re: #545 Thanos

Forgetting all about carbon dioxide for the moment, can you drive it to work without the engine contributing radiant heat that otherwise wouldn’t be there?

The direct heat emissions of auto engines are of no consequence outside city limits. Urban heat islands are just that: islands.

Imagine 9 billion people, each driving 10 000 miles per year in a 20 mpg vehicle. That’s 4.5 trillion gallons of gasoline a year. Grabbing numbers from an energy conversion chart gives that this would amount to 0.0185 percent (2 parts in ten thousand) of direct solar energy hitting the earth.

On the other hand, that much driving would contribute a lot to world CO2 levels. Using more search engine facts (Wikipedia for CO2 stats, and an energy conversion chart for carbon content of a gallon of gasoline, it works out that just from all that driving, we’d be pushing up world CO2 levels by about 5 percent per year.

To put this in perspective, such driving, alone, would in just 7 years match all the increase we’ve seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
If there is anything at all to the calculations that point to a degree or two temperature increase from that extra CO2, we’d be looking at 1 whole degree every 7 years.

Before centuries were out, North Dakota would have the climate of Texas, and anywhere south of that would be verging on unlivable. And that’s not counting other sources of CO2.