Quote:
Originally Posted by Tailgator
If the beams are hot enough to fry birds out of mid air, it must really warming things up in the atmosphere. Someone tell Al Gore!
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How do you figure?
Either that sunlight falls on the 3500 acres directly and heats the ground, or it bounces of the mirrors and hits the tower and heats that a lot. The total amount of sunlight (the amount of energy) doesn't change.
I guess strictly speaking the albedo of the land will differ from the albedo of the tower plus any other generation losses, so yeah it might change the albedo of the planet by some tiny amount. But the albedo of dirt is already like .3 so 70% of incoming sunlight is converted to heat.
EDIT: Unless it was just for the lulz, in that case
