Beyond Greenhouse Gases: Triangulating Climate Action for a Just and Safer World

This paper examines the contribution of direct anthropogenic heat, arising from global energy use, nuclear detonations, armed conflicts, and space activities to the acceleration of climate change. While natural variability has historically sustained ecological balance, the present crisis is driven by fast, artificial, and destabilizing forms of heat linked to human activity. Conventional climate discourse remains largely carbon-centric, which obscures these drivers and limits accountability. A mixed-methods approach was applied, combining global energy statistics, cryosphere observations, conflict-related heat emissions, and space activity data with a justice-based policy analysis. The findings show that large-scale energy consumption, past nuclear testing, and recent wars have generated significant heat pulses, while rocket launches have produced localized radiative forcing anomalies. These concentrated forcings, though often excluded from mainstream inventories, can rival civilian emissions per unit time. The study concludes that climate governance frameworks should incorporate direct anthropogenic heat alongside carbon metrics. A justice-based approach is proposed to ensure more comprehensive accountability and to better protect vulnerable regions, particularly in Africa and the Global South.

Climate justice, UNFCCC, IPCC, accelerated climate change, emissions, heat flux, radiative forcings, nuclear detonations, High-altitude pollution

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