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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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.
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