Earth is Trapping Much More Heat Than Climate Models Forecast (theconversation.com)
- Reference: 0178227938
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/29/2233252/earth-is-trapping-much-more-heat-than-climate-models-forecast
- Source link: https://theconversation.com/earth-is-trapping-much-more-heat-than-climate-models-forecast-and-the-rate-has-doubled-in-20-years-258822
You discover that Earth's energy budget "is now well and truly out of balance," [1]three climate researchers write at The Conversation :
> Our [2]recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the [3]same conclusions . This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested... These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years...
>
> [T]he burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than [4]two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These trap more and more heat, preventing it from leaving. Some of this extra heat is warming the land or melting sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. But this is a tiny fraction. Fully [5]90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity...
>
> The doubling of the energy imbalance has come as a shock, because the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change. Typically, the [6]models forecast less than half of the change we're seeing in the real world. We don't yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is [7]a big factor . Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds [8]has shrunk , while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
While we don't know why the cloud are changing, it "might be part of a trend caused by global warming itself, that is, a positive feedback on climate change. These findings suggest recent extremely hot years are not one-offs but may reflect a strengthening of warming over the coming decade or longer...."
"We've known the solution for a long time: stop the routine burning of fossil fuels and phase out human activities causing emissions such as deforestation."
[1] https://theconversation.com/earth-is-trapping-much-more-heat-than-climate-models-forecast-and-the-rate-has-doubled-in-20-years-258822
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024AV001636
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0647
[4] https://theconversation.com/two-trillion-tonnes-of-greenhouse-gases-25-billion-nukes-of-heat-are-we-pushing-earth-out-of-the-goldilocks-zone-202619
[5] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ocean-warming/?intent=121
[6] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0647
[7] https://theconversation.com/global-warming-is-changing-cloud-patterns-that-means-more-global-warming-259376
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/19/planets-reflective-cloud-coverage-is-shrinking-and-amplifying-the-climate-crisis-research-finds
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:1)
But, but, it's only 90 private jets
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:5, Informative)
> Elites who lecture you
Completely unrelated to this study, and most of those 'elites' attending Bezos' wedding don't give a damn about global warming.
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4, Insightful)
> Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding [1]https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
I don't remember the elites having lectured me about climate change, though it's entirely possible I wasn't paying attention. Do you have any examples?
[1] https://notthebee.com/article/jeff-bezos-weds-lauren-sanchez-in-lavish-wedding-paid-for-by-your-wife
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding [1]https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
Look. The mega-rich aren't without blame. Granted. But it's a counter-productive point.
Why? Because the environmental impact of those individuals is minuscule compared to us normies en mass . There are 45,000 passenger flights per day handled by the FAA. Statistically, mathematically, factually... those 90 flights don't matter.
Thinking about the mega-rich is just yet another way of shifting responsibility. You can't control their behavior and even if you forbade that wedding, the reduction in poll
[1] https://notthebee.com/article/jeff-bezos-weds-lauren-sanchez-in-lavish-wedding-paid-for-by-your-wife
Re: (Score:3)
these mega rich have immense power and influence, arguably more than the 99% combined, and a good part of them run high emission industries. they could easily do a whole lot more than using 90 jets to attend a photo op in an inconsequential meeting about climate change, not to mention using those jets nearly daily as many of them probably do.
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:1)
They are setting an example, do as I say not as I do
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4, Insightful)
> Next time you or a loved-one is looking at an F-150 or an Expedition
... or you begin to compose a ChatGPT query ...
Re: (Score:3)
> Look. The mega-rich aren't without blame. Granted. But it's a counter-productive point.
It's actually the most productive point in this discussion. The mega-rich own the companies and assets that enable the economy. It's the economy that affects the climate.
The top 1% of people in America own 30% of valuable assets. If you wiped them off the map like Thanos overnight, nothing would work any more. Things work the way they do because the 1% impose their own governance upon their own assets. It's a trickle
Re: (Score:2)
> It's the economy that affects the climate.
No, it's the combustion of fossil fuels that affect the climate.
There's certainly a fossil fuel industry propaganda claim that that's tied inseparably from the economy, but this place is news for nerds , not news for gullible idiots . We can see that just because only 8.5% of France's power generation is fossil fuels, that doesn't mean that their economy in general is in any way reduced from what it would be if they were from fossil fuel sources, nor that Norway's 1.2% of power generation is fossil fuels is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many fallacies did this guy fit into a single sentence?
Re: (Score:3)
I get about four. There's a Faulty Generalization or the fallacy of composition. The vast majority of people informing us about climate change did not attend the Bezos wedding.
There's the Genetic Fallacy. Global warming isn't false because some Elites that we don't like communicate about it.
There's Ad Hominem, specifically appeal to spite. The argument is entirely against a hated subset of the people making the argument, not the argument itself.
The whole thing is a Non-Sequitur fallacy, althou
Re: (Score:2)
Really?
Oprah and Bill Gates own and use private jets?
What should be do about it?
Does that mean that we should not reduce the use of fossil fuels, or that the increasing energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere is problematic?
But the [1]Koch familiy owns several Cessna Citations, five Learjet 45s and three Bombardier Challenger 300s. [simpleflying.com]. Does that mean that cancel out Oprah's jet, and we should reduce fossil fuels again?
I humbly suggest that perhaps the fact that people with all different abilities
[1] https://simpleflying.com/koch-industries-private-jet-fleet/
Re: (Score:2)
> Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding/p>
I will explain climate science to you, and I did not take a jet not a yacht to Jeff Bezos' wedding. In fact, I have never been on a private jet.
The greenhouse effect is real. It is based on basic radiation physics that has been known for well over a hundred years. It is the theory by which we understand the temperature of all the planets with atmospheres, not just the Earth, and is well supported by massive amounts of measurements. Many people have worked hard to come up with an alternative theory in whic
Graph to consider (Score:2)
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
So the question is how hot does it have to get to move Earth's radiating wavelength to 13 microns, off the CO2 peak.
Is there a physicist in the house?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Longwave_Absorption_Coefficients_of_H2O_and_CO2.svg
Re: (Score:2)
You make the earth a bit warmer, create clouds, and a good portion of the band your asking about never reaches the surface into the @thesurface budget, it also does not go to space until the clouds dissipate. Clouds cool during the day, Retain heat under a deck during the Night. But eventually, you get a clear night and the surface radiates IR to a few kelvin of space.
The long term carbon measurement has been proxied, has the long term cloud population and transparency. My bet is more temp, higher c
Re: (Score:2)
Peak blackbody radiation is inversely proportional to temperature, but humans can only survive in a pretty damn tight band of temperatures. Humans would be vaporized or frozen solid before the peak shifts off the CO2 band.
Re: (Score:2)
Just the wavelength of the peak frequency?
Wien's Displacement Law is:
T = (peak)/ 5.879 x 10^10 K
Raise your hand if you're surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised? I have long viewed the worst possibilities as the most likely. The most likely predictions always seemed pretty damn optimistic. We fucked.
Re: (Score:2)
> Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised?
I recommend this NOVA episode [1]Arctic Sinkholes [youtube.com] (full episode) from Feb 2022, described in the articles below.
> In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.
> Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive sinkholes. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future.
- [2]Methane craters documentary highlights rapid Arctic warming [woodwellclimate.org]
- [3]Nova episode explores Arctic methane explosions [uaf.edu]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvKpnaXYUPU
[2] https://www.woodwellclimate.org/arctic-sinkholes-documentary-methane-craters/
[3] https://www.uaf.edu/news/nova-episode-explores-arctic-methane-explosions.php
Re: (Score:2)
No need to depress myself. As I said, we fucked. Even scientists can grasp this.
Re: (Score:3)
Since their solution was "stop burning fossil fuels and stop deforestation", how, pray tell, is a nuclear reactor supposed to help?
Being you were stupid enough to write what you did, I'll just tell you: It won't.
They didn't say what kind of power they wanted to replace fossil fuels- they merely stated that they needed to be replaced. Supplementing them with nuclear power doesn't reduce carbon one iota. They must be replaced, precisely as they said.
I look forward to you dying of old age. You and morons
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You build a Mr. Fusion nuclear reactor and use it to power your DeLorean time machine with which you go back in time several decades and get a whole planet's worth of nuclear reactors started in time to contribute to solving today's global warming problems.
Orrr you could build lots of renewable power today which is cheaper and way faster and doesn't require a time machine, but may cause damage to conservative feefees.
Re: (Score:2)
You had me at Mr. Fusion. When do we start?
Re: (Score:2)
> Orrr you could build lots of renewable power today which is cheaper and way faster and doesn't require a time machine, but may cause damage to conservative feefees.
This seems to be the solution that China is taking, whereas the USA is reversing all the progress they were making along this path. I see it in my own state where the newly elected conservative government has decided that wind farms need to be cancelled but many other non-renewables projects can skip environmental regulations entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
If there was a solution that didn't threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industries, then we would have done it. Nuclear power is certainly something we can do, but nuclear power alone will not save us. If the entire world went all in on nuclear power the same time France did, that certainly would have helped. But there's still steel, concrete, planes, cars, natural gas, and a shitload of other greenhouse gas producers.
Human history is full of examples of civilizations that collapsed because they faile
Re: (Score:2)
> geoengineering and other high-tech approaches. But none of those are satisfying for the people who want to control how you run your life.
Of all the things an elite group of people could do to control everyone else's lives, geoengineering schemes have to rank up there at the very top.
Re: (Score:2)
> They posit one set of solutions, which happens to be the favorite of the woke anti-growth "environmentalist" crowd, but there's also nuclear energy and geoengineering and other high-tech approaches.
This is 180 wrong. Even without "environmentalism", [1]reducing fossil fuels is many times cheaper for the global economy than paying for adaptation to the changing climate that results [lse.ac.uk]. Where "many" is about 7.
It is also incautiously framed if you are genuinely interested in presenting a point of view that you take seriously, and hope that others will take seriously. Environmentalism isn't anti-growth. And transitioning to other energy sources than fossil fuels isn't "controlling your life".
In particular,
[1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/publication/the-economics-of-climate-change-the-stern-review/
Collapse is coming sooner then (Score:3)
Implications of the New Reality
Doubling of heating speed shortens response windows, fuels feedback loops, and spikes instability.
Collapse trajectory is now steeper; best-case scenarios require immediate, unprecedented global action.
Timeframes are collapsing: impacts once expected in the late 2030s-2040s are now unfolding today.
Feedback loops (cloud cover loss, methane, permafrost) are likely to compound rapidly.
Policy inertia is now active harm, as the climate system accelerates beyond our response capacity.
Re: (Score:3)
They won't do a fucking thing until the American breadbasket fails. Even then, they may just fucking take Canada.
The optimists-at-any-cost are nearly as complicit as the deniers.
It's been pretty fucking clear for a long time that we weren't on the middle-of-the-road projections.
Re: Collapse is coming sooner then (Score:2)
Oh yes they will. The will shut down the time honored policy of over-producing food and giving away the surplus through SNAP, through a Big Beautiful Bill, so the starvation can hit harder!
Re: (Score:2)
If nuclear power could help then why couldn't renewable? They both produce electricity which faces similar challenges for fueling vehicles and producing fertilizer. Nuclear is more expensive than renewable and far, far slower to build. If waiting for a solution is dangerous, then nuclear power is the most dangerous of potential solutions. Reactor build time is measured in decades. We should start building reactors now for areas that don't have the geography for renewables, but they'll only be possible to co
Re: (Score:2)
> If nuclear power could help then why couldn't renewable?
Because renewable energy is intermittent and dilute, while nuclear fission is not.
> They both produce electricity which faces similar challenges for fueling vehicles and producing fertilizer.
Nuclear fission does not produce electricity, it produces steam. Steam that is at a high temperature and/or high pressure, steam that is very useful and efficient at producing fuels, fertilizers, and also electricity.
The reason we aren't using nuclear power for anything than electricity right now, excepting maybe water desalination, is new nuclear power plant construction came to a crawl in the 1980s and fossil fuels are stil
Re: (Score:2)
> Because renewable energy is intermittent and dilute, while nuclear fission is not.
Renewables use storage now, so a solar plant still puts out energy in the dead of night. You should look into it.
> Nuclear fission does not produce electricity, it produces steam. Steam that is at a high temperature and/or high pressure, steam that is very useful and efficient at producing fuels, fertilizers, and also electricity.
Synthetic fuels won't work as a mainstream solution, they're incredibly energy-intensive to produce and then they go into engines that turn most of the energy the fuel holds straight into waste heat anyway. So having an advantage for synthetic fuel production isn't much of a positive.
> First, the average build time for a civil nuclear power plant is under eight years.
That's just an average of construction time over roughly the entire history of nuclear power, which doesn't accoun
Re: (Score:2)
> It's not that simple though, isn't that obvious? If it were so simple as putting an end to fossil fuel use then we'd have done that already.
But it really is that simple. We've known about this for decades. The most developed countries during that time had some form of representative government, and we did what people often do when they receive a horrible diagnosis. We pretended it wasn't happening.
We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy. We could have stopped all rural and suburban development and lived in cities that used public transportation as the primary means of getting around. We could have made a strong push for urban ga
Re: (Score:2)
> We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy.
I believe Germany gave that an honest effort. Ask them how well that's been working out so far.
We have at least one good example in France on a nation that has maintained a high standard of living while keeping CO2 emissions low. They did that with nuclear fission. France did have a plan to phase out nuclear fission, following Germany's lead on moving to renewable energy, but that didn't survive Russia cutting back on natural gas supplies to Europe. It appears that now it is Germany following France no
Models Wrong but Actually Right (Score:2, Informative)
> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change
Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:
Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?
Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.
I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total
Re: (Score:2)
> Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?
Vladivostok, Russia is slightly south of Oza, Spain. In January, the mean daily maximum temperature is 10C in Oza, but -8C in Vladivostok. The difference is about half due to the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).
So the collapse of the AMOC, would cool Europe and the UK by something like 10C, and correspondingly increase the heating of tropical West Atlantic. It is still considered an approaching tipping point. [1]Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course [science.org]
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
I'll bet (Score:2)
It's more of less and less areosols that's making the difference and the models not accounting for that, more countries are scrubbing soot and SO2 out which makes the climate hotter because areosols in the upper atmosphere have a cooling effect
Re: I'll bet (Score:2)
As good a bet as any, theyâ(TM)ve observed it in a localized way in shipping lanes. What I do not understand is why the higher ocean temps are not increasing evaporation rates and cloud cover.
Sounds like ... (Score:2, Troll)
... the climate model forecasts are garbage. Remind me again why we should pay attention to them if they are wrong?
Re: (Score:2)
> ... the climate model forecasts are garbage.
No, they're accurate. [1]Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming [science.org].
> Remind me again why we should pay attention to them if they are wrong?
Leaving aside that they're right. The reason you should pay attention to them is that they can be used to uncover the mechanisms at play, and therefore the have insight into the impacts of various actions or inactions.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming
The evaporation rises exponentially with temp (Score:2)
This according to Grok and common sense science, all base science point to a linear or gently exponential relationship of cloud cover to ocean temps. The anomaly is that this is not happening. The hope is that somewhere whatever that is will go away, and we will all be living in Seattle until we get the CO2 under control.
Excellent (Score:3)
We can be parboiled even faster.
Like boiling a frog (Score:3)
The heating has been sufficiently gradual that much of the public is in denial about it.
(an obsolete metaphor, a frog really will generally jump out when the pot is gets too hot, no matter how slowly you increase the temperature)
Re: (Score:2)
> (an obsolete metaphor, a frog really will generally jump out when the pot is gets too hot, no matter how slowly you increase the temperature)
The frogs in those experiments were basically lobotomized. Which might actually make it a more apt analogy these days.
Re:YOU are the one in DENIAL (Score:4, Funny)
I only do this because George Soros has a party every year on his yacht for the scientists, journalists, and influencers working to propagate the climate change hoax. Last 10 of them have been epic and I hope to attend again.