Letter: An offer for some climate education - Chico Enterprise-Record
Letter: An offer for some climate education - Chico Enterprise-Record
Mr. Donmoyer seems to be trying to have things both ways. White windmills, he says, absorb sunlight then re-radiate solar heat back into the atmosphere and warm the Earth. They also waste up to 20% of the wind’s energy to heat in gearboxes and generators. In an earlier letter he pointed out that dark solar panels absorb solar heat and warm the Earth. I am curious what color he thinks we should paint fossil-fuel power plants so that they don’t absorb and re-radiate solar heat while wasting energy to heat in gearboxes and generators and additionally dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
He seems to be interested in science, and in applying science to solve some of the challenges facing our planet. This is a good thing, and I encourage him to continue along this path! We have here in Butte County some excellent institutions of higher learning which he might consider utilizing in his quest. My colleagues and I in the physics departments at both Butte College and Chico State stand ready to help him should he wish to learn something about thermodynamics before writing another letter about thermodynamics.
— Eric Ayars, Chico
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.