If you use renewables, you're using heat that is already around on the planet. As long as you don't change planetary albedo, equilibrium temperature is the same.

Of course, heating water locally, etc, can cause its own environmental impacts.

This depends on the renewable.

Hydro, wind and waves are probably at that ideal except to the extent that they are tidal energy.

Solar panels... are literally in the business of making the planetary albedo higher, to the extent that they do so they are introducing thermal energy.

Geothermal is in the business of increasing the rate at which heat escapes from underneath the surface, which increases surface temperature.

Tidal energy is in the business of extracting energy from the kinetic energy of the moon, which probably increases the temperature of earth (but it's hard to say to what degree).

Fusion (if it ever becomes practical, and you count is as renewable) is in the business of releasing potential energy trapped in hydrogen atoms, increasing the temperature. This is particularly problematic because fusion would also enable us to increase our energy usage to the point that direct heating becomes a problem at the same scale as CO2 release currently is.

Fission (if you count it) is like fusion.

Space based solar (if it ever becomes practical), is increasing the area of the sun captured instead of the albedo, and is directly introducing energy.

Etc

this! another way to look at it: your solar panels are temporarily "stealing" heat generated by sun rays hitting a surface of equivalent color. When you use electricity to do some work, it will be turned back to heat. so if you want to be 100% "heat neutral", all you have to do is to ensure that for every square meter of solar panels you also paint an proportionate area with a color that reflects the right amount of sunlight to compensate the difference between the color of the solar panel and the area that was there before you installed the solar panel.

If you think that's silly (and rightfully so), then perhaps that can sharpen your intuition on how insignificant is the total amount of heat produced by our devices (even if cumulatively they are a big looking number); the total amount of radiation that comes from the sun down to earth is staggering.

Solar panels don't work on IR, they work on visible light.

IR might be reflected or absorbed.

The visible component is absorbed. Whether it would have turned into heat or reflected back in to space is about a 1 in two chance.

sorry I don't understand the comment; visible light carries energy too and thus can heat materials it hits. what happens to the IR part of the spectrum is irrelevant and can be captured by the general concept of "color of the object", defined as the spectrum of reflected vs absorbed EM radiation

"Renewable" refers to energy, not just heat. The sun's energy is be used for other purposes than heat, thankfully.

Growing a 100 trees and chopping them into lumber is less hot than growing 100 trees and burning them.

If all the sun's energy were converted to heat (and not radiated away), we'd be in big trouble. That's what "carbon" pollution is all about -- Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat. Reducing albedo is one way to increase tempterature, but directly burning stuff is another way.

I think you missed the point of what I said. When we're talking about powering data centers with renewables, talking about sequestering carbon via lumber is rather orthogonal.

The point was, coarsely: using e.g. solar panels only changes the Earth's surface temperature to the extent it changes albedo. (Ignoring second-order effects of concentrating heat and associated effects on radiation, etc.)

Not necessarily - if (I think this is true but am not able to prove it) the earth is on a slight negative carbon slope, and renewables reduce that slope we are still making an impact on long term temperature.

Actually, in the long-term, waste-heat management is the only problem. Every other problem can be geo-engineered away, but we could never geo-engineer away thermodynamics.

Sure, where "doesn't matter" read "is way way less important than CO2 emissions".

When you say "short term," how long are you talking about?

The similarly extreme version is kind of an interesting comparison, and similarly irrelevant.

The 84,000 ppm for 60 minutes is roughly the lethal CO2 concentration. Local CO2 concentration is often several times atmospheric CO2 levels. That’s clearly addressable but I suspect around 8,000 ppm atmospheric we would start to see deaths from this which is achievable from coal deposits. Reaching a fully lethal atmosphere is of course much harder.

So, I think you’re right temperature pollution at extreme levels is worse.