1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."
With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.
Problem solved.
Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!
2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.
3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"
Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.
