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An Affluent Earth Based Civilization With All Clean Energy Would Still Warm The Planet By 3 Degrees Celsius
From NextBigFuture.com
Rising greenhouse gases are causing roughly 380 Terawatts less heat to escape from the atmosphere. Result: the planet is warming. The warming due to the 16 Terawatts from waste heat produced by humans is tiny in comparison. If the demand for power grew to 5000 Terawatts, it would warm the planet by 3 °C.
If 9 billion people all became affluent at about $430,000 per person, then the energy utilization would reach the level of 5000 terawatts. The physics of energy production means that there will be waste heat.
Geophysical Research Letters -Integrating anthropogenic heat flux with global climate models
Nearly all energy used for human purposes is dissipated as heat within Earth's land–atmosphere system. Thermal energy released from non-renewable sources is therefore a climate forcing term. Averaged globally, this forcing is only +0.028 W m−2, but over the continental United States and western Europe, it is +0.39 and +0.68 W m−2, respectively. Here, present and future global inventories of anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) are developed, and parameterizations derived for seasonal and diurnal flux cycles. Equilibrium climate experiments show statistically-significant continental-scale surface warming (0.4–0.9°C) produced by one 2100 AHF scenario, but not by current or 2040 estimates. However, significant increases in annual-mean temperature and planetary boundary layer (PBL) height occur over gridcells where present-day AHF exceeds 3.0 W m−2. PBL expansion leads to a slight, but significant increase in atmospheric residence time of aerosols emitted from large-AHF regions. Hence, AHF may influence regional climate projections and contemporary chemistry-climate studies.
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