[djleni]

Your top level comment got flagged but:

some napkin math suggests the additional heat can’t solely be from those sources.

According to https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

The ocean gained heat at a rate of 0.83 watts per square meter from 1993-2022.

The same article also says there are more than 360 million square kilometers.

This gives us 0.83 * 1e6 * 360e6 = 2.988e+14 watts heating in the ocean in that time period.

A watt of electricity ends up becoming a watt of heat, and according to https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview... the world used 22,000 TWh in 2022. Converted to power, thats 22e3 * 1e12 / 24 / 365 = 2.5e12 watts.

It’s not right to use power here and energy should be used instead because that wattage will be lower each previous year, but, even at that peak, it’s not enough (by two orders of magnitude) to account for even just the ocean warming, let alone land or atmospheric heating.

The mechanism for CO2 trapping heat is well understood: https://youtu.be/sTvqIijqvTg?si=M_5uZwjNCThm3swH

[rolldat777]

Using total energy consumption (not just electricity) and redoing the calculation using entire incident solar flux, I get that they are within a factor of 4 of each other. I agree that the sun currently dominates and the co2 capture is the dominant mechanism. It's also interesting that our consumption is so close to the same order of magnitude. It suggests that if we were to heavily invest in e.g. nuclear to solve our carbon issue that the heat alone would be on the same scale of excess energy and heating would continue. It also says that for solar to solve the problem we would need to cover something like 5-10% of the land mass in solar cells!