I don’t write a lot about climate change, but every once in a while something catches my eye. Over on Watts Up With That, a post apparently written by Julius Sanks asks the question “Can we puny humans produce enough energy to melt the huge icecap?” Before explaining why he’s wrong — or rather, why that’s the wrong question — I want to take a detour to a another Watts Up With That post that Sanks praises at the beginning of his post. Along the way, I’m going to try to reproduce some of the math in the posts.

The post Sanks likes is written by Andrew Watt himself and is titled “Getting ‘Cooked’ by Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Global Warming.” In it, Watts complains about the claim by John Cook that

our planet has been building up heat at the rate of about four Hiroshima bombs every second

I kind of agree with some of Watts’s criticism. Describing global warming in terms of nuclear bombs can be unnecessary sensationalist. Nuclear weapons concentrate all their energy in a spectacular blast, whereas weather and climate events spread out their effects over millions of square miles. On that scale, nuclear bombs are not very significant.

The standard unit of energy is the Joule (J), but the yield of nuclear bombs is usually expressed in terms of the number of tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) explosive that would be needed to give off the same amount of energy. That’s not a very precise measurement, but the conventional assumption is that 1 ton of TNT releases 4.184 billion Joules (4.184×10⁹ J) of energy. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton weapon, equivalent to 15000 tons of TNT, so it released 62,760 billion Joules (62.76×10¹² J). Four of them would release about 251,000 billion Joules (251×10¹² J).

Those numbers are big, but so is our planet, and lots of big things happen on it. For example, a fully-formed hurricane releases about 600,000 billion Joules (600×10¹² J) per second, which is pretty close to ten Hiroshima bombs every second. In a single day, a hurricane will release 52 billion billion Joules (52×10¹⁸ J), the equivalent of 800,000 bombs. (Fortunately, only about 1/4 of 1 percent of that energy is used to drive winds. The rest is used to evaporate water from the oceans and turn it into clouds and rain.)

Watts’s post uses a different point of comparison by calculating how much energy is in sunlight. The Earth’s radius is 6378 km, which means that the Earth’s cross-sectional area (given by πr²) is 128 million square kilometers. Solar flux, the density of energy reaching the Earth, is 1361 Joules per second per square meter, so multiplying it out, the Earth intercepts 174,000,000 billion Joules per second (174×10¹⁵ J/s) from the sun. That works out to about 41 megatons, or about 2770 Hiroshima bombs, every second.

From this, Watt concludes that global warming energy is negligible:

Gosh, a thousand Hiroshima bombs exploding on this planet every second? How frightening! With that sort of threat, one wonders why Obama isn’t going to announce taxing the sun into submission next Tuesday.

These calculation just go to illustrate that in the grand scheme of things, not only is the global energy associated with global warming small, it isn’t even within the bounds of measurement certainty.

(Watt gets a figure of only 1000 bombs because he uses ballpark estimates for solar flux, the bomb’s energy, and frickin’ pi, and all the errors are in the same direction.)

This is kind of a silly argument. A lot of natural processes take a very long time. Water washing over rocks erodes only a tiny amount of material every day, but let it go on long enough, and the Colorado river can carve out the Grand Canyon.

Sanks’s post ostensibly addresses the issue of whether humans could possibly produce enough energy to melt the Antarctic ice cap, as is predicted to occur if the Earth’s climate gets warm enough. I’ll go through the math before explaining why this is a silly thing to talk about.

It takes about 334 Joules to melt a single gram of ice, and according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center, the Antarctic ice cap contains about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. Given that 1 cubic centimeter of ice ideally weights 0.9169 grams, that’s 27.5 billion billion kilograms of ice. Multiplying by 334 J/g lets us figure out that melting the Antarctic ice cap would take 9,200,000 billion billion Joules (9.2×10²⁴ J).

Sanks then tries to estimate how long it would take to melt the Antarctic ice cap if we used all of the energy produced by human civilization to do it. Using an energy production figure of 89 billion billion Joules per year(8.906×10¹⁹ J/yr) from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, he estimate that it would take about 103,000 years.

Unfortunately, Watt is using the wrong numbers. As you might guess from the name, the U.S. Energy Information Administration only reports U.S. figures. A better figure for the world (for 2015) is 146,000 terrawatt-hours, which is 526 billion billion Joules per year (5.256×10^20 J/yr). At that rate, it would take 17,500 years to melt the Antarctic ice cap.

It’s actually a little wore than that. Ice only melts when it reaches its melting temperature, and the arctic ice sheet is actually -49 degrees C below its melting point (according to Sanks), so some energy will be absorbed just raising it to the melting point. The amount of energy to raise one gram of water 1 degree C is 1.865 Joules. Re-running the math, it would take 22,300 years to melt the ice cap.

The author thinks the conclusion is pretty clear:

My goal here is to show the enormous energy levels involved and how ridiculous it is to blame humans for any significant ice melt.

That’s just plain dishonest. Climatologists aren’t claiming that human energy production is directly raising the temperature of the planet. The principle global warming claim is that a variety of human activities are changing the composition of the Earth’s atmospheric gases in ways that change the way the Earth retains heat, leading to a slow temperature increase. As it happens, the combustion products of fossil fuels are the main source of the “greenhouse” gasses that are causing the change, but it’s not the fossil fuel energy itself that is raising the Earth’s temperature.

The weird thing is that Watt’s post (referred to by Sanks) actually sets the scene for how this works. As he explains, the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is a whopping 174,000,000 billion Joules — 2770 Hiroshima bombs — per second. That’s about 10,000 times as much energy as our entire civilization produces. If all of that energy were focused on the Antarctic ice cap, it would melt away in a little over two years.

That’s not going to happen of course, and no climate scientist is predicting that it will. But here’s the thing: As Watt emphasizes, this is a tremendous amount of energy — so much that even a really small change in how it is absorbed could cause big changes to the Earth’s climate.

Early climate models were built around the assumption that everything was in equilibrium: The weather may be chaotic from moment to moment and vary from place to place, but over reasonable amounts of time, the planet-wide climate as a whole did not change. This constraint was a good enough approximation for scientists to build useful models of weather and climate.

For that constraint to hold, there would have to be no net energy change over the entire planet: If 174 petajoules of sunlight strike the planet every second, then the planet has to radiate away 174 petajoules of energy to space every second. This doesn’t have to be true from second to second, but it has to hold over periods of years or decades.

If the energy flows in and out are not exactly balanced, the Earth will experience temperature changes. So if changes to the Earth’s atmosphere reduce the amount of energy radiated to space, the Earth will accumulate energy, and that energy will cause the Earth’s temperature to increase. The temperature will continue increasing until the energy equilibrium is restored. Fortunately, all other things being equal, the warmer an object gets, the more energy it radiates, so as the Earth warms, it will begin to radiate more energy. Eventually, it will reach a temperature where it radiates as much Energy as it did before, at which point the balance of energy flows will be returned, and the Earth’s temperature will stabilize at the new value.

There are, of course, a lot of complexities. Some solar energy is reflected away without ever being absorbed, there are complex energy exchanges between the land, the seas, and the atmosphere, and there are other sources of energy besides the Sun, such as nuclear decay of radioactive elements deep inside the planet. But the basic idea still holds: If the energy flows are not balanced, the Earth will experience temperature changes.

And given the enormous quantity of energy involved, over time spans of decades or centuries, it should not surprise us that even slight perturbations to the Earth’s energy handling mechanisms could cause devastating climate changes.

A little more information has come out about that suspicious investigation that produced the seemingly abusive subpoena to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, asking them for a crapton of documents related to CEI’s work on climate change, presumably in connection with the investigation into ExxonMobil’s alleged lies to investors.

The Washington Times has a copy of a subpoena issued to ExxonMobil, and it’s quite the fishing expedition. It asks for all of ExxonMobil’s communications about climate change by almost any means (including MySpace!) with over 100 organizations. Most of them seem to be random policy think tanks, a few of which (e.g. the Heartland Institute) have a pretty shady reputation when it comes to climate change.

I’ve heard of many of the rest, but I couldn’t really characterize them one way or another on climate issues. Since many of them also appear on Greenpeaces’ ExxonSecrets list of supposed climate change deniers (presumably because both lists were created from similar sources) I assume they have expressed some degree of skepticism about global warming.

The one that got my attention (because they brought it up themselves) is Reason magazine, or rather their publisher, the Reason Foundation. With all their contributors, I’m sure that somebody at Reason has said something stupid about the climate, but their main climate science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, has been pretty straight about it. He was skeptical of early global warming models that predicted catastrophic levels of warming, but he got on board once scientists figured out how to reconcile the satellite data (which showed little warming) with the data from surface thermometers (which show more warming). You could argue that he should have gotten on board sooner, but there’s a difference between being sincerely skeptical and lying about the science.

Reason is a policy oriented organization, so their concern — and mine — is not about the existence of anthropogenic global warming but about what our response should be. Soon after global warming entered the public consciousness, environmentalists, anti-capitalists, and big-government politicians seized on it to claim the power to control a large chunk of our economy. To those of us in the libertarian movement, rather than being an inconvenient truth, global warming seemed to be a suspiciously convenient theory for the radical left. Despite this, the libertarians at Reason have pretty much accepted global warming and moved on to discuss what to do about it. This conversion was what convinced me that climate change was not just another moral panic and that I should pay more attention to it.

There are far too many organizations mentioned in the subpoena for me to research, and many of them could be lobbying fronts for ExxonMobil. A lot of them, however, appear to be right-wing or free-market advocacy groups, such as the National Taxpayers Union and the Heritage Foundation, or business-oriented groups such as the National Black Chamber of Commerce which would naturally be highly skeptical about climate change without having to be part of an alleged conspiracy.

Some of the organizations seem pretty legitimate, such as university-centered research teams like the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University, the George Mason University Law and Economics Center, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which have a free-market orientation that would make them skeptical the kinds of centralized planning proposed to deal with the climate crisis.

Then there are places like the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, or the Arizona State University Office of Climatology, which are legitimate scientific organizations that I assume are on the list because of a kerfuffle with one or two of their researchers.

So far as I know, only one of these organizations (the Competitive Enterprise Institute) has been hit with a subpoena of its own, and maybe that’s where it will end. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Witch hunts usually don’t end until they cause a lot more damage.

Since I’ve been picking on climate change activists for their legal policies, I figure I should take a turn picking on global warming deniers for their misstatements about climate science. Case in point, an unsigned editorial in Investor’s Business Daily titled “Father of Global Warming Admits: It Used to Be Hotter Than It Is Now.” I’m by no means an expert on climate science, but I think I can see a few flaws here.

To listen to the climate change alarmist community, one would think that Earth has never been so warm as it is now.

There are enough climate activists in the world that I’m sure someone somewhere must have said something like that, but that’s not actually part of the theory of anthropogenic climate change.

But it’s been warmer, and sea levels have been higher, facts that the leader of the movement acknowledges.

I would hope he does, since it’s pretty well scientifically established.

James Hansen, the famed NASA scientist who stirred the climate scare when in 1988 he told a Senate committee that “global warming” — yes, he used those words

— What the heck is going on with global warming deniers who think the shift in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change” is a trick of some kind? What’s that about? I’ve got to look that one up someday. Anyway…

— “is already happening now,” has never backed off his claims, despite the fact that he’s been demonstrably wrong.

I know almost nothing about Hansen, or how his specific claims have held up, but the editorial sure seems to get important things wrong.

The narrative since that day in 1988 is that Earth is entering a dangerous warm era created by man’s carbon dioxide emissions. Every heat wave, cold snap, drought, hurricane, heavy snow, torrential rain, and change in sea level has been supposedly caused by man. And all are allegedly unprecedented events.

Um…no. The theory of anthropogenic climate change makes claims about worldwide climate trends over periods of decades or longer. One of those claims is that global warming will increase the frequency and intensity of some local weather events, but as far as I know, there’s no way to trace these kinds of specific instances of extreme weather to global warming. Each time we break a temperature record is another bit of evidence that warming is occurring, but no single hot day or intense hurricane proves global warming. Even a hot year is just a data point. (Of course, no single cold day or year refutes global warming either.)

It’s been warmer, and extreme weather has visited us before, all in a time long before man began to drive cars and operate power plants that helped move him from an almost primitive existence to a modern one.

Hansen has even admitted this.

I would hope so, since much of climate science is based on historic data from those periods. Lots of things have affected our climate over the life of the planet — variations in output from the sun, cycles in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, volcanoes, changes in vegetation, changes in ocean currents, meteor strikes, drifting continents… A lot can happen to a planet in four and a half billion years. The geological record of those ancient times is one of the reasons we have some idea of what the Earth would be like with more CO₂ and higher temperatures, because both of those things have happened before and left evidence for scientists to analyze.

“The last interglacial period, 120,000 years ago, that’s the last time it was warmer than today, sea level was 6 to 9 meters higher,” he said in an interview with online magazine Yale Environment 360.

So it has been warmer, and sea levels have been higher. And those conditions were entirely natural. Yet the alarmists want us to believe that the predicted warmth of today — which has yet to occur — is man-caused. How do they know?

That’s a huge topic, but the short answer is that we can see that our civilization is dumping massive amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere, and we can see evidence that this is causing the atmosphere to retain more heat, but when we look at all the other known possible causes of global warming, none of them seem to be responsible for the current warming.

The Watts Up With That blog points out another hole in the narrative: While implying that we’re headed for another 6-to-9-meters increase in sea level […] “Hansen failed to say” that “paleoclimatological studies have indicated that it took a number of millennia for sea levels to rise those 6 to 9 meters when temperatures were warmer than today.”

Maybe Hansen failed to say it, but climate scientists aren’t predicting an overnight deluge. They believe it will take centuries for the world’s glaciers to melt away.

Yet we’ve been told until the alarmists have no more hot air to exhale that we are running out of time to act, and maybe already have.

Contrary to what the IBD editors are saying, there’s nothing inconsistent about having to act quickly now to prevent a catastrophic sea level rise in the future. The way it works is that CO₂ levels rise as fast as we can dump CO₂ into the atmosphere, but then it takes decades for the greenhouse effect to warm the Earth, and even longer for the warmer climate to melt glacial ice to raise the sea level. Nevertheless, the final height to which the sea rises, hundreds or thousands of years in the future, is a function of the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and we are increasing that level right now. The sooner we stop producing massive amounts of CO₂, the smaller the eventual sea rise will be.

The only thing Hansen is “admitting” is what climate scientists have been saying for years.