Hot water kills half of Columbia River sockeye salmon

[AtheistCrusader]

96. I never said human activity doesn't affect climate change. In fact, I specified the opposite.

I have also specified the mechanism by which we do. You seem fixated on a mechanism that is irrelevant.

In fact, that heat output from reactors is trivial twice. Same way the carbon output of your presumably wood stove in your cabin is. You're just accelerating the process, putting that carbon on a treadmill. Nuclear reactors slightly accelerate the decay heat of the earth. The uranium and other elements we refine into nuclear fuel, and then 'burn' in a criticality, is just accelerating what would have been released as decay waste heat anyway. As I mentioned earlier, the earth's heat budget includes 0.03% from the earth itself, which is radioactive decay heat. Around 47 terawatts.

Humanity burns, all total, about 17 terawatts. That's electrical, not thermal. So, I'll be super-generous to you, more generous than anyone in the history of internet forum arguments ever. I won't deduct from that 17 terawatts any non-earth-thermal-budget contributing power sources. No geothermal, no hydro (considerable percentage), no solar, whether PV or Concentrating Thermal, no wind power, no tidal, no biomass, nothing. I deduct nothing. And then, I'll DOUBLE IT. Say, assuming for thermal loss/inefficiency converting thermal output to electrical output.

That would put human activity at 34 terawatts thermal. That's 86% of the earth's radioactive decay heat portion of the planet's heat budget. Or, LESS than 0.03% of the planet's total heat budget.

That's less than the yearly variance in solar output, of which, makes up more than 99% of the remaining heat budget of planet earth.

The heat, output by those reactors, is less than a popcorn fart compared to the total energy in the system.


But we ARE IN DEEP SHIT. Global Climate Change is well underway, and you need to be stupid and or blind to miss it. On that, we probably agree. But the MECHANISM is insulating gasses and materials that contribute to a greenhouse effect. NOT the heat emitted by various reactors and power plants of other sorts. The greenhouse effect is a force multiplier. CO2, Methane, you name it. It's wrapping our system in a blanket. We're robbing the planet of radiative cooling.

Heat moves off the surface through several means. The most important of which is evaporative. You don't get evaporative cooling if you don't have rainfall. We have vast swaths of the US in drought conditions because changes in climate have diverted atmospheric systems/rainfall to other regions. The other component of the atmospheric heat engine is thermal infrared energy. That's the part that gets reflected back at us when we insulate the earth with shit like CO2. That's where you get your anthropogenic forcing on the climate, leading to changes in climate patterns, things like the droughts we're seeing, and rising record temps in localized areas that used to be damper, used to have more evaporative cooling effect, etc.

You're pissed about statistical noise, which amounts to a couple calories worth of heat generated by a body, when the main effect, the main problem, is wrapping that body in thickening layers of insulation, driving a measurable spike in total heat budget by reducing the radiative cooling of the body.

In other words, you're after the wrong thing.

AND to score some points, you keep building strawmen and attributing completely false shit to what I am saying. That's highly obnoxious. It would be nice if you could argue a point without stooping to lying about my position. Climate change is real. It is human induced. It's just by way of a mechanism you don't seem to understand.