No, that's how it is convected around. It is GENERATED by radioactive decay. And that radioactive decay is going to happen regardless. But let's say you pull enough heat out that it solidifies.

Now your magnetic field disappears. Oops! Hope you like eating solar wind.

Also, as Doc Cloud said, it might actually increase the spin rate of the Earth. But probably it does nothing either way, because the total mass of the Earth has a total amount of angular momentum, and both quantities would be conserved. I think.

 

I wonder how the climate is in Holland.

 

At this time of year?
Dark, sun doesn't really come up til 9:30 or 10 in the morning and it never gets bright even at lunchtime.
let's just say it's not a good place to be selling sunglasses.

 

Yeah, they would -- I was talking about the distribution of the mass, which might get altered by enough heat removal. But I think that whole topic is a pretty dead end.

The climate of Holland, however, now there's something interesting, especially because I'm sitting in Boca Raton. I wonder how their (legal) drug sales change with the seasons. I can see myself living in a cannabis coma from about October to March if I lived in Amsterdam.

And, combining topics, it would be a good homework problem for students in an advanced class on weather to calculate how much the Earth's rotation would speed up as a function of power generations by wind farms. (You'd have to specify where the wind farms are sited, of course.) HPH

 

anybody catch the program in the last couple of days about erecting the wind farm in the North Sea?

The jumping jack ship was pretty cool.

 

The holland reference was due to their windmills and possible climate effect of them.

 

True. But that energy was going to be removed from the wind somewhere. The sun is constantly adding more energy to the atmosphere, but wind speeds don't get faster and faster. So the kinetic energy of the wind is getting converted into heat somewhere. The windmill is just taking energy that would have been extracted by swaying trees, blowing sand, friction between air molecules, etc.

 

^^That was the basis of the homework assignment I outlined.

Large-scale deployment of wind farms will increase what we call the "aerodynamic roughness" of the Earth's surface, creating more drag on the global wind patterns. Because the winds blow west to east over much of Earth, that drag will translate into increased push on Earth's rotation. (Winds blow the other way in the tropics -- the Trade Winds -- but they tend to be gentler and not so suitable for power generation.)

It will also, of course, change the overall balance of forces in the atmosphere and potentially change how the wind systems behave. Despite the continual renewal of the ultimate source of energy for the global circulation, it can and will adjust to whatever sets of internal forces it's subject to.

There's just no free lunch, anywhere, anytime. HPH

 

No wind powered car for me. I certainly do not want to contribute to the earth's falling out of orbit.

 

remind me of a project in a thermo class many moon ago.
goal was to take advantage of thermocline off the coast of Hawaii to generate power.
objective was 20 megawatts.
figured out that you would be sucking the volume of the earth through the turbines every two weeks... that might not be viable.