Earth's Energy Budget
The Earth can be considered as a physical system with an energy budget that includes all gains of incoming energy and all losses of outgoing energy. The planet is approximately in equilibrium, so the sum of the gains is approximately equal to the sum of the losses. All energy use results in waste heat. In order to use more total energy than presently and without raising the Earth's average temperature, that additional energy must be compensated for by using only sources that would otherwise have been wasted. For example, fusion power is a possible source of new power and will therefore exceed the Earth's energy budget, whereas increasing our use of solar voltaic energy is compensated by simultaneously cooling the land beneath the solar panels.
- Note on accompanying images: The figure opposite depicts only net energy transfer. There is no attempt to depict the role of greenhouse gases and the exchange that occurs between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere or any other exchanges.
Read more about Earth's Energy Budget: Natural Greenhouse Effect
Famous quotes containing the words earth, energy and/or budget:
“Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life
Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do ‘t, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)