Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
I don't want to start any of these circular arguments but there's a whopping 2.5 billion more humans on the earth today compared to 1986. Population growth is playing a role in this as well.
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More humans = more human activities for sure. More cars, more houses, more food being grown and shipped around the world, etc.
Though this made me thing of just the heat output of humans, out of curiosity... if we assume that all the food a person eats is converted to energy and radiated out as heat, humans would be about the same as a 100W light bulb. 2.5 billion humans, 250 billion W. Calgary is 825 million square meters, not sure how much solar irradiance it gets but lets say it gets 1000W/m2, which is about the max on earth, so Calgary is 825 billion W. So 2.5 billion humans heat output is like adding 3.3 times the area of Calgary to the area of the earth. Well actually twice that since only half the earth is facing the sun.
That's like 0.001%? That's more than I would have thought.