Solar energy is heat from above, what about heat from below?

Question

"About 25 percent of the heat that flows out of the Earth's interior is transferred to the oceans through this process, " http://news.ucsc.edu/2015/06/seafloor-siphon.html

And there's also an interesting article I read called "Plate Climatology" which is a geologist's view of climate related plate tectonics, volcanic activity and internal heat release a lot of which under the oceans. http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/images/PDFs/Plate_Climatology_Jan_7_2015.pdf

Where in "mainstream" is this addressed? Is it in climate models? Or is it insignificant? (It doesn't sound insignificant at first glance.)

Answer 1

Don't forget "passive geothermal energy". It will not energize the world or large systems but, it can be used on an individual basis to moderate external temperatures: heat in the summer, cold in the winter. Through the moderation of temperatures, one can use less external energy to either heat or cool building air and water. This type of passive, geothermal energy is often used in a number of different ways by off gridders. It has also been traditionally used to moderate building temperatures in older structures built before heat pumps, forced central air, and air conditioning.

Answer 2

It's called geothermal energy and is a viable heat source mostly in the western part of the USA but with a couple of "hot spots" in LA and WV.

Answer 3

Yes

Answer 4

Here's how AGW theory works, only man's activities changes the climate, everything else is static or constant and don't you think these guy's already thought about this. Thou shalt not question the word.

Answer 5

Yes

Answer 6

They don't want to talk about that. They aren't that interested in researching solar energy either, just declaring that total irradiance doesn't change much therefore the sun is not to blame. The emphasis is entirely on CO2 because that's where the power is. They don't even care about standard environmentalist issues like changes in land use causing global warming.

Answer 7

Very interesting. I know the vents certainly release lots of heat. They have mechanism similar to the mantle's convection currents that distribute heat from the mantle at spreading centers (mid ocean ridges). I didn't read it all, I will have to read it at a later time, but I skimmed through it and it proposed some interesting mechanism such as El Ninos being formed from deep ocean mechanisms. Unlike Bacch, I won't close my mind to the possibility that geological forces have a role to play. I am of course skeptical but I satisfied myself that they didn't seem like crackpots and I definitely plan to read it in full when I can.



So S says minimal except near volcanoes. I guess we can chalk him up as a maybe.



We have a ring of volcanoes (the mid ocean ridge) that looks the seams of a baseball moving around the earth. Beneath these ridges we have mantle material (and heat) moving upwards to form new oceanic plates. There is a huge amount of energy here and there are a lot of unknowns. It wasn't so long ago when the vent based life was discovered.



Apparently Peggy James thinks we've put a thermometer everywhere and have determined the thermal gradient with more than a scintilla of accuracy and with boreholes no less. How do you measure the energy from super hot fluids that spring from various vents and then collapse and develop somewhere else. We can barely get down there. We can peek around from time to time but there is a whole world going on there that we don't know that much about. What is about alarmists that cause them to think we know everything already? Sure we know some things in a general way but I find the ocean to be something that is extremely important since alarmists seem to be finding all sorts of hidden goodies there. It is so much more massive than the atmosphere, a tiny change can be magnified in importance.



The tectonic plates that we ride on, the plates that build mountains are theoretically powered by convection currents distributing heat from the outer core to the upper mantle. This energy isn't insignificant but I also don't claim to know how it affects or causes variations in climate.



Peggy, it is comical that you believe you can determine the heat released from vents by taking measurements in boreholes per your comment to zippi (I believe). Instead of believing you know everything already, I suggest you learn something useful and start by acknowledging that we don't know how much heat is coming from the vents. The best they could do is provide a ball park estimate based on lots of assumptions (do I need to list a few for you?) and the margin of error would be huge. I don't need to take a graduate course to know we don't know. Apparently you need far more than that.



Actually peggy what you think of as knowledge, I think of as intellectual laziness on your part that stems from your desire to eliminate anything that threatens your Cause. What is that you claim to know Peggy? You think you know the global heat flux for everywhere on the planet? What a joke. They can use a model to create a global heat flux and they can add some measurement data. Whoopty do. That doesn't mean there aren't occasions when that heat flux can vary in time and place. It doesn't mean that they know they can't affect El Ninos or other poorly understood phenomena. Is that really a difficult concept for you Peg or are you just lazy or is the Cause that important?



Last week there was an article about a surprisingly high heat flux beneath glaciers in Antarctica. How could that be? Peggy James said we knew everything already. Frankly I didn't pay that much attention because I'm not that easily surprised by finding out we didn't know something because unlike Peggy James, I understand that we don't have thermometers everywhere and computer models don't necessarily reflect reality. I hate to beat a dead horse but Peggy James claims to have a doctorate. Count me as unimpressed.

Answer 8

minimal except near volcanoes

Answer 9

Total heat flow from the planet interior to the climate system accounts for less that 0.1 w/m2. Incoming solar radiation accounts for more than 340 w/m2. Just the added CO2 from human activity adds 1.6 w/m2. Human activity adds about 18x more energy to the climate system than does the total heat from the interior (that is not including the feedbacks that amplify any warming).



When discussing climate *change*, we are ultimately discussing forcings *change*. There is no known geological change that would come anywhere close to explaining the warming since the industrial revolution. Over longer periods, it has caused major changes to the earth's climate, but those changes are over time periods much longer than human existence.



The standard tests that have proved the warming is greenhouse-driven rather than solar-driven also work to prove the warming is greenhouse-driven rather than geology-driven. The stratosphere is cooling as the troposphere warms. Nights are warming more than days. You'd have to come up another explanation for these findings to challenge an enhanced greenhouse effect as the major cause of the warming. And you have to explain where our CO2 goes, why the CO2 in the air is gaining isotopes from plants/animals, and why the carbon content in the oceans is increasing if you want to challenge human activity as the cause of the enhanced greenhouse effect.

Answer 10

The Core's temp is equal to that of the Sun's from what I have read. There's a lot to Al Gore's idea that "Earth has a temperature", but he was way off base when he attributed it to raised CO2 levels. Temperature variability has a lot of things that influence it besides CO2. They just like the idea of focusing on it because Governments are paying them to do it. It was the original mission of the UNIPCC, but they have simply "rode the environmental wagon" being pulled by the Global 'environmental horses' (environmentalists).



" ... "The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is -- not much."



The study took advantage of the fact that water expands as it gets warmer. The sea level is rising because of this expansion and the water added by glacier and ice sheet melt.



To arrive at their conclusion, the JPL scientists did a straightforward subtraction calculation, using data for 2005-2013 from the Argo buoys, NASA's Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites, and the agency’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the total amount of sea level rise, they subtracted the amount of rise from the expansion in the upper ocean, and the amount of rise that came from added meltwater. The remainder represented the amount of sea level rise caused by warming in the deep ocean.



The remainder was essentially zero. Deep ocean warming contributed virtually nothing to sea level rise during this period. ... " -



http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/october/nasa-study-finds-earth-s-ocean-abyss-has-not-warmed/#.VabAD_lViko



BACCHEUS is dead wrong about the 0.1 w/m2. He tries to make orange juice by throwing apples into the mixer. They've been trying to tell us that the deep ocean is where all of the surface heat is going, yet they still can't measure deep ocean temperatures so they use deductive reasoning instead. Deep ocean mixing may be the reason why we will never see a catastrophic scenario on the surface. We know very little about "deep ocean mixing".

Answer 11

1

Answer 12

Sigh. Haven't we been through this before? Baccheus is correct. Heat flow varies a lot from place-to-place across the globe, but the global average is less than 100 milliwatts per square meter. There are lots of global heat flow maps that you can look at, you can see one at this site:



http://geophysics.ou.edu/geomechanics/notes/heatflow/global_heat_flow.htm



Some places like the East Pacific Rise and, apparently, West Antarctica have values substantially higher than 100 miliwatts per square meter; other (larger) regions have substantially lower values. That's how it works out to be less 100 over the entire globe.



More importantly, that's not the number we're interested in for climate change--what really matters is the CHANGE in the heat flux over a few decades, and that is almost certainly several orders of magnitude less than the flux number. Ever been in a mine or cave? If you study the heat diffusion equation you'll find that it takes a long time for a heat signal to propagate through the Earth and it decays as it propagates, so even if you have a very active volcanic year the vast majority of the Earth's surface won't know anything about those volcanoes going off--at least not from changes to the heat flux.



By the way, I'm not saying anything is wrong with measurements in the Advances in Science paper you linked to, in situ measurements are always good reality checks for remote sensing. The heat flux may even be contributing to some ice melt there, but in general geothermal heat flux is an insignificant contributor to global climate change on the time scales we're interested in.



The other "paper" ("Plate Climatology Theory") is by a crackpot who has no idea what he's talking about. He apparently never studied geophysics during his geologic career or he would know that the things he is proposing are not physically reasonable on geophysical bases, much less atmospheric.



Why do you look to crackpots to explain things?



EDIT: To answer JimZ's question " What is about alarmists that cause them to think we know everything already?" Scientists (i.e., what you call "alarmists") don't believe we know everything, but we do know SOME things, and those things put limits on just how much the geothermal flux gradient can be contributing to recent climate change. If you want to understand those sorts of things, I would suggest that you get off your duff and take a graduate class in geophysics. You need to learn about the heat diffusion equation, so it's going to require math at the level of partial differential equations. Then it would help to know the thermal conductivities of various rock types so that you can understand estimates of thermal diffusion times. You also need to learn some geophysical inverse theory, and you need to know about Fourier series and the Nyquist sampling rate. You might want to pick up a standard textbook in geophysics like "Geodynamics" by Turcotte or "Principles of Geophysics" by Sleep and Fujita.



There seems to be a general assumption by JimZ and other non-scientists in here that we really know nothing about the planet, that it's all a big mystery that we can never hope to solve. I can see where you might think that if you haven't studied physics and geophysics. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and science must seem like magic if you haven't put in the effort to study it. If you DO study it, you'll find that some things are physically reasonable and some things aren't. There are observational limits on global heat flux. It can't just be any value you think it can be and it can't suddenly change from one value to another. This is a big system and there it's been here for 4.5 billion years or so.



What you think of as your "skepticism" is actually just intellectual laziness on your part.



Another EDIT for JimZ's comment on vents: Geothermal vents are very cool (not literally) things. Heat flux is certainly locally much greater if is carried out by convection of water rather than thermal diffusion through rock, but most of the ocean bottom is NOT covered by geothermal vents. Do I know how exactly how much heat is being transmitted through the vents? No, but what I do know is that since the vents make up such a small fraction of the ocean bottom that even if I assign a very large heat flux to any vent and add up all the vents, it's still not going to change the numbers appreciably. That's what you don't seem to get--it's not that scientists know everything, but they can make estimates and determine which things are important and which things aren't. Vents are certainly VERY important locally to the geothermal heat flux, and most of that is probably already reflected in the geothermal flux measurements on ridges, but they're not going to change the global average from 0.075 Watts per square meter to anything close to 1 Watt per square meter. No way no how.



If you think they can, demonstrate it. Make some assumptions on how many vents there are and what their water flux is and how much their outflow is greater than that of the ambient water, then we can compare the energy in those vents with the energy flux from the rest of the ocean bottom. I'm going to put my money on the rest of the ocean beating the vents hands down.



And what's more, again it's not the geothermal heat flux that matters, it's the variability of the geothermal heat flux, which as I said before is almost certainly several orders of magnitude lower than the flux itself.



Again, you don't have to know everything, but you pretend that scientists (and I'm not including you because you seem to have no interest in actual science) don't know anything, just because you don't.

Answer 13

IM GOING TO HAVE A BATH gNIGHT