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Earth has been trapping heat at an alarming new rate, study finds:
The amount of heat trapped by Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun's energy was entering Earth's atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up.
[...] The researchers think that the reason the Earth is holding on to more heat comes down to a few different factors. One is human-caused climate change. Among other problems, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more heat they trap. It gets worse when you take into account that increasing heat also melts ice and snow. Ice and snow can help the planet reflect heat back into space — as they disappear, more heat can be absorbed by the land and oceans underneath.
There's another factor at play too — natural changes to a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Between 2014 and 2019, the pattern was in a 'warm phase' which caused fewer clouds to form. That also meant more heat could be absorbed by the oceans.
Journal Reference:
Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, et al. Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth's Heating Rate, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093047)
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday June 27 2021, @06:19PM
I am aware of the notion, though I didn't know it was called Jevon's paradox. It certainly holds with computing power. Tremendous advances in graphics and other capabilities, memory, speed, and storage have only served, it seems, to whet the appetite for more. I had guessed, wrongly, that because 24 bit True Color surpasses what our eyes can see, there'd be no appetite for even more depth, but there's 30 bit Deep Color, and on up to 48 bit. And it does make sense, as necessary for polished image processing work.
I'd say there's room for more nuance. Travel, for instance, costs time as well as energy. One of the things about our current society is that we've shrugged off this great expenditure of time. It used to be that traveling to the next county, 30 miles away, was thought a longish trip, not to be done regularly. Now though, that same trip, if it is within a great metropolis, seems more local. It's crazy how far people are expected and willing to commute to a job. Worse, I know people who were suckered into making house calls all over a large city, for no extra pay, because it didn't occur to them that all that travel was costly, they're so conditioned to driving long distances and thinking nothing of it. I pointed out that $30 per hour, with the employer paying only for time spent at the site, was a ripoff when the employee had to spend an unpaid hour in travel time for each paid hour. Lowered the effective pay rate to $15 per hour. Yeah, sure, the employee got to deduct travel expenses from his income tax, but that's no real compensation, that's merely an offset for all the fuel use and wear and tear on the employee's privately owned vehicle.
Anyway, no matter how cheap fuel gets, travel still takes time, and reductions in energy use will therefore not all be taken to increase consumption. Travel speed could be increased, of course, but there are many challenges towards making, say, 120 mph the new standard in ground travel speed.