Of Heat Engines and Refrigerators
21 hours ago Guest Blogger
Kevin Kilty
Weather is made possible because transfer of heat also makes available some amount of mechanical work. The view of the atmosphere being akin to a Carnot heat engine has a long history involving many famous names in atmospheric science – Sverdrup, Brunt, Oort, and Lorenz. To say that the literature around this topic is vast is an understatement.
Related views, rarely mentioned, hold the atmosphere’s working to be a refrigerator or a thermostat or even air-conditioning. WUWT guest blogger, Willis Eschenbach, often makes reference to these ideas, as he did here recently and even more recently here. The Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis belongs here, too.
Two simple models, heat engine and refrigerator, compliment one another. If, for example, one is interested in how heat transfer produces the observed weather, a heat engine is a good place to begin. If, on the other hand, one’s focus is how the atmosphere works to produce a stable climate, free of CO2 terror, then perhaps the refrigerator makes a better starting place.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/26/of-heat-engines-and-refrigerators/
