Thread by @homemadeguitars

A lot of evenings my thread is about something that really matters, at least to me, about climate and available actions, and I know that one will get the smallest number of likes and RTs of any of my work.
Sometimes I do hard science at about a 10th grade level, applying to 🌍🌎

2. Tonight, though, I'm just going to muse about energy.
I've been tweeting this image a lot lately. I find it endlessly fascinating.

3. As I often mention, what we call climate change - just that specific portion of the greater ecosystem collapse event - climate change is the accumulation of energy in the atmosphere and everywhere else.
Carbon catches the energy and stores it, which is why we think of carbon.

4. The molecule, one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, can catch a lot of energy, particularly in the infrared spectrum.
Which is what sunlight bouncing off stuff is, mostly. Infrared.
So it soaks into the CO2.
One carbon and four hydrogen catches even more. Methane.

5. Energy is what disassembles glaciers. If the energy is measured by one human scale as being below zero, the ice stays ice.
Add a little energy, measures at, say, 0.9 on the same scale, or 1, the glacier disintegrates.
Energy at work.

6. We know how to measure this energy in degrees on various scales. I doubt if anyone has the entire global system, all planetary and atmospheric portions, in BTUs, though, our Joules, or any of the other measurements, in the system.
Maybe someone has.
Temperature is result.

7. The energy arrives, and the various new or rebalanced compounds in the atmosphere capture it, and we measure that afterwards as temperature.
We measure energy other ways. Everyone knows electricity get measured in amps, and volts, and watts, but it's all the same electricity.

8. So, the result of the total solar energy captured by the new chemicals is one thing. The BTUs is another.
You could measure, if you could get at all the data, how many BTUs of energy have been captured since climate change began.
And you could convert that to, for instance,

9. it's energy equivalent in barrels of oil.
You could say, if you could get all the necessary data (which I don't know is or is not possible) "We have <<X.YY>> total gigawatts of climate change."
Instead of temperature.
One BTU, for instance, is the amount of energy it takes

10. to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.
If you raise it one degree Fahrenheit in 30 seconds you have done more work, but expended the same energy, as if you raise it one degree Fahrenheit in 30 minutes.
Work is energy throughput × time. Energy doesn't change. 1 BTU

11. How many BTUs of energy have greenhouse gases captured since we began the process?
I don't know. It is hypothetically knowable. But there's another variable we always ignore.
Let's go back to our diagram. These boxes are in a number which can be translated to BTU. Quads.

12. I would, however, call to your attention a technical error in the diagram's label: it is not energy consumption, as shown right there in colors it is energy throughput.

If you look at the lowest gray box on the right, that energy has gone through a process called entropy increase, after which the energy still exists as energy but it is less available to do further work. It's like it's gone, almost. Ghost energy.
The light gray, much larger, box

Has been rejected by all the entropy-causing processes, and is still available to do work.
When somebody drives down the country road where I live, part of the energy in that light gray box from their passing picks up dirt and hangs it in the air. The air contains so much energy

that it overpowers gravity. The dirt doesn't fall out of the air. Dust cloud.
Slowly the energy dissipates into the lower energy air around it, because that is what energy does, and the dirt falls back out until the next pickup truck rockets by.
Some humongous percentage of gray,

just pops out as heat.
The same stuff carbon captures.
Leaving out the part where it comes from the sun and bounces off the Earth and gets sucked up in carbon conglomerations, we just squirt heat right out our tailpipes and off our brakes. We blow it out of our power plants.

Heat boils off our steel mills and out of our cement kilns. Heat is energy. It is the very exact same form of energy we are capturing with our carbon.
Is there enough to make a difference?
They asked that about carbon, too. I don't know.
But I do know this: energy is.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This is possibly the most fundamental principle of the entire universe(s).
All of the energy we have ever dug up, drilled up, burned up, fissioned up, since we surpassed firewood, is still out there.
If it hasn't done any work yet,

It's looking for some.
I told a shorter version of this to Michael Mann. That, in fact, was the occasion on which he blocked me.
He said, "Nonsense. The sun has (whatever the number was) Kilowatt per square meter. Our energy is nothing." And blocked me instantly.

But to me, that sun number hasn't changed at all. That much sun has always fallen all over.
Originally virtually 100% of its immediately available energy went to power the biosphere which operated the carbon cycle. Everybody knows that. The sun shone on an Earth covered with 🌳🌾

And of all the 🌾🌳🌿🏞️🌵🪴🌴🍂🐹🐯🦁🐻🦄🦓🐗🦝🐷🐸🐴🦮🐈🦭🦈🦃🦀🕸️🪲🐛🪱🐾🦠didn't suck up, some bounced off and some stayed in the world and ev'body was comfy and ate and slept.
Then we fixed it.

Anyway. I don't know if you could see it in Hurricane Ida, but I'll tell you for sure that every atomic explosion and every traffic jam is still out there. Its heat has dissipated into all the same stuff everything else's heat has dissipated into.

It is not possible for energy to not dissipate from areas of higher concentration to lower concentration and to not do work on any matter that gets in its path.
V8 Mustangs and hurricanes run on the exact same principles.