Hypothetical #3 Global Warming, Man and Water

Hypothetical #3 Global Warming, Man and Water

I have no doubt that human activities contribute to global warming. I have personally and anecdotally observed local warming trends from the Keys of Florida to the Northwest Arctic, from Mazatlan to Gander, Australia to Chukotka and from sea level to nearly 14,000 feet. But the numbers are huge and unwieldy and proofs have yet to be seen; not that of warming, but of man’s causal relation to that warming.

I think one of the problems may be that we are looking to the wrong place. Because we burn stuff and create some 9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and graphs seem to show a correlation between CO2 and warming trends science seems to favor this as the cause. A few years ago it was deforestation of the Amazon basin and lack of winter snow cover. Probably all are contributors.

I was high in the Sierras one summer contemplating water as kinetic and thermal energy storage when the question popped out…Where is the battery for global warming? The difficulty with the CO2 model is that the infra-red reflectivity required for the model to work really requires clouds of dry-ice, like those experiments from 7th grade. It also seems to suffer from some reality problems, in that CO2 quantities are predictive in current atmospheric models as compared to actual quantities in ice core samples. The ice core samples also presume a homogeneous atmosphere rather than the climatic soup we are familiar with. Also, 9 billion tonnes a year from human sources seems like a lot, especially if you think ozone and sulfurous haze over Denver is what science is talking about, but compared to natural sources for CO2 , it is a fractional percentage. When those numbers are compared to the vast increase in biomass in the northern hemisphere, some estimates are close to 10 trillion tonnes of new growth, direct CO2 contributions to global warming seem slight. The atmosphere is also a crummy place for storing energy.

I would be the first to agree that the natural system is so complex and may be so delicate that these changes in atmosphere could indeed create the problems we see but I think there is a more insidious and counter intuitive man-made cause and that is: water works. For several thousand years we have slowly been altering the water-cycle, slowing it down and adding vast amounts of solar energy to it. I believe enough to change the balance of nature.

Today, every major river and most minor rivers and steams have been dammed, channeled and “tamed” producing solar energy “batteries” of trillions and trillions of kilo-calories of solar energy. Curiously, in northern climates these batteries are self-insulating. It is true that the fresh water part of the water cycle is just a drop in the bucket but compared to atmospheric mass it is actually significant.

This warm water has also helped warm the oceans, warmed the atmosphere, and created more “warm” biomass. It has converted “kinetic” water in glaciers, ice caps and mountain snows into more “thermal” water. Irrigation for instance is not benign; it enhances solar thermal absorption through evaporation. Similarly, we also take “kinetic” water in thermally stable aquifers and “heat” it by bringing it to the surface. As a final measure more than 90% of our energy use is involved in heating water, even non-fossil fuel sources like nuclear energy. Did you know that in your car more energy is used in heating water than in producing motion? Thermal maps of our coast show the impact of human induced warming of our oceans.

But it is probably the lakes that are the biggest change. Without a lot of help I can’t provide the numbers but here is a mental picture of just one man- made battery. At one time the Colorado River passed through Boulder Canyon. It was fast moving, a couple hundred yards wide at best and a few feet deep. It probably gave off more energy than it absorbed. Even in the middle of the desert it was really a mountain stream, clear and cold. Today at Lake Mead it is a dark deep energy sink absorbing daily billions and billions of kilo-calories of solar energy. The evaporation from the lake is millions of times greater than the historic river further disrupting the water cycle. When the hot salty remains of the Colorado reach the Sea of Cortez it further heats rather than cools the ocean. Evaporation from the heated ocean is greater as the warmed air can hold more moisture in raised saturation points and the temperatures of the entire cycle are increased. The denser atmosphere does not cycle as readily to higher levels and less energy is released to space.

I believe that human disruption of the “water-cycle” is large enough to create the kind of changes we see. It even contributes to the “greenhouse” effect in that water is a “greenhouse” gas only slightly less reflective than carbon-dioxide. This new cycle would be enhanced by carbon-dioxide in the creation of more biomass. The biomass “frees” more water and the temperatures of the entire cycle are increased.

If I am correct in this assumption the atmospheric temperatures will increase at a substantially faster rate than the CO2 model. I think we are seeing that already. In 1999 when I proposed this idea the CO2 folks model showed global temperatures significantly less than they are today. It is still my contention that substantive change will occur in years not the decades they propose.

The cure is just as hard to swallow, maybe harder because we have always assumed clean and benign with water, as giving up burning. I think results would be quicker, maybe only a generation or two to cool the planet if we blew up all the dams, stopped irrigation and pumping the aquifers.

One benefit might be a whole lot less people running around.