Earth’s energy balance sheet is in the red, leading to higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Sunlight in, reflected and emitted energy out. That’s the fundamental energy balance sheet for our planet. If Earth’s clouds, oceans, ice caps and land surfaces send as much energy back up to space as the sun shines down on us, then our planet maintains equilibrium.
But for decades, that system has been out of balance. Sunlight continues to pour in, and Earth isn’t releasing enough, either as reflected solar radiation or as emitted infrared radiation. The extra heat trapped around our globe — some 90% of which is stored in the ocean — adds energy to worldwide climate systems and manifests in many ways: higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events.
While climate scientists have warned for a half-century that this was the inevitable result of adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, so-called climate deniers have continued to suggest that the observed changes might be a fluke — just natural variation.
“Until now, scientists have believed that because of the short observational record, we can’t deduce if the increase in the imbalance is due to humans or climatic ‘noise,’” said Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, a graduate student in atmospheric and oceanic sciences (AOS) at Princeton. “Our study shows that even with the given observational record, it is almost impossible to have such a large increase in the imbalance just by Earth doing its own oscillations and variations.”
He and his co-authors used satellite observations from 2001 to 2020 and found that Earth’s “energy imbalance” is growing. Raghuraman worked with David Paynter of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a NOAA-funded national laboratory located on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus, and V. “Ram” Ramaswamy, director of GFDL and a lecturer with the rank of professor in geosciences and AOS at Princeton University. Their paper appears today in Nature Communications.
“It is exceptionally unlikely — less than 1% probability — that this trend can be explained by natural variations in the climate system,” said Raghuraman.
So what has caused the growing energy imbalance?
“We always think, ‘Increasing greenhouse gases means trapping more infrared heat’ — the classic greenhouse effect becomes larger,” said Raghuraman. “This is correct, but the flip side is that the resulting warmer planet now also radiates more infrared heat away to space, so the greenhouse gas heating impact is cancelled. Instead, much of the imbalance increase comes from the fact that we are receiving the same amount of sunlight but reflecting back less, because increased greenhouse gases cause cloud cover changes, less aerosols in the air to reflect sunlight — that is, cleaner air over the U.S. and Europe — and sea-ice decreases.” (Bright white sea ice reflects much more sunlight than sea water, so as sea ice melts, Earth is becoming less reflective.)
In addition, the Princeton and GFDL researchers noted that oceans store 90% of this excess heat. Because of this close relationship between the growing energy imbalance and ocean heating, the Earth’s energy imbalance has important connections to marine health, sea-level rise and the warming of the global climate system. The researchers hope that tracking the historical trends in this energy imbalance and understanding its components will improve the models of future climate change that drive policymaking and mitigation efforts.
“The satellite record provides clear evidence of a human-influenced climate system,” they said. “Knowing that human activity is responsible for the acceleration of planetary heat uptake implies the need for significant policy and societal action to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to curb further increases in Earth’s energy imbalance.”
###
“Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance,” by Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, David Paynter and V. Ramaswamy, appears in the current issue of Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24544-4). The research was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (award 80NSSC19K1372), the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, and the Mary and Randall Hack ’69 Research Fund.
JOURNAL
Nature Communications
DOI
10.1038/s41467-021-24544-4
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
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About as unlikely as the US women soccer team would loose with 0-3 against Sweden.
“You are a looser.” – Rudi’s grammar teacher.
When you concentrate on how woke you want to be, instead of the game you are supposed to be playing, it’s amazing the things that can happen.
I’m sorry but did you just say that all of the US womens soccer team are loose?
90% of the energy went into the oceans, yet the average temperature went up some fraction of a degree. I’ll run around screaming about the climate emergency after I finished my coffee. Yawn. We’re all doomed. Yawn.
I think I see the problem:
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
Just wondering how else it could be done?
Perhaps look at the data?
You’re right, such a pointless exercise in alarmist projection could not be done using actual data. Only climate models produce such obtuse nonsense.
How about observations, measurements, and use of historical records?
Climate modelling is Cargo Cult Science, and thus utterly worthless.
It’s a shame what college students are being taught these days. Climate science turned on its head… Draw the conclusion then fill in the blanks to support the narrative.
No. I think that’s how climate science got started in the 70’s and that’s pretty much how it’s continued since. I think it’s fair to say that modern climate science bears no relation to the excellent research that has been done by most reputable physicists over the years.
Temperatures have been relatively flat since about 2000, when incidentally co2 started increasing at a high level, especially in China and India. CO2 greenhouse theory therefore disproved.
After careful consideration and research, I estimate the chance that these “scientists” are correct to be 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001%.
Give or take.
Hrm. Can we see the error range on that figure please? It does seem to be a little bit high.
Earth’s energy balance??? There is no balance. The system is not perfect and is chaotic so a sustained balance is not possible. It will strive toward a balance as opposing forces tug at each other but can only be achieved for an instant while changing from one state to another.
What is inevitable is that it will change which is evidenced by the large climate variations throughout the Earth’s history.
Some time ago Kip Hansen posted this illustration of a chaotic system and that’s only with two parameters. Just think how chaotic the climate system is. Besides that there’s this from the IPCC:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
WayBackMachine
I use that quotation almost weekly buy the AGW true believers just slough it off as unimportant. Hell, astrology has a better track record than modern climate science.
“Earth’s energy balance??? There is no balance. “
Of course there is!
If not then either the Earth would slowly cool.
Over an extended period.
Or slowly warm.
It is.
Just because there is necessary “noise” in such a complicated system as it moves absorbed heat around (weather).
It does NOT mean there is not (or should be after an appropriate amount of time following extreme orbital characteristics) an overarching energy balance between that absorbed from the Sun and that emitted back to space by the Earth.
I see you believe that whatever imbalance may exist, must be permanent.
The reality is that the so called balance constantly shifts, sometimes incoming exceeds outgoing, sometimes outgoing exceeds incoming.
The causes, sizes and durations of these shifts occur quite naturally and have been happening since the Sun first started fusing hydrogen.
Exactly right.
Or, both, “over an extended period.”
And it is obvious that both have happened in the past.
Non – linear! What part of that do you fail to grasp? There is no straight – line, steady state system; the Earth appears to exist almost in a constant state of change, warming then cooling then warming again. Which really shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise given daily and annual rotation does exactly the same flipping thing at any point on the Earth’s surface.
As I have been saying ever since they adopted the equivocal term “climate change” and left global cooling and AGW in the dust. Change is the default condition of what is improperly called climate.
Yes, and consequently we have seasons over a large part of the earth.
As the Earth orbits around the sun, it’s distance from the sun varies. Since the Earth has mass, the energy flows both into and out of the Earth will always be out of balance.
Add in daily rotation and axial tilt and it becomes a very complicated cyclical process. I’ve thought for a while now that there is almost a fractal pattern quality about the change in temperatures on a daily, yearly and longer period cycles.
Don’t forget the helical path our planet follows around the Milky Way.
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Yep, it’s complete bollocks. File it in the “ignore” tray.
Rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiigggghhht..
https://rclutz.com/2021/05/08/adios-global-warming/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/03/el-nino-and-the-lengthening-new-pause-now-6-years-10-months/
Nineteen years is absurd. Last UAH put global temp back to 1988. Watching for July’s
Yes it did – and only 20 months ago it was 0.6C higher.
While 5 years ago it was at 0.7C higher.
Having fallen to something similar to now between.
Back 9 years ago it was 0.4C lower than now and a full 1.1C lower than the peak in 2016!
All meaningless in terms of the long-term trend
Why is it SO difficult to grasp that there IS NV in the climate’s GMST?
The ENSO cycle being by far the greatest modulator of that.
The test of the long-term trend in Mr Roy’s UAH V6.0 is in the line of least squares though it from 1979 to now..
It stands (from his website) at …..
“The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).”
Thank you for pointing out the UAH6 0.14 C/decade trend from its beginning in 1979, Anthony. That was a period of significantly increasing CO2 atmospheric concentrations. It also included a period of cyclical upswing in the long-term minor secular warming from the Little Ice Age. That pretty much puts a hard cap on how much warming we should expect in the future.
less than 1% of climate experts understand the nature …
This kid now has it made for the next few years, in terms of grant funding.
Assuming his destruction of the GHG ‘blanket’ theory goes unnoticed.
They have a simulation model that starts with the assumption that 90% of the extra heat is stored in the oceans. If they’re off by 1% in the estimate of the assumption that explains their result, pretty much completely.
The consensus or flat-Earth model, literally (e.g. simulation), and socially. One step forward, two steps backward.
Flat earth, fixed point with the sun moving around it by the look of things. More than 2 steps back – this model is pre – Galileo!
Perhaps these pinheads will toddle through and see it, so I will ‘splain it one more once. The climate changes constantly, always has and always will. Humans are not causing it to change and can not stop it from changing. CO2 is plant food not pollution, more is better, less is bad. In summation hubris is not a positive character trait, check yourselves before you wreck yourselves.
Let ’em knowingly have a wasted life. They only get one.
The old, if it’s caused by man, it must be bad line of religious thinking.
Why can’t man cause bad things? Climate change is a bad thing and man caused it.
Climate change is a recurring phenomenon of unqualified character. Warming has generally positive effects for the viability of humans, fauna, and flora.
Struggling with evidence-free assertions again griff. Why don’t you do what you think you do best and give us a Polar sea ice report …..
…. oooooh err, not today. That link isn’t evidence-fwee and it’s howwid. Waaaaah, where’s my Mummy.
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, is it.
I never said that man can’t cause bad things. I said that these people make the assumption that any change caused by man is bad. If you can’t see the difference, then there is no hope for you. (Then again, we already knew that.)
There is no evidence that climate change is bad. The climate has been changing since the Earth first developed an atmosphere.
There is no evidence that man is the sole cause of what little climate change is currently happening.
The only change is a slight warming and a little more rain. All good.
Why do you believe that Man can’t cause good things?
“Man caused it” – Griffy you are egotistical beyond belief. Go and get help before you need to be sectioned for your own good.
That’s exactly the opposite of what Mark said, though.
Why can’t man cause GOOD things?
Change is the natural default condition of any chaotic system. Man did not “cause” it and it’s neither a “bad thing” … nor a good thing. It merely exists. The term you use to describe the naturally coupled, non-linear chaotic system “climate change” is a logical fallacy … an appeal to ambiguity … equivocation.
Circular reasoning much?
If there is such a huge imbalance, why isn’t the planet warming by more than it is?
Is this supposed to be a counter argument?
Cue the professional apologists…
It is, though I’m not surprised that you don’t see it.
Don’t see what, genius? 🙂 BTW the planet is not warming by more than it is is because of the numbers, you know, those things scientists are extremely good at.
It’s certainly one of them. There are many more, especially the one showing the study to be fact free.
Fact free? Rory, you’re again confabulating… Please come back if you are able to understand the meaning of “empirical law”. Until you stop being illiterate in basic things you can’t assess whether something is “fact free”.
Prove it.
Clearly you have no idea what empirical means.
That is not an argument. It’s hand waving.
it is only of the order of + 0.4 to 0.8 W/m2.
And ~ 93% is being taken up by the oceans.
Hey I thought it was 90% just a few comments ago? Keep commenting and you’ll get it up to 97% yet.
Now prove it.
The oceans had been warming, both before and after 1950. I’m not sure if current data indicates recent ocean cooling.
Dr. Roy Spencer has done some calculations of ocean warming since about 1950. IIRC, ocean warming since then, from all drivers, is about 1% (maybe up to 2%, stretching it) of the energy flows into and out of the Earth. Read what he has to say about it in his ebook “An Inconvenient Deception.”
That’s for the tip … I shall.
You’re kindly referred to the relevant literature. Just as one doesn’t have to prove the Pythagorean theorem every time, already proved scientific results can be used without proving them.
In other words, you have none and have no clue where to find it if it did exist.
From the “Methods” section: “We analyzed 47 CMIP6 coupled models’ piControl simulations …”
This brand new article in “science” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming contains a message by Gavin Schmidt (NASA); ” Already scientific papers are appearing using CMIP’s unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100, adding fire to what are already well-justified fears. But that practice needs to change, Schmidt says. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.” Nothing more to say.
But Schmidt and the boys still run their CliSciFi models with them and publish their results.
90% of this “energy imbalance” has “gone into the oceans”, where it can’t be measured. How convenient. But, they “know it’s there”. Riiiiiiight.
Yup they know it’s there ‘cos they dyed all the affected water with a blue-green dye. See that’s smart, that is!
There are several OHC timeseries available. For example, Cheng et al. 2021 is one such timeseries. There are others available. Clearly it can be measured. Do you actually mean that you reject the measurements?
The recent ARGO measurements are unalarming. One of the reasons the prior study began in 2005 is that they needed the accuracy of ARGO combined with CERES in dealing with quantities that are miniscule and only now becoming measurable. The science is evolving rapidly and CliSciFi is back in the Climategate stone age.
Dr. Roy Spenser’s work shows an ocean heating-driven EEI that is unalarming.
“higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events…..pretty Polly! pretty Polly!… Polly want a biscuit!”
Add Princeton to the list of Universities NOT to send your children to. Imagine spending the kind of money it cost to go to Princeton and ending up with just another credentialed moron.
Or a supreme court justice or the richest person in the world. 😉
The other possibility is that the oceans have been warmed by some other mechanism and then share 10% of that energy with the atmosphere. They never discount this possibility so the claim about less than 1% chance the EEI increase is natural is nothing but an outright lie.
In fact, ocean warming appears to have started around 200-400 years ago in some places. Here’s one example.
?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1
Not to annoy, but can you give a hint as to how the temperature circa -7000 (or any other time prior to the invention of the thermometer) was determined?
https://www2.usgs.gov/landresources/lcs/paleoclimate/proxies.asp
Actually, temperature is defined as a function of the average velocity or motion of the atoms and molecules of which a substance is composed, correcting for the specific heat. It is very difficult to accurately make such a determination. Therefore, liquids that expand on heating are used as a proxy for the ambient temperature. Liquids contained in a calibrated glass stem are called thermometers. They have a disadvantage that they can only determine the temperature at the instant they are read (with the caveat that Min-Max thermometers retain the range between readings and re-setting). Virtually all temperature measurements, now or in the past, are by proxy.
Thank you.
SO why have we not discovered this extra source of energy heating the oceans that just happens to coincide with a 50% rise in a non-condensing atmospheric GHG?
Why haven’t we noticed this warm water rushing to the surface and causing an anomalous zone/zones of high SSTs ?
After all hot water rises and it has to get to the surface to heat the atmosphere.
The problem is that the error bars on this claimed warming are 5 to 10 times greater than the warming itself.
Only those who are paid to see, can see it.
PS: The planet has been warming for around 150 years. Long before the CO2 levels started rising significantly.
If it was possible to actually measure the oceans warming, such warming wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprising, nor would such warming be evidence of catastrophic CO2 generated warming.
Can you post a link to the dataset you are looking at which publishes error bars 5-10x greater than the warming itself? I’d like to review it too.
Simple, the best sensors have a precision of 0.5C or so, out of the box, degrading as they age.
The claimed temperature rise is about 0.01C.
The number of sensors is pathetically inadequate to measure the entire ocean with any degree of accuracy.
If anything, I gave your side the benefit of the doubt.
Let me be more specific. Which dataset that publishes a global mean temperature timeseries and accompanying uncertainty analysis are you looking at that shows X C/decade of warming and +/-5X C/decade of uncertainty?
He cant as there isn’t any.
Just another perpetual myth on here.
The sensors are accurate to 0.002C
as I have posted up twice in contemporary treads.
For denizens nothing that science can do to measure heat content on the planet is good enough.
Ergo we don’t know enough.
Ergo lets do nothing.
But actually things are being done as fast as is possible in an imperfect world.
So it’s OK
And here is just the remnants of ideological bias in it’s death throws.
Accurate to 0.002C? You are utterly delusional. They can’t get that can of accuracy in carefully calibrated laboratory settings.
Where do they get these numbers? Disneyland?
If you reread what you have just written, I think you have just tried to disprove all of the AGW climate change in one go. Well done. Dasvidaniya Ivan, for you the war is over.
Eh?
The oceans warmed and cooled dramatically without Man’s paltry inputs.
Or they got their sums wrong in the first place and nobody wants to be the first to own up!
First, pull a number you like out of your . . . the air (one that sounds impressive, like 97% or <1%), then make an argument without any evidence that you can assign cause, effect, and predict implications. Collect check.
The basic science says that the Hydrological Cycle halts the Greenhouse effect when the atmosphere becomes saturated with water; but I would NOT expect a graduate student to know that.
The current mindset in our universities doesn’t appear to teach that sort of thing.
Perhaps he should now explain why the ocean temperatures never get much above 32C in spite of millions of years of relentless solar radiation and why this 32C figure. Also what would the figure be in the absence of water?
He’s a young guy, he doesn’t want to get cancelled.
“climate scientists have warned for a half-century that this was the inevitable result of adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere”
Strictly speaking are there are no “climate scientists.” At best they are a jack of all trades (sciences) and master of none. There are various scientific fields with specialized scientists (masters): biology, geology, chemistry, physics and the likes. A biologist has a broad grasp of his field who then focuses on a particular area. He knows enough to critically evaluate the research of other biologists – even if it means first some selective reading up on the topic. The same applies to the other sciences.
Is a “climate scientist” sufficiently competent to draw, analyse and evaluate a huge quantity of climate information from various sciences? Understanding climate requires multidisciplinary contributions. A “climate scientist” can only have a broad grasp of one or two of the contributing sciences. He may not even have a good grounding in Mathematics and Statistics, or perhaps he only specialized in Statistics. If someone disputes his assertions, even someone from the pure sciences, his reflex reaction is to disparage him because he is not a climate scientist.
It may be a generalization but it appears that flawed reasoning and logic is what climate scientists have in common, whether male or female. Perhaps if they spent more time outside and far less pouring over the climate models they would be enlightened.
Well the UK Met Office, who know a thing or two about weather, just presented evidence the UK climate is already changed, having become both warmer and wetter…
Too bad actual scientists who spend their time studying weather, laugh at the clowns at the Met Office.
Griff,
The Met Office may know about weather [climate? Maybe less so?] presented assertions, with some numbers [look carefully cherry-picked to me].
Mike Kendon – lead author, quoted by the BBC at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57988023: –
““As it continues to warm we are going to see more and more extreme weather such as heatwaves and floods.””
But we know that warmed Poles reduces the energy available to causer storms, as the Differences are less.
And the IPCC can’t see what he claims . . . .
Out of interest, in what era do you think was the climate ideal?
You have all of time up to today to choose from.
Please give some coherent reason. Thanks.
Auto
The Met Office talking about rainfall:
” Annual trends are small relative to variability between years”
“It is also unclear how, or if these trends can be linked directly to climate change.”
Don’t worry the useful idiot Grifter will link anything and everything for the good of the narrative.
You apparently don’t know the difference between a meteorologist and a climatologist, which isn’t surprising.
Most climatologists don’t know the difference either.
We can add journalists to that list, also.
I disagree – they presented an opinion which, given their long string of failed forecasts longer than 2-3 days over the past couple of years, I would be inclined to disregard entirely. The Met office has become a rather expensive joke I’m afraid.
The Met office are the SOURCE of the climate goat rodeo. They’re more unreliable than the NASA/GISS clown show.
It should be Meth Office
A process beginning up to 300 years ago. Some multi-decadal periods warm faster while some cool. The late 20th Century was a short period where temperatures were on a cyclic upswing. The whole CliSciFi CAGW fearmongering is based on temperature estimates over a period of about 25 years. Not a very solid foundation for fundamentally changing our society, economy and energy systems.
This!