Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years." video.

  1. The claim that energy consumption would significantly heat up the atmosphere did not sound credible to me so I made a rough calculation. The earth's surface is 510072000 km2. We get about 1 kW/m2 from the sun on the equator which is 1GW/km2. Taking into account the curvature of the globe that roughly translates to an effective surface area of 100 million km2. That makes 100 million billion Watts hitting the earth continuously (10^17 Watts). For the sake of the argument, let's say only 10% of that power makes it into the lower atmosphere and the rest is reflected or immediately re-radiated outwards again. This leaves a conservative 10^16 Watts or 10000 TW coming in from the sun. Global power consumption is about 15 TW.
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