I get that fossil fuel burning generates more energy but there are wild fire breakouts due to scorching temps in southern Europe (and the rest) …whats the big deal breaker stopping us from harnessing the climate energy increase we cause and long term view of reducing emissions.. which in turn reduces the energy we can harness from our climate.
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You can’t really get usable energy (i.e. energy to do work) out of just generalized heat. You need a heat difference, then you can extract energy from the flow of heat from hot to cold.
Heating up the environment doesn’t really make any new energy available.
For a more rigorous treatment of this concept, look up the Carnot cycle. Basically, any heat engine can be treated thermodynamically as a Carnot cycle, and the maximum energy you can extract is related to the hottest and coldest parts of the engine.
First, humans aren’t *creating* the energy that is warming the Earth. The energy we release is minuscule compared to the energy dumped into the atmosphere from sunlight. Climate changing is happening because the carbon released into the atmosphere by burning fuels creates a blanket that traps the energy coming from sunlight. Specifically, it’s best at trapping infrared.
Sunlight has light from all frequencies, from radio to high UV. Most of it makes it through the atmosphere. Once it hits stuff on the Earth, a lot of that energy is absorbed and becomes heat. The heat causes stuff to radiate infrared light back out, but the atmosphere causes a lot of the infrared light to bounce right back to Earth, trapping that heat.
So, the first problem is that we are not *creating* usable energy, we’re merely trapping more energy in the atmosphere.
Regardless, we can’t use it. Energy doesn’t do work just because it exists. In order for energy to do work, it has to go from where it is to where it isn’t. In the process of doing that, it does work. That is what entropy is: energy is bunched up somewhere and highly ordered, then released into somewhere else where there is less energy and it is unordered.
When we burn fossil fuels, we’re taking energy that is stored in chemical bonds and turning it, ultimately, into heat. That heat is released into the atmosphere. There’s really nowhere else to put it. All energy ends up as heat, and all of that heat ends up in the atmosphere. Some of it radiates out into space, some of it stays trapped. Eventually – in billions and billions of years, *all* of it will radiate out into space. But we can’t do anything else with it. The only way to use it would be to put the work we want it to do in its “path” between the atmosphere and space. That’s not really feasible – it’s the *entire* atmosphere of the planet. Plus, that would mean capturing it and slowing it down, which is the opposite of what we want anyway. We *want* it to go into space.
Countries are committed to different degrees to switch to renewables, but in general the trend goes in that direction. What climate energy increase are you thinking about? The temperature itself? I don’t see how that would make for a usable energy harvesting source. To make electricity out of temperature you need a big temperature difference and big areas. To me it seems that the most common renewables already used (solar, wind, tidal, hydro) are more practical. The thing is, a couple degrees warmer on average don’t necessarily mean there’s more energy available in a useful form. First, 3°C is like a 1% increase in thermal energy. This increase doesn’t come from more sunrays, but from less of them being sent back out of the atmosphere. A generally, globally warmer climate could mean higher average wind speeds in a place, but less wind in others.
Burning fossil fuel doesn’t “create” energy. It takes energy from the Sun that was captured long ago as chemicals and releases it in the present.
You can harness that climate energy with wind farms or tidal power stations, warming the planet makes winds higher and wind farms more efficient.
You could harness the heat flow from the hotter atmosphere to a cooler something, if you had a cooler something with the mass of the atmosphere. Alas, we don’t have something like that.
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