[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.

[xyzzyz]

I consider talking about Type II and Type III civilizations ridiculous in the context of discussing potential increase in the use of air conditioning in India.

[somethingnot]

I see. So when you said "No, it won't ever(x) become a problem", it was like one of those ads "Unlimited(x) data", with the fine print "(x) unlimited is meant to be understood as less than 10 GB per month", or in your case "(x) ever means at most 200 years from now"

Note, that when I said "all of India being airconned" I literally meant all of India, as in the whole subcontinent being a single giant city with 100 billion people living in it. And on that scale you need energy not only for airconn, but food/water/waste disposal/... But I guess you exclude that possibility too. It's understandable through why you would just imagine that I was talking about making India into something like present day Europe. In general people find it really hard to imagine anything radically different than the status quo.