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.”
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“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
Someone, somewhere on Earth is doing real science. Not these folks however. Conclusions-driven evidence is now the usual way to build an “academic” career.
And your science based evidence or argument that what they say isn’t the case is…?
Oh the irony…
No! Please say it ain’t so. Can I believe my eyes? Griffy is actually asking someone to supply evidence? You’re right, this is too much.
The fact that the real world consistently refuses to follow along with what the models claim it should be doing.
You are tedious! Many of us here have presented numerous scientific reasons why the alarmist claims have weak support, at best.
griff doesn’t recognize anyone who disagrees with him as a scientist. Which means that he gets to ignore any of these non-scientists.
He never has acknowledged that Crockford is a scientist. Like Humpty Dumpty, a word means whatever griff wants it to mean.
I’ll just offer the Null Hypothesis in response to your inquiry. Falsify that and you’ll gain some credibility here.
What does who say?
I don’t need to read the conclusions of a published “scientific” paper to know from the methods that the conclusions are not reliable. This isn’t a matter of proving it wrong, but rather realizing that the methods are not scientific and of no use to reach conclusions. I spend my whole career reading and acting on scientific publications and in the past publishing and reviewing such papers. The majority of such publications can not be relied on to reach valid conclusions because they don’t abide by the stringent rules of objective science. This is just one more paper fit to line the bottom of a bird cage.
The problem is there is so much we do not know about the oceans that the assumption being made here is one that while certainly deserves argument can not be etched in stone, Large scale cyclical events intersecting or increased hydrothermal events we can’t see can cause it. Here is another inconvenient fact. The warming, especially in the west pac, encourages a change in the GWO in which countering La Ninas can develop. How so. Lower pressures to the west increase easterlies to the east. COuntering that is low solar, which would encourage el Ninos and is why I am not a big fan of sudden cooling due to lower sunspots. Just where is all the heat from the last 200 years of higher sunspots stored? No one seems to want to look at the elephant in the room, that the set up for the last LIA had 200 years of next to no sunspot activity. But the article here does not adress the run up to the current warmer time. In addition there is no runaway warming and that should be brought up, One can see it in daytime max temperatures lagging well behind and again indicating the natural tendency of the system to fight back. . I suspect a very strong La Nina will show up about 2026 at the peak of the solar cycle and turn heads. I agree with the idea of the ocean being a driver,, but I think the assumption made here that its 99% due to human activities is arguable, if not a stretch, But what else can be said? . If someone came out and said the opposite its game set match for his or her career What bothers me is there is no mention of the obviously distorted warming that is taking place and that in a way, the warming is positive if there is more in the north, That means zonal potential energy ( contrast) for the extremes lessens. And since they refuse to quantify mixing ratios which would show this is not as bad as they portray, you cant really see it and certainly the public wont. In his defense. the cleaner air was brought up a big key also. Still, when we see the arctic WARMING in summer, that is when some alarm bells will go off with me, And there is no sign that is happening and in fact its quite the contrary. In the end, we should quit quantifying temperatures and move to wet bulbs, or better still saturation mixing ratios. Given they will expose the fact this is not the emergency that is being portrayed, that is not going to happen
Fascinating this study is out of Princeton, I bet none of them talked to Will Happer
Why would a grad student writing a paper on the behavior of infrared in the atmosphere want to talk to an old white guy who happens to be the world’s leading specialist on the behavior of light in the atmosphere, the guru of adaptive optics?
“Still, when we see the arctic WARMING in summer, that is
when some alarm bells will go off with me, And there is no sign that is happening and in fact its quite the contrary.”
Would you not expect there to be little warming (in air) in summer, considering the vast sink to LH that the sea-ice provides.
You only have to look at the DMI to see that the Arctic sits at near Zero C through summer.
No coincidence that the vast majority is ice at zero C and absorbing LH of melting/fusion at the rate of 334 J per 1 g of ice at 0°C.
Or about 80x that required to raise water by 1C
and 334x that required to warm air by 1C
With respect to how little we know about what goes on in the ocean, there is this recent revelation:
https://scitechdaily.com/undersea-volcano-discovered-near-christmas-island-that-looks-like-the-eye-of-sauron/
Joe, you should hire whoever edited your latest book to edit your comments. I had to re-read it a couple of times to get the full import of what you are saying. It would be great if you took that small comment and expanded it into a WUWT article, going into detail as to the background for your summary statements. The science and import behind wet bulb temperatures and saturation mixing ratios would be an education for many of us.
Why not use all of the available data? Starting in 2001 calls this study into question. It also assumes that changes in cloud cover are the result of human emissions, ignoring all other possible explanations for such changes. Thus it contains the same fundamental flaw as most climate research these days. It ignores the fact that the climate changes quite naturally all the time, without significant changes in TSI or volcanic activity. They continue to ignore ocean cycles as possible causes for change, when ocean cycles are the most obvious reason and are consistent over all time periods. Granted, no one gains power and wealth from such scientific understanding.
The ice cores clearly show that the Holocene is waning and that glaciation is likely in the next 2-4 thousand years. Temperatures will be naturally cooling during the interim, and no amount of CO2 will be able to reverse that trend. This paper, and 99% of climate change ‘science’ today is politically funded and driven, making it advocacy, not science. Success in the industry is simple…feed the false narrative and thrive. Do actual science and be forced to find other employment.
There is a 99% chance that these “scientists” have never done any science. Especially that idiot Shiv, Their Method of Research is “Computational simulation/modeling” which is not science.
I’m confused.
I though the science is settled. That mankind is making the earth boil and the scientific consensus mean’s it’s accepted scientific fact and beyond debate.
If that’s the case why are they still doing “studies” to try to prove it?
Princeton University got it wrong in their very first paragraph with this statement:
“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.”
Because of the enormous heat capacity of Earth’s oceans as well as the latent heat associated with ice-water phase change, our planet never reaches—let alone—maintains equilibrium. There are internal sources/sinks (aka reservoirs) of energy that have time constants that likely exceed 100,000 years . . . interestingly, about the same as the cycle period for glacial-interglacial conditions that have occurred over the last million years or so.
It is nice to look at Kiehl & Trenberth-type diagrams of energy (actually power flux) flows within the Sun-Earth-deep space system with a net “accounting” that shows energy in = energy out, but such represent only a theoretical limit-case condition . . . one never reached in reality. More specifically, K-T-type diagrams and associated “budgets” DO NOT consider flows into and out of energy reservoirs that exist on Earth, thereby enabling misleading steady state calculations.
As but one example, the worlds oceans below the average depth of the deep-end-of-the-thermocline (about 1000m, or 3300 ft; see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/thermocline.html ), are still in the process of warming up from the last glacial period which ended about 12,000 years ago.
I cannot quantify what errors are introduced by leaving “reservoir flows” (my terminology) out of the assumed equilibrium calculations, but I would not be surprised if these actually lead to 10-20% differences between assumptions and reality in terms of the planet having energy equilibrium when averaged over any 100 year or longer interval.
It depends on what the modeler excludes from the system.
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
Ok then.
“The observed changes might be a fluke — just natural variation.”
You got it
A scientist was being interviewed on BBC this week who admitted a trade secret: when you hear “1 %” mentioned as a probability, it means they don’t really have a clue so it’s a default guess based on a hunch. Sounds about right.
If you are going to round off to the nearest percent, one can’t get below 1%!
there is no imbalance … solar energy in = radiated energy out … insulation (GHG) do not stop energy movement … they slow it down is all … it still moves …
This study says differently. CO2 impacts aerosols and clouds; it doesn’t do the old GHG insulation. Its a brave new world.
Biden’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management has called on Biden to wage a war on over population in order to save the environment.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tracy-stone-manning-wage-war-overpopulation
For some reason, organizations with the initials BLM seem to attract the biggest nut jobs.
Oh so that’s what taking the knee is all about – it’s so they’ll hit the guy standing behind you!
Sunlight is much weaker at the poles than it is in the tropics as a result of the footprint being spread out over a larger area, and having a long slant range through the atmosphere, affording more scattering and absorption before reaching the surface. Thus, forcing from insolation is much subdued.
More PhDs that have not heard of Fresnel’s equation for reflectance, and probably have never taken a physical geography class. They also appear to not have heard of bi-directional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/12/why-albedo-is-the-wrong-measure-of-reflectivity-for-modeling-climate/
If modelers are unaware of basics of light transmission and reflectance, then they can’t be expected to develop computer models that will come close to reality.
How is it that they are confident that there is only a 1% probability of natural variation when their TEEI is 0.4 ± 0.2 Wm^−2 decade^−1? That is, they are dealing with only one (justifiable!) significant figure that has an uncertainty of ±50% of the nominal best estimate! Such poor experimental results for a college freshman in a beginning washout-physics course would probably result in a grade of “F,” even today.
What is earth’s in-out IR flux supposed to look like in the absence of greenhouse warming? Rough or smooth – how much variation and on what scales? Is there a null hypothesis to compare against? I think not.
“In addition, the Princeton and GFDL researchers noted that oceans store 90% of this excess heat.”
lol the hydrosphere is ~300x the mass of the atmosphere, the average temperature has barely changed enough to measure
if the politics on this topic were reversed, instead of demanding nonsensical attempts to reduce emissions by making energy more expensive in rich countries which would have no measurable impact on temperatures even if ECS>2 (and we already know it isn’t) they’d be crowing over the generally improved state of Earth relative to a similar cooling cycle
“ Using climate model simulations, we show that it is exceptionally unlikely (<1% probability) that this trend can be explained by internal variability. ”
We keep pretending our models are representations of the planet’s climate. How does this crap get past peer review?
CliSciFi GCMs’ average global temperature vary by 3 C. Each model must have its own unique physics; just modeling evaporation would vary by 3C.
We know none of the systems that contribute to the total energy imbalance to the precision that we claim to know the total top of the atmosphere imbalance. All you have to do is demonstrate one system that climate models do badly and just entire absurd argument collapses. Like snowcover. Can models forecast snowcover? No? Well then your climate simulations don’t tell you dick about what CO2 forcing is doing to contribute to the total imbalance.
The lack of a tropical tropospheric hot spot invalidates most all the UN IPCC CliSciFi models. I understand the CMIP6 models add more hot spots to the troposphere outside the tropics.
They used models that assumed changes in GHG would be the primary cause of changes in RF, and that natural variations were small. In a shocking twist they found that recent changes in RF were larger than could be explained by the assumed to be small natural variation.
Never mind that natural variation caused faster warming just a few hundred years ago, apparently back then the ocean didn’t bother to heat up due to RF changes. Or that the models they used failed to track temperature changes during the same time period as the study.
I can barely force myself to read this pack of obvious lies, when right at the get go we have what we all know are made up facts, that do not coincide with reality in any significant way!
I mean, look here:
“…higher temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, more powerful blizzards and hurricanes, and deadlier extreme events.”
None of those things are true.
All are demonstrably false.
By my calculations, there is a 0.000% chance that any result obtained by this guy and/or any of his pack of kindred spirit lying liars, has any shred of credibility or actual scientific value, whatsoever
As I write this there are 214 comments so I’m expecting it to be ignored. Oh well.
There is one human effect on the local climate which is mostly ignored by both sides of the CAGW debate and that is land use. Pielke Sr. used to be regularly featured on WUWT.
If you take land use into account, the apparent effect of CO2 is reduced by as much as half. If you take atmospheric and oceanic circulation into account, the apparent greenhouse effect is reduced by as much as a half. If you take geometry into account, the back radiation from the upper atmosphere is drastically reduced.
Any climate modeling that doesn’t account for factors like those above and only considers CO2 is almost certainly in error.
Anyway, folks should be paying more attention to land use.
Wow! 1 CO2 effect minus 1/2 CO2 effect minus 1/2 CO2 effect minus ? back radiation reduction equals a negative CO2 effect.
If you try to calculate the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) to CO2 based on the observed temperature trend, and you don’t take into account all the possible sources of error, your calculation will be wrong.
Never forget that the predominant greenhouse gas is water vapor.
What about the evidence that atmospheric CO2 lags temperature?
Could CO2 have a negative effect on temperature? You could dream up a theory to explain that.
Also never forget that the whole CAGW schtick depends on a posited positive feedback where more CO2 causes more water vapor and we get runaway global warming. The positive feedback analysis is misapplied and done wrong.
So, could the ECS actually be negative? Given the complexity of the climate system, that possibility can’t be totally ignored. Anyway, if you add up the probabilities of all the worst case errors you can easily get an unphysical result.
Not to worry, Bob! A grad student has overturned the old CliSciFi “water vapor enhances CO2 warming” meme. One needs to keep up with the current dogma, you know. Almost as good as grad student Mann overturning the MWP and “hiding the decline.” And CliSciFi still supports Mannian “science.”
These folks really lack understanding of error ranges or statistics.
Aw cmon! YouReekAlot! so not even worth reading let alone debunking.
Are we sure this isn’t a project from the journalism department? Didnt this uni department collude with all the activist news outlets to barrage the public with end-is-nigh climate horror porn?
METHOD OF RESEARCH :”Computational simulation/modeling”.
Tailored to suit the Administration Requirements and not even worth discussing further.
From the article: “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.”
What changes? You mean the 0.6C cooling that has taken place since 2016? Did CO2 cause that?