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Dilema:
In a timerframe of roughly 50-60 years, the human race has achieved many technological accomplishments to assist in comfortable living. The problem I address here is that of mass heat dissapation. It seems to be more apparent that nature is beginning to react to the sudden change in climate. To us humans, hardly any change is noticable. Considering the earth being many millenia old, the changes we are putting the global environment through are harsh, abrupt. I'm not talking about pollutants, cutting down trees, or dropping nukes. I'm talking about the vast machinery we wield. A point made - when all planes were grounded during 9/11 for two days, ambient temperatures across the U.S. were 2 degrees F less than usual. Have you ever seen a realtime map of planes currently in the air at any hour? It's quite dense, many thousands of jets going in any direction. Each of those jets have a number of jet engines, sucking through incredible amounts of cold air and pushing out superheated thrust. And this is only one of the machines. It would be hard to understand how many vehicles are on the road until you've travelled to many cities and places, then realized the tens of millions of vehicles that are travelling .. somewhere. This country would stop functioning if semi-trucks/tractor-trailers ceased operation. Ever wonder where a person next to you was going, how you two even crossed paths? Vehicles are everywhere, sucking in cold air through the intake, combusting fuel in the engine, and pushing hot gasses out the exhaust. Tens of millions of people doing that right now. Now of the less obvious ones. You're in your air conditioned office. Where's that cold coming from? The large industrial sized AC unit(s) sitting on or next to the building. Doing what? Dissapating huge amounts of heat to run the compressors. Feel the back of your refridgerator. Everyone has one of those. Heating your dwelling in the cold months is given... many tens of millions of habitable locations (homes, offices, etc) creating heat. How about computers? Current CPU processors can dissapate heat equivent to two standard 60 watt light bulbs. And light bulbs all around. Monitors. TV's. Plus the rest of the media equipment needing heat dissapation. Dryers across the nation. One hour minimum per head per week (relative). Again, how many millions doing laundry? You'd think the problem was production plants and factories, but by themselves they really aren't an offender. The strive for comfortable living and the machines that make it possible are also ever persistant heaters of the global environment. Nearly anywhere land is inhabitable we humans are creating heat. Although we have created controls on certain pollutants, ways to burn fuel better, better efficiencies, etc, it's all still generating heat. Nature is going to react, and to take a couple decades to do so is a pretty violent reaction in an earth timeline. -wily duck |