- A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶
̶ A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶1̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶q̶u̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶
- A̶ ̶T̶e̶r̶a̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶.̶
[edit: The earth receives 14.9 ZettaWatts of solar power per day, and 173 Petawatts per second, I was reading it as 173 PW over a day, in which case the above works fine. Mea culpa]
See: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
Power (kg m^2 / s^3) * Time (s) = Energy (kg m^2 / s^2)
Now from context it's obvious that what was meant is that Earth continually receives 170 terawatts from the sun. The phrasing is technically inaccurate, but it's a turn of phrase that works fine.
(Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so. I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that the water is almost never sloshing around at any scale proportional to itself. It's up to us to educate those who don't understand positive feedback loops and the existential risk they present to any system in equilibrium.)
People love tech solutions, because then they don’t have to stop consuming and live modestly.
People will learn to live modestly, voluntarily or by force.
> We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
Everybody wants to solve the problem with technology. What if, the solution is just plain old hard work like planting trees, conservation, better recycling, better laws that help in saving ecosystem. But who would do that. So let's keep on creating problems with technology and then solve them with more technology.
In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...
[0] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=100943
Get rid of the millionaires excessive destructive power (both structural/political and the personal excessive consumption) and by eliminating factory animal agriculture.
Neither would diminish well-being. At least the actual. Some ego/envy issues though as narcissistic "successful" people couldn't feel their power, but I'm willing to sacrifice that for my kids future.
The benefits are many fold as per Durkheim and more recently Wilkinson and Pickett have shown us.
Easy peasy guys.
You are right though, there will be a correction.
The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).
If you pour out one bucket of sand every hour, and you do that for 10 hours, I expect the quantity of sand to be measured in buckets.
"Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day"
= 170 PW × 1d
= 170 × P(J/s) × 86.4 × ks
= 170 × 10¹⁵ × (J/s) × 86.4 × 10³ × s
= 14.6 × 10²¹ × J
= 14.6 ZJ
However, I also think "of solar energy" could be read as specifying the type of energy for the "rate of energy transfer", which is already implied in 'watt'. And since it's related to energy usage (rate), there really is no need to leave the "rate of energy transfer" interpretation at all and get hung up on "energy vs. power":
"Earth receives 170 petawatts as solar energy - 10,000 times the energy humanity uses, at any moment.
Edit: And let's be real, we all only feel very smart here because we just watched the latest Technology Connections video https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OOK5xkFijPc :D
[1]: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
From the article, there's significant uncertainty what's driving the currently measured effect:
> Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes.
> The team also found that 80% of the overall reflectivity changes in these regions resulted from shrinking clouds, rather than darker, less reflective ones, which could be caused by a drop in pollution. For Tselioudis, this clearly indicates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, not pollution reductions, are driving the trend.
> But Loeb, who leads work on the set of NASA satellite instruments called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, which tracks the energy imbalance, thinks pollution declines may be playing an important role in the cloud changes, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “The observations are telling us something is definitely changing,” he says. “But it’s a complicated soup of processes.”
To your point, however, we do appear to be the only ones capable of intentionally modifying the environment, so if anybody's going to understand and address this, it'll be us.
But even if we would spend only the explicit subsidies we would have a trillion dollar each and every year to spend on things like carbon capture and other mitigations which are not dangerous large-scale geoengineering projects like cloud seeding.
Really common mistake in general to use kWh as a kW. Watthour is unit of energy. As watt is energy by time period. So you get back to units of energy.
Technically watt/day could be change in power consumption.
It's the opposite: joules/day and watts are both units of power.
It is akin to thinking that "2 apples" and "an apple divided by 2" are interchangeable because both expressions involve the concept of an apple and the number 2.
i'd definitely rewrite it myself, but it's also a correct way to specify that there are no days of the week, year, or whatever (solar cycle) in which the terawattage is below 170k. Not very intermittent, is it!
watts/unit thus seems fine to me, whatever the unit may be, even if it itself is derived from time. watts per day would just work out to joules/second/1/24*60*60, making 1 watts per day a derived unit that expresses joules/84600 seconds, or an instantaneous rate of one 84600th of a joule.