growth so here's an interesting thought. humanity consumes some 16 terawatts of power. which must be radiated away into space. fortunately, the earth is kinda big. so we have lots of area over which to spread this extra heat. still though, it's some 0.024 C. raw. people who study such things say the greenhouse effect introduces a positive feedback multiplier of some 3.8. thank god. otherwise the earth would be frozen solid like hoth. so anywho, that's still slightly less than 0.1C. which is a non-negligible chunk of the observed warming over the past century. note that the source of this energy doesn't matter as long as it didn't come more/less directly from the sun. like solar, wind, and hydro. most of the energy we use would have stayed stored without human intervention. so it counts for our purposes. okay so let's get silly. the earth becomes uninhabitable at 35 C and 95% humidity. that's about 21 C warmer than today. we'd need to burn some 3.7 petawatts to heat ourselves to that temperature. which is an increase of some 230 fold. the past several decades have seen an increase of energy usage of 5% per year. at that rate we'll cook ourselves in 110 years. which is a far far more dire result than what even the most looney ipcc global warming "alarmists" have been predicting. even at 2% growth we all die in 275 years. better buy land on antarctica for your great grandchildren. heh. course that assumes energy usage will grow at an exponential rate. which isn't physically possible. course the converse means that the economy will permanently stop growing relatively soon. if it hasn't already. no matter how much politicians and mainstream economists say otherwise.  ¶ 8:00 AM