Greenhouse Warming From Burning Coal Exceeds Heat It Generates When Burned In Just 34 Days
The warming from carbon dioxide released by burning a lump of coal exceeds the heat generated by the combustion in just 34 days. It takes 45 days for oil combustion and 59 days for natural gas to achieve comparable warming to that generated by burning the respective fuel.
This shows that global warming does not take years and decades for its effects to be felt, shows a study by climate scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science. "Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more," Ken Caldeira said in a Carnegie news release.
Caldeira and Xiaochun Zhang also extrapolated heat measurements for continuously burning power plants. Coal plants took just three months for warming caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide to surpass the heat released into the atmosphere by combustion.
"If a power plant is burning continuously, within three to five months, depending on the type of power plant, the CO2 from the power plant is doing more to heat the Earth than the fires in its boiler," Caldeira said. The research, "Time scales and ratios of climate forcing due to thermal versus carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels," is published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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Caption: Ratio of warming from accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide to warming from combustion for coal, oil, and gas plants over time. Figure is simplified from Zhang and Caldeira’s paper (ERL, 2012)’.
