The Energy Collective

The world's best thinkers on energy and climate

  • Home
  • Post Here
  • Columns
    • Electricity Markets & Policy Group
    • Full Spectrum
    • Energy and Policy Developments
    • Game Changers
    • Energy for Human Development
    • Seeking Consensus
    • Green Growth
    • New Energy Voices
  • Fuels
    • Oil
    • Wind
    • Nuclear Power
    • Coal
    • Natural Gas
    • Solar Power
    • Renewables
    • Biofuels
    • Geothermal Energy
    • Wave & Tidal
    • Hydro Power
  • Environment
    • Carbon and De-carbonization
    • International Climate Conferences
    • Sustainability
    • Climate
    • Public Health
    • Water
    • Recycling
  • Grid
    • Smart Grid
    • Electricity
  • Tech
    • Cleantech
    • Green Building
    • Storage
    • Rare Earth Minerals
  • Business and Economy
    • Cap-and-Trade
    • Agriculture
    • Efficiency
    • Green Business
    • Utilities
    • Finance
    • Green Jobs
    • Subsidies
    • Risk Management
  • Politics
    • Environmental Policy
    • Energy Security
    • Communications and Messaging
    • China
  • Transport
  • Help
    • FAQ
  • Account
    • Login
    • Register

How a Warm Earth fueled Hurricane Sandy

October 31, 2012 by Brian Reynolds

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

This morning residents of New Jersey woke up and discovered that Hurricane Sandy had turned the garden state into a Michael Bay film.  Damages to property, infrastructure and the economy will likely be greater than any other disaster the east coast has seen.  Exceptionally powerful computers model weather like this. They’re required because the computations are far more involved then any team of scientists could hope to tackle longhand. Despite that fact you should clear that we understand of the cause of the hurricane.  The simple truth is that this tragedy was largely one we brought on ourselves.

The Facts:

Hurricanes are among the most well studied natural phenomenon on the planet.  They’re studied because they’re massive and long in duration.  They’re studied because they inspire fear in a way only an unstoppable force can, but mostly hurricanes are well studied because they’re the most expensive of all the natural disasters and insurance companies pay fantastic amounts of money to understand them.

The unknowns of climate change are many; ice-melt, sea-level rise, changes to the salinity of ocean water and alterations to the trade winds being just a few that you may have heard of.  Reasonable people have constant disagreements on the relative values of these in predicting the way that an altered climatic system works but all research assures us that the layman only needs to understand one simple concept:

The Earth is not an island.

We’ve been aware that the earth revolves around the sun for some 500 years (not that long given that some readers have relatives near 100) so maybe we haven’t gotten used to the idea that it’s always day and always night. 24-hours a day the earth takes on energy from the sun.  24-hours a day it releases that energy on the night-side of the planet. For a very long time the atmosphere has had just enough of the right materials in it to hold some of that energy as heat.  This keeps us 40 to 60 degrees warmer at night than if it didn’t.  More poorly understood is the fact that the portion of the atmosphere responsible for this is less than half of one percent of the sky.  That’s right – greenhouse gasses make up less than this much of the sky:

Percentage of the Atmosphere comprised of the GHG CO2

The math behind climate change is simple. Roughly 1/4 of 0.1 percent of the atmosphere is composed of gases that  trap energy from the sun.  Carbon released for power and transport has altered that and we are now racing toward 1/2 of 0.1 percent doing the same job. The earth is warming.

The ever-so-slight thickening of the atmosphere alters the balance of energy absorbed and released by the planet.  The process is analogous to the gears in a car.  Rev your engine to 5000 RPM in first gear and you’ll run out of gas as quickly as someone racing around a track with their tachometer in the same spot.  We haven’t changed how much energy is being introduced to the system, we’ve changed how the system is dealing with that energy.  Now instead of bleeding heat out into space we’re retaining it and all that extra energy has to go somewhere.  That “somewhere” is our oceans.  Next time you boil water notice how long it takes and how much energy is required to boil even a small pot.  Water is “energy hungry” and it holds onto that energy until there’s some good reason to release it.  Some good reason like a hurricane overhead.

Five degrees:

As Hurricane Sandy formed the Atlantic ocean’s surface temperature is now five degrees warmer than normal.  Let that sink in for a minute.  The entire surface of the Atlantic ocean averages five degrees warmer.

What does that mean for hurricanes?  Hurricanes get their power by feeding on the warm water under them.  That means that a warmer Atlantic has a lot more fuel to contribute.  How much more?  Hard to say for sure but the the number is astronomical.  Take the top inch of ocean surface below hurricane Katrina (125,000 sq. miles) then run the math to heat that volume by five degrees.  What you get is an amount of energy in that water eight times greater than was released in all the nuclear tests in the history of the world.  Take a look at the chart below.  Here we have the math behind the storm.  What you see is the combined energy of all the nuclear tests ever conducted on earth followed by the energy increase in the top 1″ of water under each of the hurricanes listed.  

Additional energy in 1" of surface water under modern hurricanes

The New Math:


A five degree rise for just the first inch of ocean, for a static area 900 miles in diameter (the size of hurricane Sandy) requires 95-million terajoules of energy.  If we assume it gets used the most efficiently it can be, a ton of coal gets you about 35 gigajoules. That means we’d need a cube of coal .9 of a mile/side to generate the energy needed to heat just that first inch of water five degrees. Now mind you that all that energy is a fraction of the heat being trapped.  Just a fraction.  We’re going to see a lot more storms get charged up this way.

And So:

Of course storms are larger, stronger and more willing to wander north.  Of course they’re more damaging.  Of course they’re more destructive. There’s simply no comparison between the energy the sun pours down on the earth and what we are capable of generating. Remember, this is only the top inch of ocean surface we’ve compared and we’ve only looking at a static location. Hurricanes uncover far more than the first inch of water.  Waves, currents and the storm’s transit from Africa to North America expose a hurracane to awesome amounts of energy orders of magnitude greater than shown here.

But this is no help to the East Coast. New Jersey will be a mess for the foreseeable future. New York City and its transit systems will see spectacular cost overruns in dealing with this part of the climate crisis. We can’t do anything about these problems, but if you’re reading this with fresh eyes, if these comparisons are new to you, please read more and consider how you can be part of the solution.

Related posts:

How Climate Change Amplified Sandy’s Impacts How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive? Storm Surges, Sea Level and Climate Change Climate Change: New Tool Shows Extreme Weather by ZIP

Brian Reynolds

Filed Under: Climate, News Tagged With: climate change, extreme weather, Hurricane Sandy

  Subscribe  
newest oldest most voted
Notify of
Eve Stevens
Member
Eve Stevens
November 4, 2012 23:52

Brian, Seven major hurricanes hit the east coast from 1954 to 1960, when the ocean was .3 C cooler and C02 was 310 ppm. A major hurricane has not hit the east coast since. Please rethink your line of reasoning because it seems C02 and warm ocean temperatures were not the cause of Sandy, which was not even a hurricane at landfall.

I do understand why you wrote what you did. Money! You own a clean power company.

0
 |   -   Share         Hide Replies ∧
Willem Post
Member
Willem Post
November 5, 2012 02:15

Brian,

“Rev your engine to 5000 RPM in “Park” and you’ll run out of gas as quickly as someone racing around a track with their tachometer in the same spot”

Please delete this analogy, because it is not true, i.e., false.

Think of another one.

Please read these articles.

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/83704/reduce-co2-and-slow-global-warming

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/84293/wind-turbine-noise-and-air-pressure-pulses

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/89476/wind-energy-co2-emissions-are-overstated

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/98061/irelands-wind-energy-export-plan

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/107316/global-warming-coal-combustion-and-sea-level-rise

 

0
 |   -   Share         Hide Replies ∧

The Energy Collective Columns

Full Spectrum: Energy Analysis and Commentary with Jesse JenkinsEnergy and Policy Developments with John Miller
Game Changers column badgeEnergy for Human Development Column
Seeking Consensus with Schalk CloeteGreen Growth with Silvio Marcacci
New Energy VoicesMore coming soon...

Latest comments

  • Randy Dutton on Climate Change Optimism: Five Years of Change Megaquakes (8.5 and higher) impact global warming. According to NOAA, a six megaquake cluster has re (April 20, 2018 at 10:00 PM)
  • EngineerPoet on Closing Nuclear Reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania Will Thwart Climate Goals Ontario already closed its last coal plant. (April 20, 2018 at 8:47 PM)
  • BobMeinetz on Closing Nuclear Reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania Will Thwart Climate Goals Of course, Bas. Look at all the pretty red dots on the right side of your graph, where NPPs powered (April 20, 2018 at 6:08 PM)
  • Bas Gresnigt on Closing Nuclear Reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania Will Thwart Climate Goals So those NPP's are happy to pay ~€60,000/hour*) each in order to get rid of their production... ___ (April 20, 2018 at 5:44 PM)

Advisory Panel

About the panel

Scott Edward Anderson is a consultant, blogger, and media commentator who blogs at The Green Skeptic. More »


Christine Hertzog is a consultant, author, and a professional explainer focused on Smart Grid. More »


Elias Hinckley is a strategic advisor on energy finance and energy policy to investors, energy companies and governments More »


Gary Hunt Gary is an Executive-in-Residence at Deloitte Investments with extensive experience in the energy & utility industries. More »


Jesse Jenkins is a graduate student and researcher at MIT with expertise in energy technology, policy, and innovation. More »


Jim Pierobon helps trade associations/NGOs, government agencies and companies communicate about cleaner energy solutions. More »


Geoffrey Styles is Managing Director of GSW Strategy Group, LLC and an award-winning blogger. More »


Featured Contributors

Rod Adams

Scott Edward Anderson

Charles Barton

Barry Brook

Steven Cohen

Dick DeBlasio

Senator Pete Domenici

Simon Donner

Big Gav

Michael Giberson

Kirsty Gogan

James Greenberger

Lou Grinzo

Jesse Grossman

Tyler Hamilton

Christine Hertzog

David Hone

Gary Hunt

Jesse Jenkins

Sonita Lontoh

Rebecca Lutzy

Jesse Parent

Jim Pierobon

Vicky Portwain

Willem Post

Tom Raftery

Joseph Romm

Robert Stavins

Robert Stowe

Geoffrey Styles

Alex Trembath

Gernot Wagner

Dan Yurman

 

 

 

Follow Us

32-linkedin 32-facebook 32-twitter 32-rss

Content for personal use only. Distribution prohibited. Republication in part or in whole is strictly prohibited. © All rights reserved Energy Central © 2018

Recent Comments

  • Randy Dutton on Climate Change Optimism: Five Years of Change
  • EngineerPoet on Closing Nuclear Reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania Will Thwart Climate Goals
  • BobMeinetz on Closing Nuclear Reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania Will Thwart Climate Goals

Recent Posts

  • UK Will Legislate Net-Zero Carbon Emissions Target, Says Minister
  • Why EPA’s U-Turn on Auto Efficiency Rules Gives China the Upper Hand
  • U.S. Natural Gas Production and Consumption Increase in Nearly All AEO2018 Cases

Useful Pages

  • Terms of Use
  • Comments Policy
  • Privacy & Cookies
  • Help
  • About and Contact Us
Copyright © 2018 Energy Central. All Rights Reserved
This site uses cookies, for a number of reasons. By continuing to use this website you accept the use of cookies. Find out more.