Orsdxy

So I'm very far from a climate scientist but I've always wondered, why don't things like electric heaters, lightbulbs, etc, contribute to climate change, or even things like the accelerated decay of radioactive materials -- human caused factors. I'm fairly sure it's due to the equilibrium being very stable to relatively small factors that we humans contribute and it can simply radiate away into space, but I honestly have no idea.

A simple calculation I did just now after thinking about it in some more depth put it this way: If every human had 100x 100W fluorescent lightbulbs (5% efficiency) each and were to leave them on for a year. I feel this maybe an overshoot by a few order of magnitudes but my aim is to account for other heat sources that take the average over the humans average
We'd have Power output as heat:
$$E_{heat} = 0.95 * 100 * 100 * (60*60*24*365) * (7.5 * 10^9) = 2.2 * 10^{21} J year^{-1}$$
Then with maybe a too simple $E=mcDelta T$ equation

The atmosphere has a mass of about $5.15×10^{18}$ kg (Wikipedia)

specific heat capacity of air:

SHC of air 0.716 https://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/property_tables/air/air_cp_cv.html

$$E_{heat} = M c Delta T$$

$$2.2 * 10^{21} = 5.15×10^{18} * 716 * Delta T$$
$$=> Delta T = 0.6K / year$$

Small amount for what I feel is still a gross overestimation of 100x 100W lightbulbs per person as an internal energy output, but why isn't this a factor especially as the world becomes more energy hungry? Is it 'heat neutral' I find it hard to imagine that something even like a wind turbine generating the electricity would decrease the heat energy in the air more than an electric heater powered off of it would. And why large nuclear energy sources human accelerated don't play a large effect.

The power involved does not represent a significant fraction of the total energy budget, so it can normally be ignored. Assuming (per Wikipedia Solar Energy) that the energy received on earth from the sun is about $3times 10^{24} text{J/year}$ and total energy production on earth is (per Energy Consumption) about $6 times 10^{20} text{J/year}$, worldwide energy production would represent a value of 0.02 on this chart.

There's a huge amount of fudge there. The value really represents energy consumption, so the heat output of production will be greater. At the same time, production from water/solar/wind are counted, when they do not produce additional heat (since it's already counted in the solar figure). But the figures would need a 50x boost to even reach a 1 on the chart.

The forcing due to CO$_2$ is much larger. For example "business as usual" is RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway) which will give 8.5 W/m$^2$ extra heat due to greenhouse gases in the future. Over the whole surface of the Earth, that is $4.10^{15}$ W or $10^{23}$ J/year.

With that calculation using heat capacity, that would create very a rapid rise in temperature of the atmosphere, year after year. It is not the proper way to analyze the effects of an extra forcing. Instead, one should look at steady state. Currently, the surface of the Earth radiates about 400 W/m$2$. An additional 8.5 W/m2 means a 2 % increase. Because of the Stefan-Boltzmann $T^4$ law, this would in steady state give a 0.5 % rise in temperature, about 1.5 degrees. (Very crude back-of-the envelope estimate)

Almost all household consumption of electric energy produces equivalent heat, and this does contribute to heating the planet, no matter how the electric energy was produced.

Similar thing is true for many (probably most) industrial use of electric energy - most of it dissipates into heat and turns into internal energy of atmosphere and Earth crust. This too contributes to heating the planet.

Whether this effect on warming is substantial when compared to warming due to rising $text{CO}_2$ is not obvious. We can compare the two effects by comparing their contribution to net energy dumped into atmosphere in the form of heat.

For radiation, increasing $text{CO}_2$ at current rate is reported to provide around 3 W (2016$^*$) of power per squared meter of Earth's surface more than in balanced radiative equilibrium state, thus $4.8text{e}22~text{J}$ per year (this number increases in time as concentration of $text{CO}_2$ increases). On the other hand, the net energy production per year (2015) is estimated to $5.5text{e}20~text{J}$ and this energy eventually ends up heating the planet too.

Comparing the two powers, human energy production has around 1% of effect of the greenhouse gases emissions, not substantial, but still a noticeable effect. In time, the importance of energy production will probably somewhat increase (if $text{CO}_2$ emissions are lower than today).

Decreasing impact of energy consumption is very hard, especially in developing countries that play catch-up to the developed countries. Certainly it is much easier to convince people to limit/stop burning coal and fossil fuels and use other sources of energy, than to limit/stop consuming equivalent energy in electrical devices.

$^*$ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

Power output as heat:
Eheat=0.95∗100∗100∗(60∗60∗24∗365)∗(7.5∗109)=2.2∗1021Jyear−1

Presumably, that 0.95 refers to the lightbulb being 5% efficient. However, that is incorrect reasoning. Efficiency does not refer to how much is turned into useful work instead of turning into heat, it's how much is turned into useful work before turning into heat. If a lightbuld produces 95W of heat and 5W of light, that light is eventually absorbed by something, and that something will then be heated up. So all of the energy of the lightbulb eventually turns into heat. Pretty much every use of energy eventually turns into heat, with only a few exceptions (an example of an exception would be that any energy used to build a skyscraper that goes into lifting building materials doesn't turn into heat ... at least not unless the skyscraper is demolished), and those exceptions are a tiny percentage of energy usage.

The atmosphere has a mass of about 5.15×1018 kg (Wikipedia)

specific heat capacity of air:

SHC of air 0.716 https://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/thermo/property_tables/air/air_cp_cv.html

Both the mass, and heat capacity, of land/water is much larger than that of air, and for air to remain at a high temperature, the ground and water below it has to be brought up to that temperature. You can have a region with cold ground and warm air, but for that situation to persist, that warm air has to be coming from someplace else that does have warm ground/water.

Small amount for what I feel is still a gross overestimation of 100x 100W lightbulbs per person as an internal energy output, but why isn't this a factor especially as the world becomes more energy hungry?

Besides this being a tiny proportion of the total heat, it's not permanent. The main concern over CO2 is not that emitting CO2 in 2019 will make the Earth hotter in 2019, or even 2020 or 2021, but that all the CO2 emissions are cumulative, and thirty years from now we'll still be dealing with the effects of CO2 emissions from today. The urgency of anti-warming activists is based on the premise that global warming has a lot of momentum, and it will take a lot of time to turn around warming trends. Simply adding heat to the system, on the other hand, doesn't have the same long-term effects. Heat causes objects to radiate heat. Without the greenhouse effect, raising the Earth's temperature means that it radiates more heat, and so without a constant influx of new heat, it will cool back down. So even if we were to raise the Earth's temperature by turning all our heaters on full blast, this wouldn't be a threat to later generations the way that CO2 emissions are asserted to be. CO2 reduces the amount of heat that the Earth emits, and so can permanently increase the equilibrium temperature.

Is it 'heat neutral' I find it hard to imagine that something even like a wind turbine generating the electricity would decrease the heat energy in the air more than an electric heater powered off of it would.

If you stick a heater next to wind turbine, all of its energy is coming from the energy being taken from the wind, and all of that energy would have turned into heat anyway (see my first paragraph). For the heater to result in a net increase of heat would be a violation of conservation of energy. Same with renewal energy in general, such as solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wave.