What would be the albedo impact of using solar thermal to meet a substantial part of the world’s power needs?
Question:
I have heard several commentators mention this as a problem in passing, but can find no sources on the magnitude of the problem.
I am also interested in the impacts of generating energy from sources that create combustion heat, such as nuclear and biofuel; or geothermal that released a lot of heat at once.
Answer:
Tiny.
First, not much of the Earth would have to be covered:
http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/...
Second, while solar cells are dark, they convert a substantial percentage of the energy falling on them to electricity. So their absorption of heat is smaller than you'd think.
Mankind's total use of energy is about 1.5% of the energy now attributed to global warming (previous Yahoo question). So that's minor, also.
Global warming basically is using CO2 to leverage the energy of the sun everywhere on Earth. It's a lot of energy and other things pale in comparison.
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