Just a lot of hot air

Dr. Robert M. Gresham, Contributing Editor | TLT Commentary June 2014

The debate over global warming rages on.
 

There is little doubt that human activity is causing an increase in CO2, which can contribute to warming.
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WELL, THE OLD TROGLODYTE is creeping out of his cave again. You all have heard my skepticism of global warming—oops, sorry, I mean global climate change. Actually, I may not be as skeptical as you might think. Both sides of the issue think they know a whole lot more about our environment than they actually do, resulting in a false sense of certainty and many overstatements.

There is little doubt that human activity is causing an increase in CO2, which can contribute to warming. What’s hard to argue is the extent to which this affects our environment. It is hard to know how much of this warming is due to human activity and how much due to natural causes. It is hard to predict with any degree of certainty what will be the case in the next century.

With that as a backdrop for my biases, I was looking through my library of books for the newest version of Handbook of Hydraulic Fluid Technology, Second Edition (CRC Press, 2011). This was for a project on updating our body of knowledge for STLE’s certification programs. In the course of my search, I came across an old title from my graduate school days, Thermodynamics by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Merle Randall. The mere sight of this ancient tome caused horrific flashbacks of my phantasmagoric flagellations with differential equations, integrals, etc., to study such riveting topics as heats of reaction, entropy, enthalpy, fugacity, free energy, heat pumps, Carnot cycles and adiabatic processes. I could go on, but at that point I passed out. When consciousness returned, the brain returned to the subject of heat.

We all can remember the sciolistic diatribes by the “wise ones” on the subject of bovine flatulence and their generation of methane gas as a potential source of renewable energy. Well, cows aren’t the only ones who exhibit this remarkable property. But is this a viable source of renewable energy? Give me a break. Perhaps more important is another property that we mammals share, which is the production of heat as a byproduct of our various metabolic exertions.

There are many other sources of heat. As a young chemist running my first processes in the plant, I was astounded to see first-hand how you could simply stir a liquid in a reactor and over time the temperature would increase. Likewise, in hydraulic systems, we commonly see how hot the system can get just by pumping the fluid through the system, not to mention when the system is asked to do meaningful work.

When you air condition your house, where does the heat go? It goes into the atmosphere via the heat exchanger outside the house. When you cook your dinner, where does the heat go? Some to perform a little chemistry on the food, but most of it goes into the house and, ultimately, into the atmosphere. Same for when you make ice for your cocktail, where does the heat go? It comes out of the heat exchanger on the back of the refrigerator and, ultimately, to the atmosphere. Where does the heat go from the clothes dryer? Of course, out the vent. When you do a few push-ups, what happens? You get hot and sweaty. Almost any routine human activity generates heat, which, ultimately, goes to the atmosphere.

Almost any manufacturing operation is the same. Metalworking operations can generate substantial heat. Steel mills are notorious for their generation of heat to process the metal. Nuclear, coal, and even hydroelectric plants all generate considerable heat as a consequence of generating electric power. In automobiles, 28 percent of the fuel energy goes to overcoming friction. Much of this loss is in the form of heat losses to the atmosphere from the exhaust and radiator, not to mention from braking. The point is, virtually all mechanical processes generate some amount of heat that is, ultimately, sent to the atmosphere.

So when one ponders all this, it is hard not to conclude that thermal pollution is a far bigger threat to our ecology. Indeed, when we talk about sustainability, we should also talk about thermal management. The irony to me is that we politicize, regulate, tax and proselytize those evil generators of CO2, usually those generators who live in certain countries—yet we are quite mum on the whole (I think bigger) problem of thermal pollution. Maybe it is because thermal pollution involves us all, and, thus, is hard to demonize target groups.

Well, hot air having been vented, I’ll just crawl back into the coolness of my cave. Stay cool.



Bob Gresham is STLE’s director of professional development. You can reach him at rgresham@stle.org.