NASA says Earth now trapping an ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat; here are its impacts

Researchers discovered that throughout the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019, the Earth's energy imbalance nearly quadrupled. According to a recent study, the Earth is storing nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, an “unprecedented” rise in the midst of the climate crisis. Read on to know more about the NASA reports and the impact on climate change, global warming and earth absorbing heat.

Studies find Earth's energy imbalance has doubled

The balance between how much of the Sun's radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface, and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits to space determines Earth's climate. A positive energy imbalance indicates that the Earth system is accumulating energy, which causes the globe to warm. Recent research, the results of which were published on June 15 in Geophysical Research Letters, looked at the doubling of the energy imbalance.

NASA and NOAA scientists compared data from two different measurements. The Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite sensor suite from NASA measures how much energy enters and exits the Earth's system. Because the ocean absorbs around 90% of the extra energy from an energy imbalance, the overall patterns of incoming and outgoing radiation should largely correspond to variations in ocean heat content.

"The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth's energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they're both showing this very large trend, which gives us a lot of confidence that what we're seeing is a real phenomenon and not just an instrumental artefact," said Norman Loeb, the study's lead author and principal investigator for CERES at NASA's Langley Research Center.

Human-caused increases in greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, trap heat in the atmosphere, trapping outgoing radiation that would otherwise escape into space. Other changes, such as the melting of snow and ice, as well as increased water vapour and cloud shifts, can exacerbate the warmth. The overall impact of all of these variables is the Earth's energy imbalance. The researchers used a method that looked at changes in clouds, water vapour, combined contributions from trace gases and the output of light from the Sun, surface albedo (the amount of light reflected by the Earth's surface), tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols, and changes in surface and atmospheric temperature distribution to determine the primary factors driving the imbalance.

• the paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters

IMAGE: NASA/TIM MARVEL