Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to EXCELLENT post- but....

Thanks
TB — (archived)

I figured I might have screwed that up. Joules and watts have given me trouble before, and I suspected I flubbed a decimal in there somewhere.

The joule figures for solar influx are in the table, and the overall capacity of the world's atomic power plants are around 300,000 MW.

The main point was that the energy balance of the Earth is a process, a flow, not a bucket into which things are dumped to just lie there, and that in a flow of that magnitude, it takes a hell of a lot to make even a small difference in the mean condition.

The Earth eventually radiates, by definition, almost exactly as much heat into space as it gets from the sun. If it didn't, at some point it would end up a molten ball. The beauty of our ecology is that it seems, over millions of years, to have been able to accommodate minor variations from many sources, including the sun, while remaining in the zone in which life is possible. Not always comfortable, but possible.

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