Heating Up the Planet – A Fresh Hot Look at Global Warming

Abstract

Abstract Global warming is an inescapable phenomenon that seems to be unquestionably linked with Human activity, in particular with the way Humanity uses energy, and constitutes one of the most important challenges we are facing in the near future. The occurrence of global warming is being linked to the emissions of gases with a greenhouse effect, that is, gases that can trap heat in the atmosphere and, thus, induce an imbalance between the energy the Earth receives and the one that it is able to emit back into space. This imbalance induces an accumulation that is credited as responsible for the warming of the atmosphere. In this paper, we take a different view, based on a thermodynamic analysis, of the overall world’s energy production/consumption system and raise the issue that the warming of the atmosphere is likely to be affected by the energy system in more ways than this imbalance between energy intake and energy release due to the emissions of greenhouse gases and that it may be directly influenced by the generation and use of energy itself. The main conclusion that we reach from our calculations is that the amount of energy that is currently being produced on a global scale can actually make a significant contribution, if not the major contribution, to the current increase in atmospheric temperature.