Hacker News Reader

Comment by aszantu | Hacker News Reader

I just wondered if it's really the CO², maybe we just generate too much heat in general and that's what's warming the planet? Charging the phone, phone heats up, having the laptop up -> heat. All the household appliances generate heat. Germany. There was this one or two days in usa where no airplanes were flying(after 9/11) and the temperature over there dropped by 1-2 degrees.

View on HN

We generate a lot of heat, but so does the sun by shining on half of the earth's surface. That should not be a problem however, since it goes back into space in the form of infrared beams. The natural greenhouse effect obstructs just enough of those beams to keep our planet at a stable temperature that life has had plenty of time to adjust to. Now that the greenhouse effect has been artificially enhanced by adding lots of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, more infrared beams (from the sun, but probably also some from human activity) are kept in the atmosphere and so it warms. So ultimately, the sun is just vastly more powerful than human activity, and any excess heat would be emitted into space if it weren't for the artificially raised greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

The sun irradiates the planet with about 1,000 W / Square meter, the area irradiated is always about half of the planet, with the amount of light reflected for any given spot corresponding to the co-sine of the angle at which the light hits.

In a given hour - taking into account the albedo of the earth, 0.31 - the earth soaks up more sun than the world as a whole consumes in a year.

So yes, we are generating a lot of heat, but compared to what the sun does it is not a factor.

The amount of heat we generate doesn't register compared to the sun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com