Earth’s energy imbalance continues to grow. Sign that we are not managing to control climate change
Calculated in watts per square meter, the parameter rose by 50% from 2006 to 2020. All extra heat that affects climate change
The Earth’s energy imbalance continues to grow and has increased by almost 50% in the last 14 years compared to the one accumulated in the last half century. It does not mean that we will lose orientation or that at some point it will be too difficult to walk on the Earth’s surface, but that the difference between the amount of energy coming from the sun arriving on Earth and that returning to space is increasing.
These are important measurements, because they give a better idea of how much the international community is managing to control climate change than others. It tells us whether, how much, how fast and where the Earth’s climate is warming. In addition to all this, it helps to predict how this heating will evolve in the future.
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And from the results, we don’t seem to have a bright future. The calculations have worked about seventy researchers from different institutes in 15 countries of the world, processing data from oceans, earth, ice and atmosphere. The conclusions were published in a study in the open access journal of Copernicus Publications, a spin-off of the EU satellite survey initiative.
A “deranged” planet
They say the Earth has accumulated almost 0.5 watts on every square meter of the Earth’s surface since 1971. More recently, from 2006 to 2020, heating increased to more than 0.75 watts per square meter. Almost 90% of the heat has been accumulated by the oceans, while the remaining 10% has ended up in land (6%), ice (4%) and atmosphere (1%).
“The inventory of Earth heat in this study is supported by a global multidisciplinary collaboration and demonstrates the fundamental importance of joint efforts to monitor climate change,” write the authors of the study.
The question is: what awaits us now? In part, we already know this and this data comes to confirm a very critical situation. “One of the most direct implications of a positive energy imbalance is the rise in global average surface temperature – read research – The accumulation and storage of excess anthropogenic heat leads to ocean warming and thermal expansion of the water column, which, together with the melting of the land ice, leads to the rise of the sea level”. The accumulation of heat in the Earth’s system “also leads to the heating of the atmosphere, in particular to an increase in temperature in the troposphere“, while for the mainland, it means “an increase in soil heat storage, which in turn triggers an increase in soil surface temperature, from which an increase in soil respiration and a decrease in soil water can result”.
