this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
214 points (97.8% liked)

World News

39143 readers
2492 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] frezik@midwest.social 12 points 8 months ago

Waste heat will eventually be a problem, but we're far from the limit yet:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf?sharing_token=yNwL92oPzcpklZSqVsr-ndRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N0u2htmeT1Hou6SrdtT_vjhsjDi8mPyrY6gILuO1cIPYM5r9vTrCV6dFSGWkHiq63t24rvELuWNN1w82farMIezAYiWj7ialZ8KkzI_SEgHP98WBPRE6PFu8lx9H4EP5A%3D

At present, the waste heat term is about four orders of magnitude smaller than the solar term. But at a growth factor of ten per century, they would reach parity in roughly 400 years. Indeed, the surface temperature of Earth would reach the boiling point of water (373 K) in just over 400 years under this relentless prescription. Clearly, extrapolating our recent — seemingly modest — 2.3% annual energy growth very far into the future quickly becomes ridiculous, and cannot happen.

This is not intended to suggest that waste heat is a bigger problem than, say, climate change from carbon dioxide emissions.

So that's something we're going to need to think about after getting greenhouse gas emissions under control.