Don’t forget about heat death.
More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.
More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.
It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.
We’re nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)
Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2].
So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-023-06775-x
> the total radiative forcing (RF) by human activities of approximately 2.72 W m^−2 (Masson-Delmotte 2021)
(with the radius of the Earth of 6.4e6 meters and surface area = 4 pi r^2).
Here is chatgpt doing the math - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d... - it’s roughly correct.
(Unlike co2 ofc)
Here is gpt doing estimates - the numbers are similar to the ones I calculated by hand some time ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d...