[somethingnot]

> Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

It doesn't work that way. Aircons dump unusable waste heat into the environment. On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Same with solar panels, they change the albedo of the earth surface, and this will be a huge problem in the future.

[xyzzyz]

> On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Any amount of energy we can ever generate from nuclear is trivial compared to the insolation. Average daily insolation on Earth is 6 kWh/m^2. Earth area is 5.1e+14 m^2. This means we get 3e+15 kWh daily from sun, or 1.1e+18 kWh annually. On the other hand, we produce 2e+11 kWh electricity annually. This means that solar insolation is 7 orders of magnitude larger than our electricity production.

[somethingnot]

Which is why I mentioned that it will be a problem in the future, not today. Imagine all of India airconed. And it's also why I mentioned albedo. That will drastically increase the sun insolation effect, today a lot of the suns energy is reflected back into space. This will change, especially with solar panels.

[xyzzyz]

No, it won't ever become a problem. 7 orders of magnitude means we get 10 million times more energy from sun than we generate in electricity. Bringing rest of the world energy use to US/Europe standard will at worst result in 100 times more waste heat generation than now (and almost surely much less than that), which is still far cry from 10 million.

[somethingnot]

You assume that it's obvious that we can't consume 7 orders of magnitude more energy than now.

We already grew our energy consumption 4 orders of magnitude in 300 years.

http://bwp.io/blog/2014/thermodynamic-limits-of-human-energy...

[xyzzyz]

Yes, it's obvious. There's no way a single person will consume as much energy as the whole country does today. These days, the energy use per capita goes down in developed countries, so the current energy consumption growth is mostly due to poorer places catching up.

[somethingnot]

You seem very sure about how humanity will look like in 500 years and how much energy it would use.

Obviously you consider the concept of Type II and Type III civilizations impossible and ridiculous, since they would use more than 20 orders of magnitude more energy than we do.

[xoa]

Just to add to the other comment, I suggest you look up what the temperatures of the nighttime side of Mercury are (which receives max solar radiation intensity about 10x of Earth at ~14.4 kW/m^2 vs our max of ~1.4 kW/m^2 outside of atmosphere and ~1 kW/m^2 at the surface). Now reflect on the relative importance of absolute energy input vs retention.