The Effect of the Anthropogenic Heat Emissions on Global Warming

The debate on global warming has mainly been concentrated on the effects on greenhouse gas emissions but there are other effects, like anthropogenic heat emissions, that have impacts as well. Anthropogenic heat is wasted heat released by human activity, e.g. the global energy production that makes up more than half of the heat emissions. We found that energy sources differ in their impact on heat emissions. There are three major groups of energy sources, wind and hydro power, solar energy and non-renewable energy sources. Wind and hydro energy would have been transformed to heat even without human interference while solar energy generation changes the albedo which leads to less reflection of incoming sun light. Non-renewable energy sources emit all their chemical or nuclear energy as heat. We use the Climber 3α simulation of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) to determine the impact of various scenarios of global energy consumption on global and regional temperature changes.