Answers to World Problems. Butch Biendara
Читать онлайн книгу.
Sunshine that falls on vegetation with an adequate water supply will see the sun’s energy used by the plants to grow and thus consume much of the sun’s energy in the photosynthesis process to convert water and trace minerals from the soil along with the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide into growing a crop or a forest, weather it’s the stunted firs in the northern tundra, Iowa’s cornfields or the dense tropical forests near the equator in Africa, South America and India.
SURFACE MODIFICATIONS
Other issues that increase the effects of global warming, besides the burning of fossil fuels to power the industry supporting our modern lifestyles, is the clearing of tropical rainforests for the timber growing there, and to clear land for crops to support more people. Impoverished people of primitive areas have no worldwide or long-term picture, but can be easily persuaded to cut down timber that can be sold for an immediate tangible income. Without knowledge of modern agriculture’s sustainable plantings, the simple but historic method of ‘slash-and-burn’ clearing of new lands to plant crops after the previous plots have lost their growing potential, continues to be the way of life for many.
North America is not that much farther north than the Sahara Desert, yet we enjoy a much less intense heat of summer. Some of that can be explained by the fact that the majority of the USA is covered in cropland during the heat of summer. The hot summer sun still has great energy that is converted to the lush growth of hay, corn, wheat and other crops. It is the sun’s energy that converts soil minerals, and moisture, along with carbon from the air, into enormous amounts of food for people and animals. One might say that the crops are solar collectors that put out a solid storable product instead of electricity.
THE POWER BEHIND OUR PROBLEM
The costliest and most damaging weather that hits the USA is the growing fierceness of winter snows, the spring and summer tornadoes and later fall hurricanes with their extremely high wind speeds and related rainfall. Looking at where those storms start and how they grow takes us east across the Atlantic Ocean to the vast barren land of northern Africa.
The composite image below is of the outline of the USA superimposed on the image of North Africa with both at the same scale. It shows that the vast Sahara desert and the related barren parts of a dozen countries are larger than the entire continental USA. It is this enormous ‘furnace’ that gets immeasurable energy from the sun hitting the dry surface and bouncing back to heat the air that is then sent by the earth’s natural trade winds west across the Atlantic and hits the USA.
COMPARING SIZES
It has been said that the entire energy needs of USA could be met with the solar energy that falls on an area of just a one hundred miles square. That 10,000 square mile area needed to capture all of the USA energy needs, is just 0.3 % (zero, point 3% or a fraction of 1 / 312th) of the continental USA or less than 10% of Nevada’s 109,826 square miles of area. For another perspective, the panhandle of Texas is about 160 miles by 130 miles, which would show up as a small spot a bit below and left of center in the image above and is twice the size needed for that mystical solar collection area. While it has been suggested that the US pursue a path to harness that solar energy, the construction of the plant, the collection and distribution of the energy can be dealt with in another paper and the concept is included here just to show how much solar energy falls on any defined area of the earth’s surface.
This composite map shows that the small ‘Texas Panhandle’ spot, that would represent the 100 mile square plot of land meeting all of the USA power needs, is dwarfed in the north Africa desert that is over 200 times larger, and hotter with its location that is closer to the equator. That’s over 200 times the total energy use of the USA that is spun off to send that latent solar energy “POWER” on its destructive path toward the USA.
How does the sunshine in the Sahara and its increase in global warming bring the destructive weather to the USA?
HOW USA STORMS GROW
Start with the hot dry air rising off millions of square miles of barren lands of the Sahara Desert, first by direct reflection and continuing through each night with the radiation of the stored heat that was absorbed in the rocks and sand during the day. It continues with the action of the northern hemisphere’s prevailing winds that circle the globe near the equator blowing from east to the west as the early sailors learned to follow the Trade Winds that carried them west from the east shore of Africa to the New World.
As the hot air passes over the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean, a huge amount of water evaporates from the warm ocean and begins to rise. Strange as it may seem, water vapor is lighter than air. It is the steam rising from a pot of boiling water, or the clouds of moisture floating high in the sky that shows up as a reading on a barometer of lower atmospheric pressure or lighter air.
When the water vapor rises to mix with the air, the water vapor displaces the other gas molecules to mix up a lighter atmospheric combination and just as water in a basin starts to spin on its own when you pull the plug of a sink, the rising mass of lighter moist air starts to spin as it lifts higher into the atmosphere.
For a good understanding of the relationship of Africa and the USA, the image below shows a global view including both continents. It shows the relationship of North Africa, the Atlantic Ocean and the USA along with the equator and the tropic of cancer, that north latitude that gets direct overhead sun at the middle of summer. That Tropic of Cancer, the highest direct overhead reach of the mid summer sun, while still south of the continental USA, runs right through the center of the Sahara desert. In that latitude, the sun has a direct straight overhead shot at baking the dry desert sands.
The heated air from north Africa, picks up water as it passes over the Atlantic, to then drop it’s moisture and expend the acquired energy as it is deflected by the South American continent to go west and north up through the Caribbean and the gulf of Mexico.
To illustrate and comprehend the enormous energy involved, hurricane Katrina, a recent large hurricane, but not the largest one, dropped about four, (4) billion tons of rain on the US. That amount of water in one compact container would measure a cube two miles on each side. That’s just an indicator of the power of the sun transmitted into hot air over North Africa lifting moisture from the Atlantic and moving it west. The energy of the winds generated by those gargantuan updrafts is a whole lot more.
Hurricanes don’t have a precise progress of development and travel path. Some small storms dump their rain and energy in the Atlantic to die out before reaching any land. Even those that do hit land have varying levels of energy. And the paths of storms can hit land in the northern parts of south America or veer north while at sea and hit as far north as Canada or safely loose their energy over the cooler waters off shore of the USA. The bad ones are the ones that bring that huge package of the suns’ energy and the Atlantic’s moisture for a direct hit on Central America or the continental USA.
I noted earlier that the year of 2013 had an unexpectedly light hurricane season. The reason was some unusually high temperatures in the Sahara. That may sound contradictory but the increased heat there made for unusually strong desert dust storms the blew all the way across the Atlantic. They were so big and dense that they showed up on satellite photos. Traces of that Sahara dust were found as far west as the central states of the USA and colored the clouds over the states near the Canadian border. That enormous dust storm blocked some of the sun on the Atlantic Ocean and reduced the rate of heat gain and evaporation that generates hurricanes.
2013 also had an unusually lower polar ice melt than preceding years and much less than anticipated for the year. Could this again be due to the global warming of the Sahara that raised major dust storms that blocked out some of the sun’s fierceness and reduced the storms that might have driven more warm air to the polar regions?
Those Sahara dust storms