[0x0203]

Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.

[JumpCrisscross]

> what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes

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...

[pfdietz]

More significantly, indirect heating from increased greenhouse gases is about 400 TW.

[vixen99]

Link?

[pfdietz]

Thanks for making me check, I was off a bit. It's actually more like 1400 TW. Must have dropped a digit when I remembered that.

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).

[kolinko]

It’s quite easy - we have numbers for humanity’s electricity and heat production. We also know how much atmosphere and oceans weigh, which we can multiply by specific heat of air and water. From this you can calculate how much we’ve heaten up the atmosphere/oceans - even ignoring the loss of heat to space/ground our impact is neglible.

Here is chatgpt doing the math - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d... - it’s roughly correct.