Role of anthropogenic direct heat emissions in global warming

TL;DR

This study highlights the significant role of anthropogenic direct heat emissions (AHE) in global warming, showing it accounts for over 6% of Earth's heat increase and has a comparable radioactive forcing to CO2, urging policy reconsideration.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of AHE's contribution to global warming, emphasizing its importance alongside greenhouse gases.

Findings

AHE contributed 6.23% to Earth's heat increase (1970-2010).

AHE's radioactive forcing was up to 29.94 mW/m^2 (1981-2010).

AHE's impact is comparable to that of CO2 in RF.

Abstract

The anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) are widely realized as the predominant drivers of global warming, but the huge and increasing anthropogenic direct heat emissions (AHE) has not gained enough attention in terms of its role in the warming of the climate system. Based on two reasonable assumptions of (1) AHE eventually transfers to the Earth energy system and (2) the net warming is only driven by the net radioactive forcing (RF) from either GHG or other causes, we analyzed the role of AHE in global warming. The mean annual total AHE of the four main sources including energy consumption, residual heat of electricity generation, biomass decomposition by land use and cover change (LUCC) and food consumption was estimated to be 4.41*10^20 J in 1970-2010, accounting for 6.23% of the net annual heat increase of the Earth reported by IPCC AR5 for the period. The mean annual radioactive forcing (RF) by AHE was up to 29.94 mW m^(-2) globally in 1981-2010, less than the annual net increase of total GHG (34.80 mW m^(-2)) but more that of CO2 (24.43 mW m^(-2). The results suggested that AHE played a great role in global warming, urging us to pay more attention to DHE for a better evaluation of RF and more reasonable energy policy including non-GHG energy in the future (Keywords: climate change, anthropogenic direct heat emission, energy, radioactive forcing, heat balance, global warming).