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Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash

How do you measure climate change? One way is by recording temperatures in different places over a long period of time. While this works well, natural variation can make it harder to see longer-term trends.

But another approach can give us a very clear sense of what’s going on: track how much heat enters Earth’s atmosphere and how much heat leaves. This is Earth’s energy budget, and it’s now well and truly out of balance.

Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested.

In the mid-2000s, the energy imbalance was about 0.6 watts per square metre (W/m2) on average. In recent years, the average was about 1.3 W/m2. This means the rate at which energy is accumulating near the planet’s surface has doubled.

These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years. Worse still, this worrying imbalance is emerging even as funding uncertainty in the United States threatens our ability to track the flows of heat.

Energy in, energy out

Earth’s energy budget functions a bit like your bank account, where money comes in and money goes out. If you reduce your spending, you’ll build up cash in your account. Here, energy is the currency.

Life on Earth depends on a balance between heat coming in from the Sun and heat leaving. This balance is tipping to one side.

Solar energy hits Earth and warms it. The atmosphere’s heat-trapping greenhouse gases keep some of this energy.

But the burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than 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 90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity.

Earth naturally sheds heat in several ways. One way is by reflecting incoming heat off of clouds, snow and ice and back out to space. Infrared radiation is also emitted back to space.

From the beginning of human civilisation up until just a century ago, the average surface temperature was about 14°C. The accumulating energy imbalance has now pushed average temperatures 1.3-1.5°C higher.

Ice and reflective clouds reflect heat back to space. As the Earth heats up, most trapped heat goes into the oceans but some melts ice and heats the land and air. Pictured: Icebergs from the Jacobshavn glacier in Greenland, the largest outside Antarctica.
Photo by Alexander Hafemann on Unsplash

Tracking faster than the models

Scientists keep track of the energy budget in two ways.

First, we can directly measure the heat coming from the Sun and going back out to space, using the sensitive radiometers on monitoring satellites. This dataset and its predecessors date back to the late 1980s.

Second, we can accurately track the build-up of heat in the oceans and atmosphere by taking temperature readings. Thousands of robotic floats have monitored temperatures in the world’s oceans since the 1990s.

Both methods show the energy imbalance has grown rapidly.

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 models forecast less than half of the change we’re seeing in the real world.

Why has it changed so fast?

We don’t yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor.

Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.

It isn’t clear why the clouds are changing. One possible factor could be the consequences of successful efforts to reduce sulfur in shipping fuel from 2020, as burning the dirtier fuel may have had a brightening effect on clouds. However, the accelerating energy budget imbalance began before this change.

Natural fluctuations in the climate system such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation might also be playing a role. Finally – and most worryingly – the cloud changes might be part of a trend caused by global warming itself, that is, a positive feedback on climate change.

Dense blankets of white clouds reflect the most heat. But the area covered by these clouds is shrinking.
Photo by Marc Wieland on Unsplash

What does this mean?

These findings suggest recent extremely hot years are not one-offs but may reflect a strengthening of warming over the coming decade or longer.

This will mean a higher chance of more intense climate impacts from searing heatwaves, droughts and extreme rains on land, and more intense and long lasting marine heatwaves.

This imbalance may lead to worse longer-term consequences. New research shows the only climate models coming close to simulating real world measurements are those with a higher “climate sensitivity”. That means these models predict more severe warming beyond the next few decades in scenarios where emissions are not rapidly reduced.

We don’t know yet whether other factors are at play, however. It’s still too early to definitively say we are on a high-sensitivity trajectory.

Our eyes in the sky

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.

Keeping accurate records over long periods of time is essential if we are to spot unexpected changes.

Satellites, in particular, are our advance warning system, telling us about heat storage changes roughly a decade before other methods.

But funding cuts and drastic priority shifts in the United States may threaten essential satellite climate monitoring.