solve compared to what you just suggested.
G'day,
Oh, I say ...!
Why hath nobody ever thunk of such a thang before thus, then, one wondurrz.
Perhaps EVERYBODY who already knows the answer will sit silent while YOU go ahead and build one functioning Unit, for all those still wondering to observe your Results.
My guess is that you WILL encounter a variety of the Principle of Elbarsoles, Arselbows, and even ElbArsEyeBalls...
En Elbow is easy to design, and so is an Arsehole, but to build an Elbow which can also work as an Arsehole is as difficult as making a simple Arsehole which will function as an Elbow..., and an Elbow that works as an Arsehole, Eyeball and Testicle is really really difficult to imagine.
So, if you can figure out how to retrofit your House so the Waste Heat from your Toaster and Hair Dryer, Computer and Microwave, with that from your Refrigerator and Air-Conditionining is recycled to produce your Electricity, while furnishing all your hot Water...
After that, you might like to show us how to use the Waste Heat from your Road-Vehicle to operate your Washing-Machine.
Ready...?
Get set....,;
Off
You
Go
Then....!
Double-Quick
Olde Bean,
Time is of the Essence !
Such is life,
Have a good one...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
@@WarblesOnALot the age of aquarius beckons.
"...because we'd all die before that, which ought to slow down the economy a little" 🤣
Thank you Sabine. I very badly needed that laugh
Unfortunately actual experiment disproves that hypothesis because we all died September 2019 owing to not much sea ice that year according to a "Guy McPherson" and the 0.00001% human billionaire psychopaths in bunkers can't possibly have been doing it all themselves for 3 years, so I think it's reached a Critical Social Tipping Point my British Railways mate Richard told me in 1976 where they calculated they only needed 12% more office staff at British Railways Reading and then they could remove the trains & track and the office staff could continue doing exactly what they'd always been doing, seamlessly without interruption or notice. I think this Critical Social Tipping Point has been passed by human species.
The millions of O'neal cylinders circling the sun will absorb enough energy to cool Earth.
Doomsday cult freaks. There's a 100% chance the interglacial epoch will end returning Europe and of Canada to year round winter. Could happen in 500 years, or maybe 5,000. But it is inevitable, the warm periods are shorter than the cold periods... We have 4 seasons per year, throughout a 70 year lifespan. The earth however, has its own cycles that are 10,000 - 20,000 years long, a 100,000 year cycle, and also a millions of year cycle. If it's too hot for your taste, just wait a thousand years. And don't worry, none of these things will bring about the rapture where all the air conditioned sinners are brought before the great climate gods where they will be judged and punished in the afterlife. Armageddon has been used so successfully to control populations for thousands of years. It's hilarious and disturbing to watch this happen during a time when anyone can read the actual science online for free. Even the ICC stuff is online and the cult members don't even read that stuff despite it being their own religious doctrine.
good ol' anti-natalism. hilarious.
The total power that reaches the earth from the sun is about 110,000 terawatts or 7,600 times more power than all of humanity produces, even assuming all of that power eventually became waste heat. Magnitudes matter.
I live in Northwest Canada, we get 7 months of winter here, I love the idea of staying warm.
And your fish precooked in the ocean?
Dann zieh halt um, Mann.
Sabine's humor keeps getting better. She's hilarious! 😂
Yes but sometimes she goes too far . This time for exemple, I really thought she was taking this exponential thinking to the letter …. I viewed up to the end but couldn’t get this nagging out of my mind .
Exponentials always have limits in real life …. That is so obvious… so why even consider a model based on exponentials ?
@@thierrylandrieu7441 You are correct. Sabine was Foul with the 1st part of this video and most especially by far the sickening clickbait title in order to get eye balls of both the coal-oil-gas-wealth Shill-Troll Junk-Science Liar-Imbeciles and also of the Guy McPherson General Purpose Imbecile set. Just to keep her Business Model healthy. I'll likely never think much good of her ever again.
@@grindupBaker I think I agree . Still there are some good videos …. And some people really think it would be good to cool the planet . Just thinking that makes me sick …. We were headed towards a cooling anyhow , and the carrying capacity of the planet 20 000 years ago was so small …. You know Peter’s law ? If something can go wrong it will , so a planet cooling system ….
Yes, but her delivery is so dry that it’s often difficult to distinguish between humour and seriousness.
Of course she is funny. She’s German. :)
Sabina really is the master of explaining physics and science to people without much of a science background.
She is the teacher I always needed...
Try PBS's RUclips channel spacetime. Matt has cover so much physics really well..
Weird, because it's one of the few explanations that I hated.
🙄🤫how much do you make for fake reviews
@@richinoable I take it you don't agree?
@@johnkooy5327 top level assumption. Mmhmm
I've never seen someone present scientific topics with such simple explanations for the layman, as well as keeping it fresh and interesting by interspersing some truly golden comedy in between. I truly wish I could have had you as my teacher, Ms. Hossenfelder! Keep up the brilliant work.
you do have her as your teacher ☺💜
Yeah she does alright so much so that I often find myself searching on her channel for clarification.
Neil Tyson - Dr Becky - Derek Muller - Scott Manley - Mark Rober and so many more do exactly what Sabine does.
There wasn't really any scientific topics in this video. Just rambling about waste heat, and if you think waste heat is a complicated subject, no wonder you believe this.
@@codejunki567 you lack awareness on how much regular people know about thermodynamics
On the bright side, increased CO2 levels are, already, creating large increases in crop yields.
„You phone gets warm while you use it … but it’s not because it likes you so much.“, that’s why I love this channel, but also because of the intentional information of course.
I’m very surprised this is never talked about. I used to think it was because that heat was very insignificant and globally irrelevant, but intuitively it was difficult to believe. You just made an interesting confirmation of that point
because climate scientists - at least those who believe in "green growth" - don't like to talk about that. those who do are mostly ignored (like timothy garret "civilization is a heat engine") or ridiculed as alarmists (like guy mcpherson; although he probably deserves that).
We use very little energy compared to the earth's imputs
It is when you consider active volcanoes and increased radiation due to a weakening magnetic field. This is bs.
Also if the ambient temp rises we need to use less power for heating (and more power for cooling). Overall, at temperate latitudes, more warmth is better.
Eh, but it's still rather insignificant. It only becomes a problem if people increase fossil & nuclear energy consumption 10x.
Not only is Sabine. Hossenfelder an excellent communicator of complex ideas, but is also a gifted humorist. The dry, wit and the deadpan delivery has me listening so closely I find my mind enriched and stretched. Thank you for challenging my presumptions and misconceptions and for doing so in such a well composed manner. What a gift to the topic of physics and to our general cultural evolution.
True, there is no current global solution to waste heat or greenhouse gasses, but the most important thing to any technology making a significant contribution to the solution is that it is incorporated into our daily lives or standard business processes and not an external expense.
Adding high-sulfur fuel in airline aircraft to burn at altitude could be incorporated in months. Let's try it and see if it's feasible.
For zero risk mitigation, the SkyCool panels Sabine mentioned will work, and even cheaper are broken glass bubble pigments which do the same thing with broad-spectrum light.
I live in the Phoenix metro area, where every roof should be white.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
I love when she injects that into her videos! This sure isn't the first time...
well don't worry about that waste heat cause both you and I will be long dead before we have to worry about that waste heat in our life times🤣
"Plants can use it to grow, and we can use it to power lawnmowers to cut the plants down which is okay, because physics isn't concerned with the meaning of life" so brutal.
@@bobbytookalook it's an aesthetic irony.
@@bobbytookalook Who who think a German physicist had a sense of humour :P
"The only fat burning exercise that works", crematorium heated homes.
@@billboyd4051 that probably takes more energy than it's worth. Maybe heat from letting bodies decompose in the basement would be more efficient.
@@veganevolution Sabine spoke of a town doing it, thats why I quoted her.
I'm here for the science, but also for Sabine's sarcastic jokes! She has a good sense of humor.
well good? i prefer the monty pyton
@@omblauman ahh yes me too... Monty Pyton, the fameist comedy troup from Youganda
@@omblaumanMonty Python famously didn't tell jokes, but they did absurdist satire.
@@ppetal1 Which brings us back around to Sabine.
@Peter Leonard Gates, it seems you're confusing the (mostly) British comedy troupe "Monty Python", who indeed, did not tell jokes, with "the monty pyton" (definite article, lower case m, lower case p, no h in pyton) who did. Also, please don't confuse "the monty pyton", with monty pytonn (with 2 "n"s) most famous for their dead toucan skit!
And this is why we need to start using only heat pumps in homes. Because a heat pump doesn't create much heat of its own, merely uses electricity to transfer heat between two isolated bodies of air. And does so with decent efficiency. And why we have to abandon the steam cycle for energy, and convert X-rays from PB11 fusion directly into electrical current with the photoelectric effect.
But we don't need to worry Sabine, because the future runs on ultra-efficiency! (Or it doesn't run at all.)
I love when Sabine says, "What could possibly go wrong?"
I never comment on videos but I'll make an exception here. I just discovered this channel and I am amazed by the quality of content and the teaching style. I have studied this topic of so called "anthropogenic heat emissions" a while back and no one seemed to care about this, glad someone is putting this out there!
ᵗʰᵃⁿᵏˢ ᶠᵒʳ ʷᵃᵗᶜʰⁱⁿᵍ😊, ʷʳⁱᵗᵉ ᵐʳ ᶠʳᵉᵈᵉʳⁱᶜᵏ ⁿᵒʷ, 📝ʷⁱᵗʰ ᵗʰᵉ ʷʰᵃᵗ ˢᵃᵖ ˡⁱⁿᵉ 𝟏𝟖𝟐𝟓𝟖𝟎𝟐𝟏𝟖𝟓𝟔, ᵗᵒ ᵖᵃʳᵗⁱᶜⁱᵖᵃᵗᵉ ⁱⁿ ᵒᵘʳ ᶜᵘʳʳᵉⁿᵗ ⁱⁿᵛˢᵗᵐᵉⁿᵗ ᵐᵉⁿᵗᵒʳˢʰⁱᵖ ⁱⁿˢⁱᵍʰᵗˢ, 😊❤🙏,,
I studied Government Propaganda and determined that everything you are talking about falls squarely into that category. Sad
@@jomamma1750 Sadly, I have to agree with you. Normally Sabine makes excellent and even handed videos, but not where the subject of climate change is concerned. Academics need to be a bit more cool-headed. For sure, I am all for reducing fossil fuels (we still need plastics) and reducing any pollution including CO2 (currently rising yet long term still modest at 0,04% of our atmosphere). I can also have some sympathy for NGO/government promoted ‘exaggeration of fear’ for the good cause. But there are limits. There are people within our (un)elected leadership with a lot of influence who cannot distinguish between facts and exaggerated fear and they literally see humanity as a threat they need to deal with now. All software induced hockey stick models and theories from academics aside, we should first focus on UNBIASED measurement data sets. If it comes to temperature, ancient ice core measurement is the only thing free from academic modelling and bias. We thus need to look at the GISP2 Greenland data and recognise Earth’s climate is inherently cyclical. Climate has always changed and always will. The current changes are NOT out of long term bandwidth. As for short term changes in temperature; the most UNBIASED measurement is the rise of worldwide ocean water. It is monitored and currently stands at 1.8mm per year average, which is EXACTLY the average of ocean water rise since Pleistocene. Notice, the club of Rome 50 years ago predicted a 4 metre rise for 2025. Now in 2023, almost 50 years later we measure…. 9 cm actual increase. Let that sink in and lets collectively feel ashamed. IPCC even very ashamed. Again, yet we need to make the fuel transition but videos like these are of no help to humanity.
As for Sabines Q increase due to increased human need of energy. It is historically insignificant to the solar radiation output fluctuations (scheduled to take a downturn next year). It is well withing the parameters Earth’s biosphere can stabilize. A higher Q in general means higher altitude cloud formation, thus higher albedo (thus more solar input shielding) and the higher CO2 in combination with higher Q output is a positive for plant life in general and specifically at higher altitudes, thus more absorption of CO2, downscaling Q. But regardless. Yes, we need to be careful and make the switch to nuclear faster. But no, CO2 and current fluctuations are well within parameters Earth can handle. Earth’s population is heading downwards after 2060. We can feed all and each individual is worth-while and welcome on this planet. We will be fine as long as we take good care of the environment. Earth will be fine in all cases longer term, long after we are gone. And if you still suffer from anxiety after watching Sabine’s video, pls be sure to also check out George Carlin’s ‘saving the planet’ for some relief.
@@RWin-fp5jn You've been reading the propaganda as well. I used to work at a science station, the actual Ocean rise between 1995 and 2015 was .020 of an inch total or 1 one-thousandth of an inch per year. Quit believing ANYTHING that these people say. It is ALL propaganda.
I think we are so advanced that we now try and shape the world to our liking and that isn't normal we are the only species evolved enough to do that, this us very off topic btw but I feel the earth will undergo its natural cycles and changes over the next 10 or 20 thousand years and by then at least one event would have caused 99% human population decrease, not total extinction but there's so many of us that if 1% survived or even just like 1 million people, the human race would rise and again just as we have over the last 10000 years, my point being we tend to separate our selves from nature from the universe but we are the universe, we are made up of the universe and the universe and earth doesn't care about humans it'd gonna undergo its natural order so it prospers until it's end, so instead of trying to manipulate the earth. I've decided to take enjoyment out of looking the inevitable truth in the eyes, whether I'm here to see it or not the earth won't be here forever, nothing will and humans are just a moment in time just like the moment u just look to read this, life is just a collection of moments and we are trying to sway away from that truth and trying to make a new one, a truth where we can live forever and control planets and whatnot but maybe we were never meant to understand and conquer maybe we weren't meant to simply experience life, no one has experienced life in 100% the same way that you have, so what do you make of the world?
The thing about air conditioning is it doesn't magically make heat energy go away, it just moves it from one place to another (Inside your home to the outside, inside the refrigerator into your ktchen, etc.) and in the process creates even more heat like all electrical devices that aren't 100% efficient (which is all of them)
Yes, but it moves heat more efficiently than anything else we've tried; vapor-phase-change refrigeration gets you 3:1 joules moved versus joules required to do the moving.
After you've informed yourself by watching Sabine's video, refrain from reading the comments or risk becoming dumber for the effort.
It is called zero sum game!
„Big data is also often a source for hot air.” I really loved this one 😂
Finn here, I was surprised to hear that byproduct heat from power plants isn't used for municipal heating by default everywhere else. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, so why not?
Propably because it serves capitalism better to invent a problem and sell the solution;
Or as in this case, there's excess heat coming from power plants (solution to a problem of needing to warm up houses), so instead of recycling, let's let it all go to waste and then come up with a solution that requires additional circulation of money (effectively inventing a problem from the ashes of an old solution).
CHP was common in Eastern Europe. And then western technology took over.
It's cheaper that way. Late stage capitalism, is there anything it can't ruin and make worse?
@@KuK137 The Nordic countries, apparently
In the USA, power plants are sited away from populated areas, because nobody wants to look at them. I'm 60 miles away from the nearest nuclear plant.
I have a solution. Texas sized mirrors to reflect light back out. Less light in while infrared out stays constant means cooling.
I've been thinking about this issue myself for years. I always wondered: "But what about all the added up heat of everything producing it, aside from any greenhouse gas effect?". Glad to see a video about it.
This problem is actually very easy to solve.
We just need to nuke the ice cap on the north pole and use a fleet of big ships to push the pieces of broken ice in the atlantic and pacific oceans...
Heat pollution already has a significant local impact for big power plants, and on rivers and lakes used for cooling. Anti-renewable energy and pro-nuclear sentiment, built up over decades through PR, strategically dismisses the subject.
So the question becomes, why has the temperature only increased 1.1 degrees Celsius in the last 250 years then? Why isn't the temperature increase accelerating as quickly as we create more waste heat year over year?
This is a foul junk-science video title about apparently a paper crafted by imbecile scientists who predict that humans will use 10,000 times as much energy as right now in just 400 years. Absolute garbage, precisely matching your so-called brain.
@@kayakMike1000 This is a foul junk-science video title about apparently a paper crafted by imbecile scientists who predict that humans will use 10,000 times as much energy as right now in just 400 years. Absolute garbage, precisely matching your so-called brain.
The concept of “waste heat” has never even occurred to me. Totally makes sense when I hear Sabine’s explanation. Many thanks!!
This of all those EV cars chargers … heat is waste … and they get hot …
@CATALYST Try reading the name again; this time with your glasses 🤓!
@@captaindunsell8568 A V8 Engine gets kinda hot and so does its exhaust system.
The video is an introduction to entropy and thermodynamics - Sabine is sneaking a physics education into my youtube feed.
@@ole86 The electric car exports much if its waste heat to the power station condensers, cooling towers, and exhaust stacks. A diesel engine vehicle is easily 40% efficient. Our thermal steam-electric generating stations are on average only 38% efficient, then add transmission losses, then the losses of charging and discharging batteries.
The way I see it, if "we survive that long" whatever the foreseeable problem was will have ceased to be a problem.
I mean, true, but only by definition. "If we survive long enough for the problem to no longer be a problem, the problem will no longer be a problem."
@@o0alessandro0o Well, what I was thinking was that if we survive 400 more years that problem will have likely either been solved through technology or human adaptability. Also, if human society somehow collapses either by war or social upheaval, this will still not likely be THE problem 400 years from now. So we will either have the technology to offset the warming, or we will be producing less waste heat.
@@answerman9933 That is not a significantly different definition, for certain values of "survive", "human" and "adaptability" :P
Global thermal models are nowhere close to making any of these kinds of predictions.
I visited friends in California. They had a swimming pool and air conditioning. The previous owners had not thought of running the pool circulation water over the hot roof in tubes to cool the house and heat the pool. They ran electric air conditioning, and electrically heated the pool !
yes its trasfer of latent heat energy from one source to another. Did you know the earth can be a heat battery? Pipe the hot water from the heat exchanger into earth pipes 300 feet down then over the summer it heats up the earth to supply warm water all winter long. The total power consumption is to make up for the remaining 10% or 20% to heat the house or non at all.
If the pool is cold, why would the house be hit?
@@spyder2383The asphalt shingles on the roof reflect heat while the pool water retains the coolness of the night. By circulating water through pipes which cross the roof the water is heated by the reflected heat and the sun. So it will pull cool water from the pool, and return hot water. It can be turned on and off depending on water and air temp This allows the pool to be used during the months when pools are generally too cold to swim in.
Yes. I made a solar heater for my pool in Vegas with $20 in black plastic drip tubing. I spread the coils out on my metal porch cover and using elbows hooked it to the spigot on the side of the pool pump. The other end went in the pool. Then I ran the pool pump from 10 till 2 instead of the middle of the night. The water comes out of the pipe at 110°. Free heat.
@@grumpy3543- free except for running the pump.
The practice of using waste heat to heat homes is as old as the industrial revolution. I used to live in Erie PA, and there are still wooden pipes (basically tree trunks that had been split in half, hollowed out, and then banded back together) underground there that used to delivered steam from a coke plant (coal that has been heated in an oxygen free atmosphere to be used in steel furnaces) to homes for heating.
"Big data is another major source of hot air" 😆 🤣 😂 Great video Sabine. Very interesting and, as always, highly informative. Thank you 👍.
Crypto mining is doing an awful lot of environmental damage.
@@frankshailes3205 😂😂 Yeah and so is fake news like Sabines
For the black body to emit in atmospheric window its temperature should be around 0C So the best way to exploit this window would be to build power plants in places where ambient temperatures are low and stable around -10C so any exhaust can be cooled to that temperature before exposing it to the outside.
Your channel is very good at explaining things in layman's terms, and you are never boring. Thank you.
So simple and full of fallacies. Perfect for the uninitiated layman.
@@gickygackers On the contrary, I'd say her channel was pretty accurate. At what point in this video did she commit a fallacy?
@@vaughanpratt6469 predicting the year the oceans boil is a fallacy.
In "3001: The Final Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke this problem is mentioned as happening in the 21st century and fixed by covering half the Earth with reflectors. I didn't pay much attention to it, until now.
Seems like an easier solution would be to just stop relying on a growth-based economy.
We've only been rapidly increasing our rate of consumption, our population, our environmental impact for a few hundred years. Population growth is already ending -- we could choose to end the other 2 as well.
Any way you slice it, capitalism is bound to be a relatively short-term temporary affair.
@@dr.zoidberg8666 No growth means that new technology doesn't develop.
Population growth means more people to think of solutions to cancer and energy, or to design new video games and clothes.
When the world's population was 1 billion, everybody lived in extreme poverty.
@@williamanthony915 No, it doesn't. It means consumption doesn't increase over time.
Almost all technological development is done by the public sector, not the private sector. It turns out that profit is a terrible incentive for actual innovation because real fundamental R&D is very costly & uncertain.
@@dr.zoidberg8666 So the government made the personal computer, not Steve Wozniak?
The government made the iPhone, not Steve Jobs?
The government made re-usable rockets, not Elon Musk?
Prior to 1900, the government didn't fund energy research, and things like electricity and the steam engine were invented.
If we left phone R&D to the government, do you really think it would've been as beautiful as the iPhone?
@@dr.zoidberg8666 I personally invest a lot of money into small modular nuclear reactors (in a private company research and developing them).
It's an uncertain investment, and the whole process is very costly, but there's a chance it will produce a lot of money for me, which is why I do it.
The chimney could incorporate a turbine to produce a little energy to try to make it a little more economicaly viable, plus there are devices that produce electricity when provided with a differential in temperature, they could fit in/on the walls.
@7:54 Dangit, Sabine! Don't do that when I have a mouth full of coffee... I almost spat it all over my desk!
I'm absolutely stunned. Your knowledge is impressive and the way you present it without even flinching is truly addictive. Thanks for doing this, you're amazing!
I enjoy her sarcastic wit that is subtlety interjected into the mix.
What the adi?
So you think the oceans will be boiling because of wasteheat in 4 centuries?
I've never thought about the use and just a delay in the waste heat from solar power, excellent discussion.
Those sure were some huge numbers being thrown around for mitigation schemes. Seems like that would buy a lot of solar panels.
Solar isn't that great because solar panels are only 25% efficient and plus you'll have to use them to charge batteries. Some solar plants have been abandoned because they're crap.
@@chompchompnomnom4256 The abandoned plants are not solar panels but the mirror to heat molten salt idea, which was badly implemented. Solar panels are fine, you are correct that storage is a issue most don't appreciate fully but with the advancement of numerous battery technologies we are probably going to have solved that in the next 5 years (will still take 20 years to deploy probably).
9:18 Actually, using wind has a net cooling effect on the forcing. The thermal radiation is proportional to temperature to the fourth power. Collection of wind energy impedes mixing, and by keeping hot parts hot, increases total radiation. 9:18
Also, solar panels are far darker than the average piece of land on which it would be placed, which means that less sunlight is reflected back into space.
@@noergelstein yes. Some studies show that covering a significant amount of the Sahara with solar panels could totally change the climate in the region.
Love your delivery of information!! Thank you.
Has anyone looked into the amount of dark surfaces we've created such as asphalt roads and roof tops?
Urban Heat Island effect?
Good point. This might actually have an effect. resulting in more heat on the surface. More effect then anything Sabine talks about but still nothing compared to all other global and astronomical forces. For example: Earth was greening since it got warmer and more CO2 is available, thus the dark green color increasing globally will render all the streets an deforestation and cities insignificant in comparison.
It adds up globally, sure, but these features have a greater effect on local warming than on a global scale (yet. We're not done paving, tho!) That's because of entropy... we still need to "spread the wealth" in order to turn the entire world into an urban corridor. Mwahahahahahaha!!!!
Alot of newer constructions tries to reduce hot spots created this way. It is one part of the new LEED requirements we are asked to follow
@@SolidFake The heat does not stay in the atmosphere, it will always go out and get lost in outer space. the atmosphere only delays this cooling. The 0,04% CO2 does jack Sh*it here, even if some photons are send back to earth, in a fraction of a second they will turn back towards space. All these effects are dominated and overwritten by water vapor, clouds and so on.
As I sit here shivering in a cold room, waste heat is low on my priority list.
amen to that
Man-made tornado: What could possibly go wrong? That comment along with the observation about fat-burning had me laughing out loud. What a great way to attract attention to a topic that I have always wondered about. Great job Sabine!
You know, with the man-made tornado's we could have the flying cars without a source of "free energy" to move the car. We also could having the flying pigs and , as a result , the solar shield bult on the moon. I feel like the new Elon Musk already ! 😂🤣
Another one:
_Big data is a particular great source for hot air_
@@PolCornelis 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Man made horrors beyond our comprehension.
Don't worry Sab! When the air is saturated at 100% it works its way to Northern lattitudes and becomes snow which reflects sunlight and heat, cooling the atmosphere further and adding to snowfall and glaciation. Hot oceans guarantee an impending glacial period
Cold is a lot scarier than heat.
@@sauvagesparrow8026I can add more layers, I can only take off so much.
@@holyheretic3185 you can grow vegetables in a greenhouse, not a freezer
@@mattkonetski9818 anyone can build a greenhouse.
those Canadians had it coming
I love the humorous interjections Sabine delivers with complete deadpan expression in her lectures. If Jack Benny had been a physics professor, his lectures would be like Sabine's.
"that it's free doesn't mean it insists on taking guns on its trip to the mall" lol, so naturally delivered.
I know nothing about science and randomly stumbled upon this channel a few months back, but I enjoy the content and hints of sarcastic humor included in each video. Thank you for being so informative on things I know nothing about! I find it refreshing to watch alongside my usual RUclips binge watch sessions :)
Watch one every week and before the year is out you will know more than 95% of all politicians
And you will still know nothing about science.
@eriktempelman2097 95% of all politicians. A Yank politician who is on the "I'm with science" team, not the "my money's from mega-money-burning-carbon" crowd said "Greenland lost 12.5 BILLION gallons of water in a SINGLE DAY ! Can you believe it !???" It was actually 12.5 billion tonnes of water in 1 day, which is only 4.1 times Greenland's regular daily Spring+Summer ice loss since hundreds/thousands of years ago and the "spectacular" 12.5 Gt on that single, absurdly unusual, July day is now just 2.7 times Greenland's regular daily Spring+Summer ice loss. Politicians. LOL.
Her videos are awesome
Because this has nothing to do with science. Politics + Engineering Science.
I'm from north africa's desert, the sahara, and the cirrius clouds are a serious problem in summer, basically the infrared temperature of the sky raise alot and the nights doesn't cool down the ground
If your concern is from aircraft contrails they have a temporary effect on the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) from the Earth's surface,but it is not a significant long-term effect.
During the daytime, contrails can actually have a warming effect by reflecting sunlight back to the surface, which can increase the surface temperature but also reflect energy back into space. However, at night, the contrails can act as a barrier to outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth's surface. This can temporarily trap some of the radiation and lead to a slight warming effect.
However, this effect is typically short-lived, as contrails are relatively short-lived themselves and dissipate within a few hours. Probably, the overall impact of contrails on the Earth's energy balance is relatively small compared to other factors such as greenhouse gas emissions and natural climate variability. Therefore, while contrails may have some temporary effect on OLR, they are not a significant factor in long-term climate change. I also think somehow the earth will boil this soon is not exactly correct as essentially all local energy is ultimately from the sun regardless of our sourcing and we are still emerging from and ice age no time to panic yet.
Essentially 100% of heat everywhere in the universe ends up as waste heat: entropy is the destiny of all energy.
12:08 dumping waste heat into domestic buildings seems a good idea for areas where heating is required for the longer period of the year. However when the homes don’t use the heat, you have to get rid of it anyway. This is a similar problem to balancing the feeds into the electrical grid, albeit with a much larger time constant probably.
True, but people still want to have hot water available all the time. So using at least some of the available heat seems to make sense, if it's economically viable. Friends of mine moved to a newly built apartment block a few weeks ago. I was quite surprised to learn, that all of the heat needed for hot water supply and a substantial part of the heat needed for the colder seasons, comes from the data centre of a local telco that is sitting in the basement. Also, a lot of heat is needed for industrial processes, that aren't really coupled to seasonality. It's probably a good idea to at least consider colocating "waste heat" sources with nearby heat consumers.
@@lupf5689 Sadly if the datacenter closes the books he's back to running cold showers. Which is why you would need heat networks fed by a variety of industrial heat sources and supplemented by a number of collective heat pumps. If you could add in some mass as a heatbattery (large watercistern or something) to run your heat pumps off that would be bonus.
Dear Sabine, I found your channel about a month ago and I LOVE your videos. They're absolutely addictive. In addition to their great educational value I also appreciate your reserved humor you perform with a straight face. :) You are awesome!
Awesome is the right word !
IKR best deadpan
🇨🇦/🇺🇸... I've been wondering about this for DECADES! I even wrote to and asked the host of Canada's CBC radio's science program "Quirks & Quarks" and they were quite "duh??" about it. They couldn't believe that anyone would ask such a question! Thanks for addressing this!!
Me too. I’ve wondered about heat.
I'm doing my part by buying LOTS & LOTS of ice cubes, driving to the beach and throwing them into the surf.
"the only fat burning exercise that actually works" - I choked on this. I love your channel!
The SkyCool systems mentioned around 17:30 can be made at home if you're an enterprising DIYer, as a spray paint is available which radiates infrared very effectively; I'm unsure if it's a metamaterial (edit: It's a mix of two metamaterials in particle form, one to reflect broad-spectrum sunlight, and one to emit infrared in the range of 8-13 micrometers). Tech Ingredients used the paint to make one such radiative cooler in his video from Feb. 8th, 2023! (the most recent video as of this comment)
I've got a Planetary Air Conditioner, and I'm not afraid to use it! Current output prevents 250 tons of ice from melting per year.
just make sure your spray paint does not contain greenhouse gases.
What is the name of that spray paint? I want to buy it
@@soniagheza391 With a bit of web searching, I believe it's described as self-cooling paint, the first brand of which comes up in a quick search is PARC (which stands for PAssive Radiative Cooling). The company website says it's specifically designed to radiate infrared into the sky. There may be aftermarket resellers or off-brands of the stuff, I don't know where to get it. It doesn't seem to be sold in spray can form, you'll need a paint sprayer.
Wrong wavelength of infrared... It may cool a building, but the emitted heat is still trapped by the atmosphere as explained by Sabine.
Sabine, your ironic, tongue-in-cheek humor just slays me! Love it!👍
Sadly, she sais unscientific things that fit the political agenda.
We can easily start an ice age (bring dust to stratosphere with a controlled nuclear winter. Now what will she do in ice age, when a glacier approaches her house?
(spoiler: she thinks, that loosing her grants funding is much more real, than the global warming, ice age, etc).
And they say Germans have no humour... There's a Mercedes which obeys spoken commands. "Windscreen wipers on" etc. To the command "tell me a joke" it responds, "this is a German car. We do not tell jokes! "
@@leonardgibney2997 And there’s always German politics to keep people laughing! 😋
It is cheaper to reduce the human population than to become space civilisation that builds stuff in space.
Building a Dyson swarm around earth and abandoning all other sources of energy would mean we don’t increase the natural amount of waste heat on earth
A Dyson swarm would cool the earth as it blocks sunlight...but may interfere with the magnetic field.
09:27 - Tidal power ("... partly comes from the pull of the moon ...") would also become waste heat even without human intervention, by friction as the water both has friction with itself (turbulence) and the river/sea beds.
Great observation...truly renewable usable free energy that's otherwise waste heat. Golly, that's energy imparted to earth by sun and moon gravitation. We're gonna burn...ha ha.
The Earth has successfully absorbed the Moon's tidal power for billions of years.
I love the idea of filling balloons with hot air in order to be able to send the hot air up in the atmosphere!
Everyone knows that hot air won't go up without a pretty balloon :)
Gotta make those kids cry somehow
😂
it's Balloon Quantum Physics - now you know how much of the gas is going up - accountable !
Put all politicians in the balloons. They are full of hot air.
@@jasonwiley798, indeed!
But the trouble is that methane is about 8 times heavier than hydrogen (and 4 times - than helium) :)
I've been wondering about why I have never heard anything about the waste heat causing a temp rise of the earth since I learned that energy is not destroyed just dissapated. About 60 years ago.
I remember this issue being introduced by my biology 101 professor my freshman year in college...in 1979.
1:13 Actually, green house gases don't exactly add heat. They prevent heat from being radiated away from Earth, but not all heat radiation is prevented. We'd know since we'd feel slightly overcooked by now, if it did.
11:22 Aalborg is my town's "twin/sister town". Here in my town in Holland we also use heat waste from a nearby power plant.
Downside is that Vattenval is the only provider in this area, so the prices are kinda high (also pre-2022), but at least it works.
I'm glad you tackled the problem of waste heat. I had not realized someone had calculated the magnitude of the issue. I've long argued the promise of nuclear fusion as a source of unlimited power is not possible, as it ignores the issue of waste heat. I must admit I had grossly underestimated the magnitude of the problem. I thought of it as a fraction of solar irradiance rather than the human caused forcing.
You're jumping the gun
When you have nearly unlimited free energy, you can make some pretty good heat pumps into space
Fusion is only promoted as that so that you think that fission, the only technology that can decarbonize humanity, is outdated
@@viktorm3840 More like a molehill... All the spent nuclear fuel assemblies ever produced by every reactor on earth have less volume than a 30 meter cube AND spent fuel can be recycled and reprocessed which removes the highly radioactive shorter half-life elements to go into new fuel rods, as well as other things like medical equipment and smoke detectors, and the remaining "depleted" uranium has a half life that is so long that it is barely radioactive at all and the actual hazard is that it is a toxic heavy metal.
And speaking of toxic heavy metals and radioactive elements, guess what in the ash left over from burning Coal in power plants that produce ACTUAL mountains of ash every year?!
Literally tens of billions of tons!
That not only contains radioactive Uranium and Thorium, but also arsenic! Lead! Thallium! Mercury! And more!
That just sits in piles out in the open uncontained, with enough becoming airborne that it causes more disease & kills more people EVERY YEAR than in thE ENTIRE HISTORY of nuclear energy production!
Guess what's actually replacing the "EVIL" and "SCARY" nuclear power plants that people like the German Green party are having shut down!
@@viktorm3840 Setting aside the fact that the concrete industry is itself environmental catastrophic in the same order of magnitude as coal power production of not quite at the same level, there are still 2 problems with the growing usage of coal fly ash as a concrete additive.
1. When one attempts to discover why the EPA has decided to allow the use in concrete of a hazardous waste product containing toxic heavy metals (including several with significant radioactivity), instead of heavily restricting it's usage to only certain applications they way that asbestos reinforced concrete is restricted, you will happily be directed to a number of studies which appear to show that:
" When securely encapsulated into the concrete matrix the toxic material exposure remains within safe limits, around only 3 times higher than background levels."
While this claim is almost certainly true, I can't help but remember that, decades ago, similar claims were made regarding the use of asbestos... I suspect that those claims also being true, provided that the asbestos remained similarly safely encapsulated in the concrete, was of little comfort to those who developed debilitating illness after exposure to dry asbestos concrete mix powder during construction or asbestos laden concrete dust during demolition.
2. While concrete on it's own is capable of lasting thousands of years when well maintained, REINFORCED concrete has a lifespan of 50 years or less, before it begins to deteriorate, and even with good maintenance is very unlikely to last 100 before it becomes unsafe and must be torn down. This means that any hazardous material used in reinforced concrete will one day no longer be encapsulated, and WILL become a long term hazard.
Just as structures built with reinforced concrete containing asbestos during the era when understanding the hazards of asbestos and the short lifespan of reinforced concrete was limited, are now presenting a hazard for demolition and disposal, I strongly suspect that the widespread usage of coal fly ash in concrete will one day create similar problems.
(Except worse, because asbestos is mainly an inhalation hazard and doesn't also leach toxic/radioactive elements into soil and groundwater, while the ashcrete also exacerbating the problem of safely storing toxic coal ash by adding in the additional mass of all the pulverized concrete contaminated with coal ash.)
I love Sabine's humor. This was brilliant! She does a 22 minutes long 'xkcd what if?' style exposition and she never gives away the game!
P.S. Maybe a little too much. Judging by the comments, maybe viewers did not catch it either. The original commentary is a critique, using reductio ad absurdum, of current economic dogma.
Actually, the content is such that it seemed to me she was taking the obviously 'ad absurdum' projection seriously. She never dropped out of character to note that her comments were tongue-in-cheek.
@@donwhite2247, Sabine always stays in character!
Very good point that until today I have only heard in a presentation by Stefan Rahmstorf - and nowhere else!
Please don't forget the cooling albedo. If we exchange reflective surfaces with PV, then more energy of the sun will take effect (which is not so likely but has to be stated).
Another point is that nuclear power plants in the end are thermal engines which produce far more than 50% excess heat. So also in this category, renewables are to be preferred.
My mom used to yell at me for leaving the door open and heating the outdoors. Now I finally understand.
Do brains get warmer when thinking harder?
Dunno I'd have to think about it.
Excellent video indeed. I am a sustainable engineer and these subjects (heat recovery, exergy, gibbs free energy and entropy) are key parameters to conceptualise solutions for decarbonization. Dissipated heat is indeed the 80% energy "trivial" of Pareto`s relationship. Maybe not 80%, but 72% iin a conventional coal power plant it certainly is, as efficiency of the Brayton cycle alone (i.e. combustion turbine) is roughly 34%, while other parasitic energy losses (primarily in the form of heat) here and there it becomes easy to grasp that overall efficiency of a coal power plant can be in the order of 28%. That means that if every hour 600 MWh of electrical energy that is generated is sent to the grid, the heat dissipated into the atmosphere in the form of hot humid air coming out of the cooling towers will be 1,542 MWh during the same hour; some 2 and a half times the amount of electrical energy.
Bottom line, we need to figure out how to bypass the cooling towers and harness all that heat...
Her wrong assumption is exponential energy use and thus waste heat increases. The pattern drawn from the past is the exponential human population growth this is slowing and will trend to moving to extinction in less than a century. Development will increase existing population energy use but that will flatten as the population does.
So prediction on heat use continuing to expand exponentially is wrong because it a population and technology based trend.
Still going to cause some increase before population shrinking will solve a good deal of it. As even the rich don't have enough kids to replace themselves this not a economic problem it cultural we stopped putting pressure on people to have children. This will have to be reversed eventually but no rush overpopulation still the current problem except for like Japan which is one huge tribe they going to go radically different sooner or later on getting women to have more children and start way earlier so they don't find inability to have children in their way. I refer mostly to the wait past 30 crowd but as in Japan they still maintain 25 as get married by time that will be a tad easier but it the married people still waiting a problem
Birth defects increase every year older a woman gets from puberty, chance of getting pregnant goes down. Curse of having all the eggs already made to be subjected to radiation and oxidation. Men's sperm creating cells have some ability to repair so sperm quality drops slower and many men retain ability to get pregnant into old age. Birth defects also go up but no where as much a very unfair bit of biology but this why traditional societies wanted very young wives but often thought older men better as their genes must be better and degradation of quality not as much a problem.
@@milferdjones2573 We could supply the contraceptive pill to all women of child bearing age free of charge. Not forcing of its use, entirely voluntary. This would dramatically reduce global warming and do it relatively quickly.
The religious Right will never allow it but I suggest sooner rather than later we tell them to go to hell before there's hell on earth by their making.
Unfortunately as population declines a reordering of wealth distribution will need to occur, lest we're headed for an agrarian Pol Potist type dystopian future. Population decline has dire consequences for all economic aspects of humanity however there's still a mindset of science as a panacea - which it is not since it is too slow. Given time, then perhaps, but without time pressure then nothing much gets done.
No one aspect is going to fix this. A multi pronged approach is required.
@@milferdjones2573 If / when waste heat became a major problem, we'd have other, major sustainability problems. Namely where the heck we're getting all that free energy from in the first place. Photovoltaics are, aside from potential maintenance problems, the obvious way to get effectively unlimited energy from the ball of fusion at the center of our solar system, and *if* we ever started to get anywhere near the limits of solar power generation on earth (to the severe detriment of plant life and ecosystems et al), it would obviously make sense to just expand into space, and other planetary bodies instead.
Unlimited exponential growth on earth (and in our solar system) is obviously unsustainable, and burning limited / finite resources to get there anyways (incl fissiles, hydrocarbon reserves, unrestricted geothermal tapping, and even artificial fusion technology), would be a spectacularly short-sighted folly (a la extracting + burning all easily accessible hydrocarbon reserves and fissiles on earth, now) - w/r the future of our species and the (very) long term continuation of life within this solar system.
And w/r population, yes, *every* species follows s-curve population dynamics w/r the carrying capacity of its ecosystem. Humans are not exempt, and are in fact influenced by modern population pressures (and carrying capacity) including *economic* (ie. scarcity) factors w/r jobs, education, employment, housing, and, fundamentally, land + resource scarcity and costs / pricing. Incl ofc the opportunity costs of having + raising children, and when, if ever, to do so.
Basic resource scarcity is effectively a non-issue (or, really just an engineering, technology, and manpower issue), but those other factors will continue to limit carrying capacity on Earth, regardless. And likely in the rest of the solar system, particularly in environments that *are* much more resource constrained.
That said an obvious failing in the modern popular consciousness is a failure to imagine how we *will* survive (and adapt) over the next millenia, let alone next million, or billion years.
or Maybe stop burning coal??
@@charlesreid9337 Yes, stop burning coal, absolutely, only that we can't afford to give it up all at once, unfortunately.
Isn't the Stefan-Boltzman law says that the intensity of Radiation emitted is directly proportional to fourth power of temperature. And at lower temperatures isn't most of the emitted wavelength is in infrared band.
So the question is will it not keep earth in equilibrium?
Only effect we have to worry about is CO2?
"Big data is a particularly great source for hot air" - almost spit out my food! Haha!
For the first time I was able to watch and understand the entire video. Thanks Ms. Hossenfelder for your sense of humor to keep things rolling along. Let's do this.
Speaking of the cirrus clouds, a study that was started before 911 in the US, found the sunlight striking the earth in this area increased as planes, which leave contrails, were restricted from flying across the Midwest US, where the study was being conducted. Really look forward to your videos and saw you quoted in my subscription of Science News, which gave me a laugh.😄
also the banning of high sulfur bunker fuels for ships , basically burning asphalt, reduced particle sin the atmosphere which increased solar warming by not blocking the sun.
@northvegassailrabbit3642 Yes indeed. You authors couldn't determine whether the night time cooling because less cirrus cloud was greater than the day time warming or less than the day time warming. They stated that right at the start of the published scientific paper. Ever since then liars everywhere have been ignoring that crucial finding and lying that fewer contrails will increase global warming and by some absurd junk-science amount like a large fraction of a degree, all based entirely on lies and nothing at all. We even had a liar on our CBC Canada "science show" pronounce that huge lie out to the Public on our national radio (bit like living in Ruzzia eh).
It bugs me...planes flying above thirty thousand feet cross us (San Antonio, Texas) hundreds of times daily, not landing here. What should be clear sunny winter days are often overcast with spreading contrails by eleven AM. Can it be for safety, in case a plane got into trouble? I doubt it. But with an open mind of the moment, I think it is a coordinated effort to shade the surface transportation traffic emissions to hold down the NOx and Ozone (smog). Thence, my problem in the afternoon as the "saved" smog precursors and the city island heat dome extend out northward to where we live...MyRadar app notifies me that the air is less than healthy, bad for poor breathers, or downright bad for anybody.
@@ronblack7870 interesting to see your comment from 5 months ago on something that got into the news only recently! 🙂
@@danielmcwhirter there is no "coordinated effort" to produce contrails. It just happens depending on the temperature and water content of the air. Apparently there are now efforts to redirect planes to areas or altitudes where contrails are not created to "save the climate" (which is nonsense as it is just water that will rain down quickly enough).
The total input from the sun is around 5x10^23 watts, the amount we generate is about 8x10^15 watts, there are eight orders of magnitude before we compete with the Sun, I don't think waste heat is going to be a problem.
Another triumph by Sabine. All the talk about free energy and entropy reminds me of A-level chemistry with the Gibbs free energy equation:-
The Gibbs free energy change :-
ΔG = ΔH − TΔS
where ΔG is free energy (in joules) ΔH is enthalpy, T is the temperature in Kelvin and ΔS is the change in entropy.
The town where I grew up used to supply heat to most businesses down town and some residential customers with waste heat from the local electricity generating plant. That system was in place for several decades but was discontinued when the power plant was shut down in the early 70's. Who knew they were ahead of the curve on something ;)
The problem was that the district heat/electric power plants burned coal and were rather polluting. But rather than retrofit them with a cleaner energy source they shut them down and left building owners to build their won heating systems. The power/heat plant for my large university campus and adjacent parts of town used to put out quite a plume of black smoke from its smokestack.
@@franklittle8124 Agreed. This was a coal fired plant. But it was such a small plant that it wasn't economical any more no matter what you may have done to it. The city did try to keep the building heating system in place by converting the boilers to burn garbage after the power plant itself was torn down. That worked about as well as you'd imagine but it did give businesses a little time to install their own heating systems. The university I went to used to burn lignite in their power plant. That made quite a plume back in the day and lignite being a very dirty coal lead to a lot of burning eyes and throats when conditions were right. They converted over to gas years ago though.
Loving your sense of humor. Makes your already great videos a joy to watch.
Do I correctly understand: if we build a lot of huge wind turbines and put an electric heater next to each wind turbine that converts all the kinetic energy of the air that turns the wind turbine into heat, this would not warm the planet because the kinetic energy of the air originally comes from solar energy?
“…big data is particularly a good source of hot air…” 🤣🤣🤣 not sure if this was literal meaning or some sarcasm sneaked in 😅
There was no sarcasm there whatsoever. Not at all. Really. Big data supports my statement.
The Virginia town in which I live has, I'm pretty sure, the highest number of data centers per acre on the planet, and they just keep building more and bigger ones. Thus if anyone gets toasted by big data hot air, we're first in line.
More seriously for anyone genuinely curious: No, all this heat does not make our local climate noticeably warmer than that of the broader Washington, DC, USA area. (Less seriously, that's not a fair comparison since the US Congress these days produces enough hot air to keep the whole region warm... :)
Just watch your computer, it requires a good fan to keep it cool and running correctly . The transistors cause a lot of heat hence the statement so it is literal as well as being funny.
It's amazing how much human ingenuity goes in to avoiding spending less energy.
Watt you say?
@@hugegamer5988 Volt you say otherwise?
@@Wabbelpaddel going to have to amp up those comments
@@hugegamer5988 The current situation is spiking out of control.
@@Wabbelpaddel Deus Volt.
Great video. Just missed the effect of absortivity, or albedo, on the heat balance. Solar panels might increase the forcing if their coefficient of absorption is larger than that of the original surface where they will be mounted. Might have been the case for desert tech.
Yep. Obviously it's all negligible compared with the GHGs but yep.
I dont know for the other renewables mentioned at 9:10, but isn´t their an addional effect for pv which wasn´t accounted for:
PV modules reflect around 3-5% of incoming flux directly back into space. Grass, forest and sand reflect 25%, 15% and 40% respectively. From this PV modules should be installed on Water (0,06% reflection)?
Additionally i think the geothermal example is more complex than one thinks. At least for an surface collector, I don´t see a problem at all. You´re just exchanging the heat, meaning the temperature of the earth cools locally and radiates less. In principle this should also hold true for deeper geothermal harvesting plants on a balance sheet, but ofc there the time delay is way bigger.
I always wondered about this, thank you. This means that fusion energy will definitely not save us.
Alternatively, from an idealistic optimist's pov, if fusion becomes widespread and scales down, we would have access to so much more free-energy this would become liberating... while the waste heat increases, and I imagine we'd be mitigating that more soon, we would be able to do things that are currently economically prohibitive to help solve both the thermodynamic waste-heat and CO2 issues... mega-engineering projects that we can only dream of today. Ideally, that is.
@@markzambelli this kinda touches on the point that the true cause of climate change is our parasitic top down economic system, which is inherently inefficient. Some would call this capitalism
at least we would not release more greenhouse gas that makes it even worse
Waste heat from cars, industrial plants, etc. is something I have thought about for years but no one ever seemed to think it was an issue at all. Great video.
That's why I almost never use my brakes !!
They have solved this problem by planning to beam the excess heat into space with infrared emitters.
Industry - that have existed for over 100years and still continue have some serious funding / lobbying to continue what they do as they please
Actually, I believe that it has been known that the wide use of air conditioning in some big cities does increase the outside temperature by a few degrees in summer.
When you walk next to the outside grouped fans of a big air conditioned building, you can really feel the heat that comes out of it ....
It's not a big deal unless those projections of increase occur. Flaw in projections they from great increase in human population that is slowing and will stop and reverse to population shrinking in the future. Tech development in third world will increase the heat as well but go flat and decline with population as well.
I think of it as a minor deal but still good idea to stop wasting money letting waste heat escape forget warming there is money being wasted.
If I remember correctly, this is the problem of the alien in Larry Niven's Ringworld. Their civilization is so advance, but they cannot solved the entropy problem in their home world, so they built the Ringworld.
uh damn, I darkly remember having a book of that... not sure if I ever completed it though
Isn't that also why they wrapped Superman in a blanket and sent him away from Kripton?
Not quite, it was the Puppeteers that destroyed the superconductors on the Ringworld as they were moving five (six?) planets away from the exploding centre of the galaxy. They produced so much waste heat that they didn't need sunlight.
@@jonparsons6818 It has been a long time since I read it. I might have been in one of his shorts from the Draco Tavern.
@@jimmysuryadi3017 It's in the **book** _Ringworld._ The puppeteer explains that they'd moved their six planets (one devoted to agriculture) away from their original star, but there's enough waste heat to keep them warm.
the solution is to go full renewable, renewables are already being powered by that ambient heat + what comes from the sun + what comes from the center of the earth, as we turn the motion into electrical energy we use some of that energy for work and some of it goes back as waste heat from electrical resistances and cinematic motion, seems like renewable energy-fed work is a good ambient heat battery.
I love your indepth summaries of a wide range of topics. Thank you so much for making the science digestible!
she is the best
I've wondered about this concept. I've debated with professors in the past about waste heat building up. I've always been told it was negligible, so don't think about it. But if we just keep making more, it doesn't disappear. Thanks for covering this!
It convects upward into outer space, which is the same as disappearing.
Look up "Earth's Energy Budget" and "Stefan-Boltzmann law".
We have to worry about climate change because changing the composition of the atmosphere changes the equilibrium temperature, but as the Earth's temperature increases it loses more heat to space through radiation (and the rate of radiation goes up rapidly with temperature). The Earth's surface used to be molten, it solidified due to heat loss through radiation.
@@marciacsr it isn't that simple ;(. See a question in Quora: "Why isn't colder air of the upper and middle troposphere steadily flowing down to the surface?"
TL;DR: Air density and molecules decreases the further we go away from the surface. Atmosphere is divided into layers depending on exactly this and its temperature range. (From low altitude to higher):
Troposphere= 20°C to -60°C
Stratosphere= -60°C to -20°C
Mesosphere= -20°C to -90°C
Outer Space= -100°C and up
So this all depends on the law of physics, specifically "Ideal gas law".
So it's not just going up and exiting the globe. CO2 for example has a very hard time exiting the earth (mostly present only on the troposphere) so it ends up contributing to global warming.
Because it IS irrelevant. Heat by itself has a number of negative feedback looks that prevent it from building up.
For example higher evaporation, which causes higher albedo, which causes more heat coming from the Sun to bounce off and never reach the surface, which ultimately results in cooling.
This video was mind-numbingly stupid _(most of Sabine's videos that are related to climate change are similarly mind-numbingly stupid, but her other content is fine),_ so instead of just blindly taking it at a face value, consider thinking about the issue objectively.
Actually, the waste heat DOES disappear. The Earth radiates an enormous amount of heat into space. During clear nights in winter, it radiates MUCH MORE because the drier air doesn't hold heat.
I'm yet to finish the video, but so far, I believe this is the best and most valuable video you ever did! I read and think a lot, but it would've never dawned on me, that this effect might get noticable at one point in time 😯
I can give a real concrete examples of using "waste heat." I built a new office/studio 2 years ago. It is 6 layer insulated. The room about 200 square feet. And I heat the entire office with my computer, 1 very large monitor and 2 smaller monitors, and 3 very large LED lights. So when it's 22F outside it's 69F inside my office with no other heat source. When I say "six layer insulated" here is what I mean. Layer 1 is radiant barrier facing OUT against the outside surface, 1" of stucco. Layer 2 is 6" of rock wool, layer 3 is a 2nd layer of radian barrier (facing OUT), then a 1/2" air gap, layer 4 is radiant barrier facing IN, Layer 5 is 3/4" OSB, Layer 6 is drywall. There is also a 2' air gab between the ceiling (std acoustic tiles) and the attic which has about 6" of insulation there. I only have 1 window and 2 doors. Both double paned and one the window has very heavy curtains as well at one of the doors. In fact the only "loss" I have is the concrete/tile floor. But I did that on purpose since it helps cool the room during summer and it does not hurt that much during the winters. (earth being around 50F). During the summer I have one very small evaporative cooler and I only run it on low (80 watts). (In the SW desert of the US.)
Another example is in my garage I have a full size freezer and a 2nd fridge. But they are right next to my hybrid water heater. So the heat expelled from the cooling appliances is used by the heat pump in the hybrid water heater. I'm trying to find an economical way to port the fridge inside the house to the garage as well.
Another thing I do is I have a 2500 gallon water tank in an enclosed building (well house, it's about 200 sq ft. Water comes out of the ground at about 60F. During the summer the water tank absorbs the heat from the uncooled bulding (well house) and preheats the water in the tank to nearly 80F. So that reduces my energy used to heat water. It also keeps that completely uncooled wellhouse to 85F when it's 110F outside because the water is so good at absorbing the extra heat.
The next building I build will have an entire wall of 2500 gal. water tanks (7 of them) on the west wall of the building to absorb that heat to help cool the building and preheat the water for the bathrooms.
These things can be done. But you have to plan it all out and link "heat creators" with "heat absorbers."
In regards to meddling with the atmosphere and blocking the sun, that is an INSANE idea. We are babies when it comes to understanding the complexity of the the climate. We could spend $20,000,0000,000,000 and send the planet into global glaciers. DO NOT MESS with things you don't fully understand. Same thing with cloud seeding. Also it's MUCH cheaper and easier to COOL things rather than HEAT them up. So a planet a few degrees warmer would be much easier to deal with than a few degrees cooler.
Just make things more efficient using the waste heat. Leave the atmosphere alone!
Sounds like you need a hobby and friends.
Your sense of humour fits perfectly the sense of imminent doom
350 years isn't exactly "imminent"