...and then to register astronomical observations! The birth of science, no less.
And all because every year like clockwork, the Eufrates and Tigris blanketed an area of hundreds of square kilometers with a fresh coat of silt (from the Taurus mountains in modern-day Turkey) that was perfect as a rudimentary but cheap, easy and quick writing medium, pushing the point of a stick into a pancake of soft clay, then leaving it to dry and harden in the sun.
Given a radiative forcing coefficient of ln(new ppm/old ppm)/ln(2)*3.7 W/m**2 I have previously calculated that for every 1kWh of electricity generated from natural gas, an additional 2.2 kWh of heat is dumped into the atmosphere due to greenhouse effect in every year thereafter (for at least 1000 years that the resulting carbon dioxide remains in the air). So while the initial numbers are similar, you have to remember that the heat you generate is a one-time release (that dissipates into space as infrared radiation), but the greenhouse effect remains around in perpetuity, accumulating from year to year. If you are consuming 1kW of fossil electricity on average, after 100 years you are still only generating 1.67kW of heat (1kW from your devices and .67kW from 60% efficient power plant), but you also get an extra 220kW of heat from accumulated greenhouse gas.
I have wondered this question myself, and it does appear that the heat from the fossil/nuclear power itself is negligible over long term compared to the greenhouse effect. At least until you reach a Kardashev type I civilization level and have so many nuclear/fusion reactors that they noticeably raise the global temperature and necessitate special radiators.
Except for the young and the pregnant, we're all wearing red shirts out here. In nature, most living things are highly disposable.
It's an uncomfortable truth that is also weirdly comfortable at times. As far as nature is concerned I'm a spear carrier who should have been dead a long time ago...this is all gravy, baby!
When the stinger gets pulled out of the bee, the sac with the venom comes out too, still attached to the singer
Attempts to remove it injects more venom.
The life of the bee is worth less than the increased deterrent to animals attacking the hive.
The life of a handful of bees really isn't worth much at all to the hive. So even when there's no longer giant ass bears going after hives, there's not a lot of pressure for the bee to lose the barb.
Edit:
It's also important to remember that evolution isn't just competing against predators/prey. It's competing against competitors too.
If one hive of bees has barbs and worse stings than the one next to it, the one without barbs is gonna get attacked.
So the barbs don't have to be enough to convince predators that honey is never worth the sting, just that this honey is more painful to get than that honey.
Overtime the less painful honey may be pushed out of the local ecosystem. At which point it's just barbed bees, and the cycle might start over again with another way stings are more painful.
I just wanted to add that the worker bees with stingers are dead ends in the lifecycle anyhow. Only the queen will lay eggs and only the drones (stingerless) can mate with her. (Unless the years have really screwed up my memory!)
A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.
The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.
But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.
So that's why European bees won't "swarm" someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.
Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we're all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.
So they don't half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won't stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn't the honey badger wouldnt even notice.
Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get "Africanized killer bee" that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.
I wonder if that would sometimes be a desirable trait in farmed bees in areas with a lot of predators or competitors.
Like, the human knows that protection will be required and will suit up accordingly, but the ants, wasps or bears that try to rob the hive will be much less successful.
Sounds like something that would be very disruptive to the local ecosystem. A beehive covers an incredibly large area for its honey making operation...
But they forgot that life finds a way and the hybrids wouldn't just stay where they put them.
They not only outcompete European hives, they'll straight up raid and destroy other hives stealing their young.
Because their African half evolved in a resource scarce environment. If they run across other bees they view it as a direct threat on their resources. Pretty sure it also causes them to establish new hives much further away than European bees. Which is why they keep spreading so fast.
I'm just glad no one's tried to crossbreed honey badgers with wolves to combat the hybrid bees yet.
As for solar panels I think the word you're looking for is "albedo"
Off the top of my head I think it's close to earth's natural albedo anyway. Or even if it is a lower number and more energy/heat is absorbed it's so negligible. Only the tiniest fraction of the earth's surface would be/are covered in panels
I'm not exactly sure of the context of the question.
Electricity plants use the excess heat for district heating. It isn't just wasted.
If we could suddenly stop using coal or other combustibles for electricity production, we'd still need to produce energy for heating.
Transport is different though. Gasoline engines are highly inefficient and produces a lot of excess heat that isn't used even when the heater is on full blast.
It's not much in comparison to power production though, so while it will be more efficient to drive and heat a car by electricity, excess heat from cars isn't really an issue in itself. It's the pollution that is the main issue.
Well, my thinking was that if the produced heat was not negligible, then it would be cooler (literally) to use energy for heating which is being pushed into our atmosphere already anyways, rather than actively unearthing additional energy.
Its not the question you asked, but Nuclear plants can raise the temperature of the bodies of water they use for cooling nuclear plants. Additionally climate change is reducing water availability needed for nuke plants which is something I don't hear the nuclear advocates talk about when we're facing a dryer and hotter future. We'll have to start turning off nuclear plants right when we need them.
This is already happening occasionally in the last decade:
Lochbaum analyzes reports from the NRC showing when nuclear plants scale back generation because of warm water.
In June, nuclear plants in Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania scaled back their generation multiple times because of hot temperatures warming their cooling water. The Limerick power plant on the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia has scaled back because of high temperatures frequently over the past decade, according to the reports.
The Dresden and Quad Cities plants in Illinois had to scale back because of high water temperatures multiple times over the past five years. The Duane Arnold plant in Iowa and the Monticello plant in Minnesota also reported scaling back generation because of temperatures.
Yeah, I'm from Germany and we experienced this second-hand in 2022, when lots of French reactors were either in reparation or had not enough cooling water during the drought, so France imported tons of power from us and drove up prices.
This all happened on top of inflation and the Russian conflict, so hard to say how much it actually influenced prices, but those were quite high in the end, so presumably not nothing.
Without this happening, I probably wouldn't have been acutely aware of nuclear producing much heat. Obviously, they do have those massive cooling towers and I have read before that it's just another form of steam power, but you know, never properly thought about it.
So, in one hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than us humans generate in an entire year. If we took all of the energy we generated over a year (and not just the waste heat) and converted it into heat, we wouldn't even be adding half of one percent to the system. Our direct contributions to the system are minuscule. The problem is we're pumping out green house gasses like there's no tomorrow. And those directly increase the amount of solar energy the Earth retains. And when we start keeping 1 or 2 more percent of that insane amount of solar energy, it adds up really, really fast.
Not that it changes things much, but pretty much that entire 163,000 TWh ends up as heat, not just the waste. Pretty much the only energy that doesn't is light and other transmissions that get radiated into space.
Yes, it's negligible. Before considering atmospheric attenuation, every day something like 15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts (15 Zettawatts) of the sun's power reaches the earth. SOURCE
So enough power hits the earth in a second to power the human population's activities for many months at a time.
You would think that's enough to put into perspective how bad energy trapping atmospheric emissions are, but nope.
Humans generate 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity in a year. The sun dumps nearly that much on earth in 1 minute. That's a 6 order of magnitude difference. So I'm going to assume that human heat generation is probably negligible.
The greenhouse gas "problem" is necessary to survive. If the greenhouse effect didn't exist, neither would life as we know it.
The issue with combusting non-renewables is that that energy used to be sequestered away from the carbon cycle, effectively allowing for a balance without too much overall disruption (certain natural events notwithstanding).
So now, with all this stored away, not-part-of-the-carbon-cycle carbon being burned up, we're adding more to the carbon cycle, disrupting it, and causing a new higher thermal equilibrium (which has yet to be reached due to geological time scales). Side note: water is a better greenhouse gas than methane or carbon, but it's accounted for.
Because the greenhouse effect still exists, and we're adding more greenhouse gasses, the greenhouse effect will not allow heat to transfer to space as easily.
With solar being "captured" by a black roof, that would be mostly negligible, as a portion of that energy will potentially radiate away during the capture process. However, with more greenhouse gasses being dumped into the atmosphere, that radiative cooling will become less viable as time goes on, as it too will stay largely captured.
We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, otherwise it'll cause a runaway effect. That part might be too late.
That's one hell of an assumption. It's not gonna break down equally across the entire spring. Whatever the weakest point is will eventually wear away first and cause it to break because of all the tension in it.
Even if it could dissolve equally across the entire spring, the outer parts would go first and it eventually will dissolve away from the things holding it in place and release that tension. If it doesn't just break due to the dissolving metal weakening the structure while still under tension.
I feel like to get the meat and potatoes of the question a better way of asking would be what would happen to the potential energy if the spring was instantly vaporized, like by a Star Trek phaser.
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