Appendix V – Global Warming / Climate Change Implication #

The intermittency of wind and solar power plants is well known. Other deleterious effects include night time warming downstream from wind farms \({[^9]}\) and the solar power heat island effect \({[^{10}]}\) .

The proposed CHE, in contrast, offers potentially stable power delivery as well as continuous cooling as a result of greatly increased surface heat transport up the atmospheric column regardless of time of day. In Calculations 2 & 3 of Appendix III, it was shown that the case study transported 28.9GW surface heat vertically. Although attention has not been devoted to the potential capacity for accommodation on the outer perimeter, it can be shown that the Case Study structure can provide capacity for 14 000 to 30 000 residents, depending on depth of the outer perimeter that is devoted to accommodation. The point of this exercise is to show that the structure can directly vent between 1 to 2 MW of surface heat per occupant, depending on occupancy levels adopted.

The IPCC Effective Anthropogenic Radiative Forcing over the Industrial Era is deemed to be 2.3 \({\frac {W} {m^2}}\) \({[^{11}]}\) . The surface area of earth is some 510 million \({km^2}\) , resulting in an estimated total radiative heating effect of 746 Trillion W. With a global population of around 7.5 billion, that results in a radiative forcing load of around 157 kW per person alive today. That translates to meaning that if between 1 in 16 people alive today were living in a CHE tower all the excess surface heat trapped as a result of \({CO_2}\) can be vented from the surface, in theory. This statement obviously requires a lot of caveats, but it points to the intriguing possibility that the effect of \({CO_2}\) driven warming can be directly offset using CHEs.

The CHE technology, by removing atmospheric moisture and returning it to the soil, can potentially be used to terra-form uninhabitable deserts to being relatively well vegetated. This means that areas that are currently relatively free of vegetation can become soil carbon sinks by deploying this technology.

Returning atmospheric moisture to the soil also directly reduces the positive feedback system posited by the IPCC – the effect that some \({CO_2}\) induced warming leads to more water vapor being held in the atmosphere, resulting in further warming since water vapor is also a significant greenhouse gas.

So, the CHE would seem to have the potential to combat global warming driven climate change by:

Directly venting surface heat
Disrupting the positive feedback loop between \({CO_2}\) and \({H_2O}\)
Sequestering \({CO_2}\) over the medium to long term in the form of increased vegetation, especially in arid areas.

< Appendix IV

Appendix V – Global Warming / Climate Change Implication #

[9] Climatic Impacts of Wind Power #

[10] Solar Island Effect #

[11] Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing #