My question relates to the fact that 1- the human population is continually increasing, and 2- everybody is constantly 'doing more stuff' (or causing more to be done). So doesn't 'more people doing more stuff' heat the environment correspondingly more and contribute directly to 'global heating'? Yet I have never heard of this argument, only that of increased greenhouse gas emissions blocking the dissipation of solar heat. I leave out the fact that, as people age, at some point they do a lot less stuff. (However, could they still cause overall even more stuff to be done, e.g. when they get sick and need intensive infrastructure -- care, transport, medicines, operations etc.)
There seems to be the general perception, or claim, that everything is 'getting more efficient', so we are thereby using less energy (and heat production, in my above model?). But some comentators say that this just leads us to use a lot more of the new, more efficient technology, so that overall energy consumption and heating increases. Could telephone use today per capita (and over some unit of time) actually consume less energy than it did in, say, 1960? Offhand, it seems unlikely, especially since the definition of 'telephoning' today is much broader than the 1960s' activity.
Could increasing direct heating of the earth by human activity perhaps not explain why, at present, we are seeing consistently higher global warming measurements than were only recently predicted? (Today's Guardian headline: 'Climate crisis: alarm at record-breaking heatwave in Siberia -- Unusually high temperatures in region linked to wildfires, oil spill and moth swarms'.) (Just consider how much 'new heat' is caused indirectly and directly by one more rocket launch. And of course there isn't 'just one more', but many more.) To be sure, a lot of this heat dissipates with time into space by natural processes. But isn't the global warming argument that the sun's heating of the earth is being accumulated in the greenhouse effect, so why shouldn't the 'direct' heat from human activity, released into the environment, also be captured and add to the overall effect? (Apologies to the experts here who may find my proposal much too simplistic, but I would be interested to hear why.)
