The radiative heating or cooling of a body placed in an environment, whose temperature
is considered constant is described by Stefan’s law. In this paper, an analysis is made of how a
time-dependent environmental temperature influences the heating/cooling process. We compare
experimental results for a resistor first heated by the Joule effect inside a glass vacuum tube and
then cooled under two different conditions: in a bath at a constant temperature and in air. We also
discuss a model that describes how the time-dependent tube temperature influences the radiative
resistor cooling by identifying the properties of the environment that make the resistor cooling rate