After I had written ‘How does the air get hot?’, it was natural for me to consider how does water warm. My friends laugh at my kitchen physics, so it was natural for me to return to the kitchen again.
Most young people have never seen a kitchen range, that is a long cast-iron kitchen stove, which burnt coke or coal and most often never went out.
I cannot even find a picture of one now, except rusty old things, whereas when I used to visit my ancient Aunt Belle in Leyton, East London, the range was polished bright. On top of the range was a series of hot plates and below there were two ovens at either end.
The big feature that I remember so well was the enormous black kettle that sat forever over one of the hot plates, so there was always hot water. The one place one always wished to be was in the kitchen for there it was eternally warm. Even better it was lit by gaslight, which produced a clear and pleasant glow.
The one thing that has not changed with time is that the kettle, whether it sits atop of a gas ring or an electric hot plate or is one of those new-fangled kettles that are entirely electric, is that they all sit on top. This is so usual that nobody even imagines that it could be otherwise.
Yet when we look at the great source of heat in great nature we always look upwards at the Sun. When my personal trainer in all matters scientific explained to me that the Sun did not send ‘heat’ through space but ‘radiation’, specifically infrared radiation, I could not take that in – the physics eluded me.
It was only much later and after considerable pondering that I began to understand that radiation must encounter or collide with mass for heat to be produced.
This is a pretty difficult concept for many people, even including natural climate skeptics. However, of one thing I am sure and it is that the vast majority of the populace of this planet do accept that the energy by which we live and breathe derives from the Sun and very few – the silent majority – have been taken in by the idea that mankind is warming the globe by means of emissions of a trace gas, carbon dioxide.
Nevertheless, those who are concerned that the world is warming and that this warming is dangerous use certain supporting evidence, almost all concerning water. Was it twenty years ago that the High Priest of man-made global warming declared that the North Pole would be free of ice by now? – but it isn’t.
Sure, the ice ebbs in summer but it returns to its full size in winter. The ocean levels are rising. Well, I understand they are to the thickness of a sheet of paper. Glaciers are retreating. True some glaciers are retreating but an enormous number are advancing.
There is nothing to prove that man has warmed or is warming the planet. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever. In some areas, the barrier reef off the coast of Australia is said to have bleached, though the extent is a matter of dispute. But can this bleaching be attributed to global warming, man-made or otherwise?
Great Nature produces by far the greater part of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is the supposed villain of the piece. The burning of fossil fuels has added at most only 4% of the total and it is this extra that is supposed to have led to a ‘trapping’ of heat high up in the troposphere and an incidental rise in the global mean temperature.
This global average temperature is reckoned to have increased by eight-tenths of one degree Celsius in over 115 years, since 1900. Personally, I wish it would warm a bit more since all the evidence is that mankind has thrived in warm periods and suffered horrendously during Ice Ages.
Returning to my kitchen physics I cannot help but observe that all the heat was supplied from down below. However, in nature, the Sun shines down upon the oceans and the oceans undoubtedly have mass, so the surfaces of the oceans do warm up, clearly more so in the tropics where the sun is relatively directly up.
So, the water does warm to several feet from the surface. However, the seawater under the Sun also cools itself by evaporation and this evaporation, in turn, leads to the formation of clouds and in the course of time, the condensation in the clouds falls as rain, which is always a cooling feature.
I hope I am not mistaken here as I have never heard of hot water falling from the sky, but rain, hail, and snow yes.
Undoubtedly the sun-warmed waters of the tropics, like the winds blow away from the tropics towards the poles, producing amongst others the Gulf Stream for which those living in the west of the British Isles are truly thankful.
The warming of water by radiation is to some extent offset by evaporation and also by precipitation. So, do the waters warm entirely from radiation from above?
This immediately made me think of the large black kettle sitting atop the burnished kitchen range. The water was on top. So, the question is this: What is down below?
I have always been intrigued by thermal vents. I have even bathed in hot waters from thermal vents in New Zealand in mid-winter at Hanmer Springs. And have paddled in Kerosene Creek where the water is likewise hot.
So, it does not take too long to find out and even to see pictures of white smokers and black smokers pouring out hot water to some 400º Celsius from the bottom of the ocean. How far these thermal vents warm the ocean I do not know – I am not an oceanographer.
In addition to these thermal vents, of which Iceland makes much use for heating, there are a whole series of volcanoes under the water also spewing out hot lava, at least some of them. How many volcanoes under the sea would you guess?
I would have thought a few hundred. I cannot check this but I understand that there are millions!
Millions of volcanoes under the sea! If that is correct and the center of our Earth is nearly as hot as the corona around the Sun, does not that very fact give you pause? It does me.
It is true that the madding crowd do follow the Pied Piper of Nashville, Tennessee, and hope to take extreme measures to ‘save the planet.’
But I believe that this is but a temporary aberration based upon a lack of scientific knowledge that we will all have to suffer for a while.
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Don’t forget that in addition to heat, the under sea volcanoes are also releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, as pointed out by other articles on this site.
For a total of four years I lived in a house with a small wood cook stove. It was next to a larger electric stove. Both were used on a regular basis.
To make a statement of scientific merit based on fact and deterministic science takes an effort at “doing the arithmetic”(Sir David MacKay) . I have made an original effort on magma heating of the oceans and am now trying to get the paper, developed over the last two years, published. So far the specialist journal editors won’t touch it with a long pole, the editors say they don’t do cross disciplinary work and refer me to climate mags, who of course will reject all heresy or refer meto volcanologist journals, particularly if the approach uses hard to disprove and carefully checked data and deterministic physical laws, so is not amenable to adjustment – as is their unprovable statistical model based predictive “science”, with its wholly presumtpive “sensitivities”, turned up to 11 for CO2 and down for all else, so over predicting any change.. Hope you like my approach. Comment welcome, at least if based on quantified fact and provable science.
It seems to me the assumptions made in atmospheric models, paid to prove warming is caused b,y human caused emissions rather than find out what the causes are, are quite wrong. They certainly assume insignificant magnitude and variability in magma emissions, and worry mostly about the 1,500 surface volcanoes gaseous emissions while ignoring the up to 1 Million believed to be under the oceans, on the thin ocean floor, 1/10 the thickness of the continents. My paper suggests this sub aerial population create warming at a similar levels to the warming attributed to CO2, which in fact could be due to magma warming, as well as many other climate variabilities from ENSO to the 7Ka interglacial. Based on simple quantification of volcano formation over time and the heating effect of 1,000 degree delta temperature magma meeting cold water and crystalising at 1.4MJoules per Kilogramme. All the numbers are in the paper here on SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3259379
“Thermal Effects of Magma On Ocean Temperatures Through Ice Ages Cycles, With Particular Reference to Interglacial Events”
A Quantified Hypothesis On The Role Of Magma And Gravitational Tides In Variable Ocean Warming, With Particular Reference to current conditions and the 100Ka Milankovitch Synchronous Cycle
Ahhh, common sense at last. I have frequently bored my wife with my view on our planet’s climate and have always said volcanoes on land and below the oceans must have a very real impact on us. Your article is extremely well presented and sensible, congratulations, well done.
So much better than the rantings and ravings of the warmists.