This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 9 of this Preprint.
Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100
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Abstract
A Planet Powered, Heated, and Changed by Us
How did a civilization powered by fossil fuels begin to alter the climate of an entire planet—and where is this experiment taking us?
This book tells that story from first principles. It does not begin with climate models or political arguments. It begins with power: the extraordinary flow of energy required to sustain more than eight billion people, their cities, industries, transportation, agriculture, and material consumption. Modern civilization runs overwhelmingly on fossil fuels—ancient solar energy accumulated over geological time and consumed by us in a geological instant.
From power, the story moves to carbon. Burning coal, oil, and natural gas transfers carbon from Earth’s crust into the atmosphere. Agriculture and land-use change add still more. The book follows this carbon through the atmosphere, oceans, soils, plants, and rocks, showing how humanity has disrupted a planetary carbon cycle that operated for millennia near a slowly changing balance.
Next comes the unavoidable question: How much more carbon will we emit? Rather than treating the future as an arbitrary collection of scenarios, the book examines the physical and geological limits on fossil-fuel production and develops quantitative emissions trajectories through this century and beyond.
Then we follow the energy.
The Sun heats the Earth. The Earth must radiate that energy back to space. Greenhouse gases impede this outward flow of infrared radiation, while aerosols and clouds alter how much sunlight the planet reflects. From Planck’s radiation law and the molecular absorption of infrared radiation to satellite measurements of Earth’s energy balance, the physics is developed step by step and illustrated graphically.
This leads to one of the book’s central and most disturbing observations: Earth is becoming darker. Satellite measurements show a substantial decline in planetary albedo—the fraction of sunlight reflected back to space. A darker Earth absorbs more solar energy. The book examines how declining aerosols, changing clouds, melting ice, and other processes contribute to this change, and quantifies the additional solar energy entering the Earth system.
Where does this extra heat go?
Mostly into the oceans. We follow the accelerating accumulation of ocean heat, the retreat of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, the loss of land ice, marine heatwaves, coral bleaching, and the changing extremes of temperature on land and across the planet. These are not abstract projections. They are measurements made by satellites, ships, profiling floats, weather stations, and instruments distributed across the Earth.
The argument therefore builds as a physical chain:
Power -> Carbon -> Emissions -> Radiation -> Albedo -> Warming -> Oceans and Ice -> Consequences
At every stage, the book asks the same questions: What do we actually know? How do we know it? What does physics permit? What do the observations show? And where are the uncertainties?
The final chapters widen the lens. They examine geoengineering, climate denial and misinformation, the vulnerability of complex societies, and the rapidly growing power of artificial intelligence. The subject is ultimately larger than climate change. It is the collision between a civilization organized around continual growth and a finite planet governed by physical laws.
This is a scientific book, but it was not written only for scientists. Equations are used when they illuminate rather than intimidate; observations and graphics carry much of the argument. Readers are invited to follow the evidence themselves.
The question is no longer whether humanity can change a planet. We already have. The question is what happens next—and whether understanding what we have done can still change what we do.
The manuscript is now 461 PDF pages, with 18 chapters and eight appendices. Currently, there are 169 figures, 71 tables (240 figures+tables), and 943 references.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X5PX7K
Subjects
Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence, Artificial intelligence—Social aspects, Carbon cycle, Climate change denial, Climate system—Models, Earth—Energy balance, Ecological overshoot, Energy consumption—Environmental aspects, Fossil fuels—Depletion, Geoengineering—Harm, greenhouse effect, Human ecology, Human exceptionalism, Population—Environmental aspects, Polar regions—Climatic changes
Dates
Published: 2025-11-20 09:42
Last Updated: 2026-08-21 15:55
Older Versions
- Download Version 8 - 2026-06-24
- Download Version 7 - 2026-02-27
- Download Version 6 - 2026-01-25
- Download Version 5 - 2026-01-13
- Download Version 4 - 2026-01-04
- Download Version 3 - 2025-12-07
- Download Version 2 - 2025-11-21
- Download Version 1 - 2025-11-20
License
CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Conflict of interest statement:
The author declares no conflict of interest
Data Availability:
All data in this book are from public sources
Metrics
Views: 7884
Downloads: 1711
Comment #333 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-08-21 17:09
This latest version of the book is a **MAJOR update**, with an entirely new Chapter 9 exploring what Earth's declining albedo may mean for the near future of our civilization---and, more personally, for your own well-being.
Comment #304 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-06-01 16:28
Dear Shelley,
Thank you for your kind words.
The book was recently rejected by Springer after two rather brief reviews. One reviewer was generally positive, even suggesting that the book could retain its relevance for at least 15 years, but strongly disliked the chapter on AI. The second reviewer felt that I had not given sufficient attention to the human dimension of the story and recommended substantial revisions. Based on these reviews, the editor decided not to proceed with publication.
I am now revising the manuscript, incorporating some of the constructive feedback while remaining faithful to its core message. My plan is to submit it to a more specialized publisher that may be a better fit for its interdisciplinary nature, ideally one outside the United States.
As for timing, I hope to complete the revisions over the next few months and begin a new round of submissions thereafter. As always with academic publishing, the review process can be unpredictable, but I remain optimistic that the book will find the right home. The book is also costly to produce because of its many color illustrations, so finding a publisher willing to invest in a visually rich scientific work is part of the challenge.
With best regards,
Tad
Comment #303 Robert Shelley Barker @ 2026-06-01 12:39
hi there what's an extraordinary work what is the peer review process over what time scale is it happening?
Comment #302 Robert Shelley Barker @ 2026-06-01 12:39
hi there what's an extraordinary work what is the peer review process over what time scale is it happening?
Comment #301 Robert Shelley Barker @ 2026-06-01 11:56
There is an extraordinary read. What is the plan / timescale for the peer review?
Comment #300 Robert Shelley Barker @ 2026-06-01 11:56
There is an extraordinary read. What is the plan / timescale for the peer review?
Comment #275 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-02-28 01:06
The February 27, 2026 version is a major revision of the book. All historical datasets have been extended by one to two additional years, and most figures have been updated accordingly. The Simple Model chapter has been substantially rewritten to establish explicit connections with IPCC scenarios and models and to clarify the implications and distinctiveness of my scenarios. In particular, a quantitative linkage between the SSP5-8.5 pathway and continued expansion of global coal production is proposed.
Two new technical appendices have been added: one detailing the internal structure and operation of LLM transformers, and another describing the atmospheric chemistry of methane.
Comment #271 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-01-25 20:38
Version #6. Various small clarifications, and text typo fixes, as well as the LaTeX-unfriendly extended ASCII character fixes (long dashes, acute accents, etc.) Extended discussion in Section 3.10, and improved graphics and new figures in Chapters 6 and 8.
Comment #269 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-01-13 15:18
The new Section 6.6 demonstrates that virtually the entire net increase in global crude oil and associated lease-condensate production since the mid-2000s has been driven by the expansion of U.S. shale (tight-oil) output. Once production from the U.S. Permian Basin enters decline—likely within the next decade—the resulting decline in global oil production will be irreversible, as no other region or resource class has shown the capacity to compensate for this loss. Near the peak or plateau of production, the natural decline rate of conventional crude oil is approximately 7.6 % yr⁻¹. Absent sustained worldwide upstream investment on the order of $1 trillion per year, global oil production would fall rapidly and irreversibly.
The new Section 6.7 presents forty-two years of history of the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager on the value of a portfolio of five metals. While it is widely remembered that Simon won the bet in 1990, the subsequent thirty-five years tell a far more complex—and revealing—story.
Comment #266 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2026-01-04 14:37
The new version of the book has two new chapters and included reviewer feedback on several chapters.
We now start from an in-depth analysis of the unfathomable rise of artificial intelligence (AI) that will shape the fate of every system—natural and human-made—on Earth. Given the extraordinary acceleration of AI-driven infrastructures now embedded in economic, military, and governance systems essential to human survival, it is no longer implausible that AI will begin making, or coercing, the strategic decisions nominally attributed to governments in the United States, China, the EU-27, Russia, and increasingly India. Those decisions may result in a rapid, deliberate culling of human populations in the developed world—executed through pandemics, the denial of basic healthcare, systematic disruption of water and food supplies, denial of disaster aid, and the degradation or selective collapse of non-AI-controlled electric grids.
Under such a scenario, human emissions would decline precipitously. The climate breakdown would “resolve itself” over the next one to two centuries, while increasingly autonomous AI assumes control over whatever remains of humankind and of the biosphere.
We follow with an outline of humanity's true place in Nature and our genetic and physiological dependence on deep geological time, extending back more than 3.6 billion years. We illustrate how our collective learning as a species has been fundamentally subverted by the rise of modern techno-civilization, which has progressively severed most people from their biological and social roles and immersed them in a technological enframing that distorts perception, erodes meaning, and obscures what it means to be human.
The global carbon cycle on Earth is framed as the inner workings of a vast far-from-equilibrium system that continually dissipates the high-energy photons intercepted from the Sun. Life itself is an intrinsic and essential component of this planetary dissipation. Over the past 3 billion years, the coupled dynamics of plate tectonics, volcanism, and life have governed Earth's climate and maintained its long-term habitability. The human perturbation of the global carbon cycle is modest in magnitude compared with several natural fluxes, yet it strikes directly at the biosphere - where it inflicts a disproportionate harm on the stability of the climate system. This pivotal chapter establishes the interwoven narrative of our book.
Comment #260 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2025-12-06 11:44
V3 is a major upgrade. A new Chapter 14 on geoengineering was added. The book was edited page-by-page, many small glitches were fixed, and text readability was improved.
Comment #254 Tadeusz W Patzek @ 2025-11-28 19:34
V2 - New cover picture and minor typo and punctuation fixes