Controlling your personal environment by heating and cooling your living space adds heat and green house gases to our environment. Processing raw materials to create the consumer products we use adds heat and green house gases to our environment. On average each person you add to this planet generates an additional 6.5 tons of green house gases and an additional 85 million BTUs of heat to this planet every year.
Heat is a form of energy associated with the movement of molecules. As molecules move faster they gain potential energy and the hotter they become. Here on earth that energy moves from the faster moving molecules (hotter) to the slower moving molecules (colder) in three different ways. If you put a kettle of water on a fire, the heat moves by convection from molecule to molecule through the kettle into the water and heats the water until it boils. If you put food in a hot air fryer and turn it on, hot air is blown over the food to heat and cook that food via convection, which is still heat transfer from molecule to molecule. If you put that same food in a microwave oven and turn it on the microwave radiation passing through the food transfers energy to the molecules of the food, heating the food. As a molecule cools and slows down it also produces radiation which travels outward from the molecule until it hits another molecule and transfers that radiant energy to the other molecule. If that radiation does not hit another molecule here on earth, it will simple continue out into space cooling our planet. There is a natural limit to the radiant cooling of our planet which we reached around 1880. Once that limit was reached our planet began moving the heat we produce from the hotter areas on our planet to the colder areas on our planet through conduction and convection. That is why the poles are heating up faster than the rest of the planet, heat naturally moves from hot to cold. Cities heat up more than rural areas because more heat is produced in densely populated areas by human activity. The human race still uses a fossil fuel, carbon based technology. We reached earths limit for radiant cooling using that technology around 1880 which means the maximum population that earth can support on that technology is the global population of 1880. Every person we have added beyond that limit has been producing excess heat that the earth has to store for future release which in turn heats our planet. As we improve our technology and efficiency the planet can support more people, but we must stay within radiant cooling limit of the planet or it will overheat and we will not survive.