This essential provides an overview of the changes in our climate, their causes and their consequences. Today, humanity's energy needs are largely met in ways that are harmful to the climate. The alternative to this, solar energy, would satisfy our needs thousands of times over. But this option is far too little used for mainly economic reasons. This essential then discusses the energy converters that can be used to make solar energy available. Some other modern energy sources, such as nuclear power, are either inadequate, still utopian, or otherwise environmentally harmful. An outlook shows that our energy problem could easily be solved with economic reason by global use of solar energy. The climate could thus still be stabilized in time.
This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Unser Klima und das Energieproblem by Klaus Stierstadt, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.
Author(s): Klaus Stierstadt
Series: essentials
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 64
City: Wiesbaden
Preface
What You Can Find in This essential
Contents
1: Introduction
2: The Climate
3: The Carbon Dioxide CO2
4: The Energy Demand
5: The Sun
6: The Solar Energy Converters
6.1 Overview
6.2 Efficiency
6.3 Solar cells
6.4 Biomass
6.5 Solar Collectors
6.6 Solar Power Plants (Solar Ovens)
6.7 Wind Turbines
6.8 Efficiencies and Potentials
6.9 The Space Requirement [24]
6.10 Storing Energy [11]
6.11 Summary of the Energy Conversion
7: Non-solar Energy Converters
7.1 Tidal Energy
7.2 Geothermal Energy
7.3 Nuclear Energy [18, 19, 20]
7.4 Breeder Reactor [11]
7.5 Nuclear Fusion [22]
Epilogue: Afterword – How Can We Go On?
What You Can Take Away from This Essential
Literature
