Direct Global Warming (Global Heating)

A thought crosses my mind the other day when I walked into my house from the bitter 28 degree winter and found my living room invitingly warm at around 70 degrees:

"What if global warming isn't caused by the chemical byproducts of the industrial processes we humans use everyday? What if it is a direct result of the HEAT we produce on a massive scale?"

Ignore "greenhouse gases" theories for a second and consider the following:

We have 6.6 billion people on this planet. All of them produce heat in some way (body heat if nothing else). A good percentage of us heat some kind of residence in the winter and cool(*1) it in the summer. The hundreds and thousands of business buildings, sky scrapers, warehouses, schools, shopping malls, etc... are all heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Another thing to note is that we have to heat them continuously through the winter. The heat we produce diffuses through the walls and windows to the outside atmosphere... heating it... continuously.

(*1) NOTE: Cooling a home creates a small amount of heat in the overall system. Heat is produced at the power plant when creating the energy that powers the AC unit. The compressor in your AC unit compresses gases. We all know that pressure makes things hotter. These gases are allowed to run through a set of coils to cool (releasing the heat into the atmosphere outside your home) the cool compresses gases are then decompressed... making them drop significantly in temp. These cold gases are then run through coils to cool air to cool your house... but the amount of heat within that system (indoor and outdoor combined) remains the same. No "cold" is ever produced, only moving the heat from one place to another.

All of the industrial processes we use create heat energy through chemical reactions, most notably burning fuels. Our power plants, both coal and nuclear, that produce all the electrical energy we consume daily release enormous quantities of heat energy into the atmosphere.

The millions and millions of cars we drive every day produce large quantities of heat as well (ever tried to touch your engine after driving). Every plane, boat, train, truck, etc... produces obscene amounts of heat.

It is also notable that endothermic reactions (reactions that absorb heat energy) are comparatively few and far between in the industrial world as a whole.

Is it not possible that these heat sources are capable of resulting in a one or two degree rise (that's all global warming is... a couple degree rise in temp) in temperature globally? The question I present is: Is the rate of earth's ability to shed heat into space great enough to completely overcome the rate at which we produce it... or are we slightly ahead of the curve, producing just enough heat to raise the atmosphere's temperature by one or two degrees?

I'd really like to hear your honest thoughts on this. I tried to do some research but finding numbers for this stuff is impossible since every global warming site out there ignores this possibility completely and gives no useful statistics on human heat production. Please feel free to expand on this theory and add factual statistics if you can find them. Thanks guys!

Air-conditioning is a known source of heat in big cities, specially in areas with a big percentage of office buildings.

And don't know if you live in or near a big city, but if you do you may have noticed that the weather is usually worse (more clouds and rain) on weekends. Some people think that this is a result of the lack of heat from the normal work-day activities, like the presence of vehicles and the functioning of all those heat sources you spoke of.

But I don't think that this only could be responsible for global warming, its just another thing that is helping it.

my mom and dad always used to say we weren't heating the out-doors so close the fire-truckin' door!