Apropos of yesterday's post regarding using enormous air-source heat pumps to convert Global Warming het into electricity, a friend of mine pointed out that due to the fact heat can neither be created nor destroyed, such heat pumps would achieve little, if anything at all.
However, I then thought; "Hey - the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics refers to energy, not heat." Energy can't be created or destroyed, but it can be converted into some other form of energy. Witness the nuclear bomb, which converts matter into heat and light and Einstein's famous E=Mc^2. Also the incredibly dense and hot plasma soup of the early universe was converted into all the matter in the universe.
Reverse this notion and you come up with heat being turned to matter via a reverse nuclear device. We simply need a device that accomplishes this task - a device that sucks heat energy out of the atmosphere, converts it to matter and deposits small boulders around its base - an endothermic reaction. Even a small pebble would be the equivalent of a lot of heat when Einstein's equation is used.
Photosynthesis actually achieves this, converting light and CO2 into sugars and oxygen. So, just cover the earth with trees. Oh, hang on, lots of people are actually advocating this already and we're chopping them down in huge quantities in certain countries.
1 comment:
"heat can neither be created nor destroyed" But you were converting heat energy into a different form of energy, so that is irrelevant.
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