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> We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere".

We are doing both. We are doing more insulating than heating, but we obviously generate more heat.




Did you actually read my comment to the end?

If so, how'd you do on the numbers?


Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.


Good, so by what rough order of magnitude does the sun heat us up more than human power generation then?

Is it x10, x100, x1000, .. more?

This is after all the part that matters.


I have no idea. Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own. That does not make your blanket assertion true.

The original question is a good one. We will use more energy as it gets cheaper (see monster trucks, Las Vegas, Dubai). We should be thinking of what we will do with the waste heat when everyone has a fusion reactor.


Your repeated assertion that I made a "blanket assertion" suggests you're either someone with english as a second language or else someone who stubbornly digs in (unless there's another explanation here?).

To be clear I made a qualified assertion; the phrase "Relative scales of various factors matter here" does the work.

> Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own.

Yes - but, again, How much more?

If it's barely twice as much (which seems unlikely) then heat from our activity is a major factor in all this.

If it's 100,000x times more then I stand firm, heat from our activity has effectively zero impact on the AGW issue (although other by-products from our daily routines are the crux of the problem).

If it's some other factor then what relative signifigance does our human heat generation have?

> I have no idea.

It's a shame you didn't grab an envelope and make use of the back, it's a classic Fermi problem [1] of the kind I and my class mates were posed in high school and the kind of thing many other HN commeters would delight in taking a run at.

If you're feeling game you might like to start with the daily heating of the earths surface from the sun, and then look at the petajoules of energy generated and consumed per day and take a stab at guesstimating the waste (unused, released into the lower earths surface layer) heat as a percentage (or google efficiencies, etc).

Have fun!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem


Stubbornly digs in, indeed.




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