Global Warming: How It Works

 I have a small collection on the bottom shelf of my bookcase of important books.  The books are: How Things Work (4 volumes), Roger Segalat, translated from German; The Way It Works, Robin Kerrod, 1980; The Way Things Work, translated from Italian, 1989; The Way Things Work, David McCauley, 1988; and two massive volumes on the history of science.  That’s what people do – we figure out how things work, and use that knowledge to understand and manipulate the world around us.  

A friend recently asked me, “What is the best argument that a lot of current climate change is caused by humans, through fossil fuel CO2, methane, and other green house gases?  What are the best data and arguments?”   The most important point about climate science is that we know how it works.  It isn’t speculation or correlation.  We simply know how it works.  Since the 1860s or before, people have known that glass bottles filled with CO2 heat up faster than bottles filled with air.  In 1896, the brilliant Swedish chemist Arrhenius calculated how much the earth would warm if CO2 concentration was doubled.  This happened in the same decade that we invented the manual transmission and radio transmission of Morse code, and about a decade after Edison’s electric lightbulb.  Scientific research has continued since Arrhenius, and we know how the CO2 greenhouse effect works just as well as we know how an AM radio, manual transmission, or incandescent lightbulb works.  

We’ve observed and measured the processes that trap heat in the atmosphere and we’ve made predictions of future warming and related events.  To confirm or deny the theory of global warming, scientists set up a system of instrumentation across the planet and in orbit, beginning about 30 years ago.  The data are clear – oceans are warming from the surface downwards, ice is melting in every setting on the planet, and atmospheric temperatures are rising.  We’ve seen the primary predictions of global warming and second-order climate changes robustly confirmed.  Objections and challenges to the data and interpretation have been evaluated and refuted.

How It Works
The entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation includes gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves and radio waves.  The high-energy end of the spectrum consists of very short wavelengths, including gamma rays and x-rays through visible light, while the low-energy end of the spectrum has longer wavelengths, from infrared through radio waves.  

Everything radiates electro-magnetic radiation at some wavelength.  It’s called by several names –Planck radiation, black-body radiation, or thermal infrared radiation.  The kind of radiation emitted by objects depends on temperature.  Hot objects emit high energy radiation with short wavelengths, and cool objects emit low energy radiation with long wavelengths.  The sun primarily emits energy in the visible spectrum, because it is very hot.  Atmospheric gases are transparent to the visible spectrum, so most of the sun’s energy passes through our atmosphere to reach the ground.  Visible light strikes the earth’s surface and is converted to heat.  The warmed earth also emits radiation, but at a longer wavelength (infrared) because it is cool. The earth’s infrared radiation mostly escapes back into space.  Carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane, however, are partly opaque to infrared radiation, depending on the specific wavelength.  These gases trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the air, the oceans and the ground.  The phenomenon is called the greenhouse effect, because glass will do exactly the same thing, keeping a greenhouse warm – visible light goes in, but infrared radiation is trapped inside.  

Image credit: Science News.  The yellow lines are actual IR readings from space, compared to the theoretical Planck radiation from the ocean surface shown in dark blue.  Depressions and divots in the yellow lines represent absorption of upgoing IR radiation by various greenhouse gases, notably CO2.  Differences between the yellow lines represent clear and cloudy skies, with cloud tops having cooler temperatures and a different baseline Planck profile.

The natural amount of CO2 and water vapor in the air keeps the earth at a temperature to which we’ve  become adapted.  If the earth’s atmosphere had absolutely no CO2 or H2O, the earth’s average temperature would be about 33 C colder, causing freezing conditions over the entire planet.

Of the sun’s incoming radiation (341 W/m2), about 29% (100 W/m2) is directly reflected back into space, mostly by clouds.  The remaining 241 W/m2 is absorbed by the ground and atmosphere, warming the Earth.  The Earth radiates energy back into space at a wavelength in the infrared spectrum, balancing the energy input from the sun to create a stable climate for the past 6000 years.  But the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is currently trapping 0.94% (3.2 W/m2) of the sun’s energy reaching the surface.  That heat is ultimately redistributed to the oceans, ice, and air, warming the earth.

This figure simplifies many heat transfers within the atmosphere before energy is either retained on earth or returned to space.  The heat retained by greenhouse gases is given the awkward technical term "radiative forcing".

[Technical note: The sun's radiation, measured in space, has an intensity of 1364 W/m2.  There is a range of reported figures from 1361 W/m2 to 1368 W/m2, depending on the choice of instrument calibration.  The earth receives sunlight according to its cross-sectional area, equal to one-quarter of its surface area.  The earth emits radiation from its entire surface area.  So for a simplified energy budget as shown below, we have to choose a convention of adapting numbers for the cross-sectional area or the surface area of the earth.  Most displays adopt the convention of the whole earth surface area as I've done above.  This requires dividing the sun's input radiation by four, yielding 341 W/m2 to represent the average energy input across the entire earth.]

Under natural conditions, a balance develops between the incoming and outgoing radiation, which keeps the earth’s temperature stable, unless disturbed by other factors such as orbital variation.  The earth’s orbit varies over cycles of 40,000 years and 100,000 years, which triggers feedback mechanisms (including CO2 concentration and reflective ice) producing ice ages. 

Climate-change deniers are fond of saying "The climate has always been changing."  But since the last ice age, for the past 6,000 years, the climate has been stable, as proven by geological studies of sea-level, temperature-sensitive isotopes, and ice-sheet deposits.  This is the entire period of the written record of humanity.  The pre-industrial level of CO2 created a “Goldilocks” climate in which humans and nature thrived.

For the past 150 years, we have burned increasing quantities of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas, and cleared or burned forests to create new farmland.

The CO2 emitted from these human activities has markedly changed the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, from the pre-industrial level of about 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, to the current level of 420 ppm CO2.  Because CO2 is such a potent greenhouse gas, this small change in atmospheric composition has a marked change in retained infrared radiation. 

You might not think that 400 parts per million is enough to change the retention of radiation in the atmosphere.  I’d like to propose a small thought experiment.  Four hundred parts per million is equivalent to four parts in ten thousand, or one part in 2,500.   One ounce of water contains about 600 drops.  Four and 1/6 ounces of water, about a half-cup, contains 2,500 drops.  Imagine, for a moment (or really try) putting one drop of opaque India ink or dark food coloring into a half-cup of water.  The ink noticeably reduces the visible light transmitted through the otherwise transparent water.  It’s the same with CO2 in the atmosphere.  

Climate Feedbacks
There are further processes known as feedback mechanisms affecting the earth’s heat budget.  Feedbacks are processes that are triggered by changes in Earth’s temperature, which either amplify (positive) or diminish (negative) the primary changes.  The strongest feedback effect is the Planck effect, a negative feedback.  As the Earth’s temperature rises, it radiates energy more strongly, counteracting the influence of greenhouse gases.  The balance between the sun’s incoming energy and the Planck effect is what caused the Earth to settle at a stable temperature.  The second strongest feedback is water vapor.  As the ocean surface becomes warmer, the equilibrium humidity in the air rises.  Also, warmer air can hold more humidity, keeping additional water vapor in the air.  Higher humidity is a positive feedback mechanism, because water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas.  So as the planet warms, more heat is retained by water vapor.  As Arctic snow and ice melt, the surface reflectivity diminishes, causing positive feedback.  Climate change increases cloudiness, causing feedback effects.  Clouds are complex as a feedback mechanism, with both positive and negative impacts.  Depending on the type of cloud, the primary impact may be to reflect sunlight, or may be to retain infrared emissions from earth.  Overall, clouds are considered to be a positive feedback.  There are more complex feedbacks involving biochemistry and methane, and fast versus slow feedbacks, but these are generally an order of magnitude less significant than the physical feedbacks.  This is an area of active climate research.

The Planck effect dominates all other feedback mechanisms, and the total impact of all feedback effects is negative.  This is very good, because a simple modeling exercise shows that the global climate would soon irreversibly blow up if the total feedback were positive.  Nevertheless, there are number of authoritative sources on climate feedbacks (notably Wikipedia and Andrew Dessler’s Modern Climate Change) that neglect to mention the Planck effect among climate feedbacks and assert that the net climate feedback is positive.  This is incorrect.

Global temperature change since pre-industrial times is about 1.1 C, so the current total feedback is -1.3 W/m2.  Combining the greenhouse gas effect with total feedback leaves a positive (warming) climate influence of 1.9 W/m2.  

Validation
Climate science predicts that the earth should be warming, due to heating resulting from the buildup of greenhouse gases.  These greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, are unquestionably from human activities (see my blog post, https://dougrobbins.blogspot.com/2019/12/understanding-source-of-rising.html).  We have detailed temperature records for much of the world for the past 150 year or so, and we have plentiful temperature measurements of the oceans beginning in about 1950.  However, early climate data have a few issues with data quality and coverage.

Starting around 1990, scientists put in place a comprehensive set of instrumentation specifically designed to detect and measure global warming.  These systems have corrected some of the issues of data collection from early research, and provide unprecedented coverage of our planet.  The results are unequivocal.  The oceans are warming from the surface downwards; the air is warming over the oceans; the air is warming more rapidly over land; the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet; and continental glaciers, Arctic sea ice, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are melting.  Other, second order effects of the heat are well-proven also, including an acceleration of rising sea level and seasonal changes in physical and biological systems.

There is simply no point to denying that global warming and resulting climate changes are happening due to human emissions of greenhouse gases.  These changes are observed to be accelerating, as expected, due to higher concentrations of greenhouse gases.  Previous predictions about climate change have been highly accurate.  There is no reason to doubt further predictions of serious to catastrophic harm from future climate change unless we greatly curtail emissions of greenhouse gases.

Appendices
Appendix 1
Climate change indicators and sources
Air Temperature Over Land and Oceans
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/

Temperature Anomaly Map, 2016-2022 vs. 1951-1980
Note Arctic warming is more intense than the rest of the planet, as predicted by the Macdonald report in 1979.  Also note that air over land is warming faster than air over oceans.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/

Ocean Heat Content and Temperature
Note that the ocean is warming from the surface downwards.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/global-ocean-heat-content/index3.html
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/global-ocean-heat-content/index.html

Continental Glaciers, World Glacier Monitoring Service
https://wgms.ch/global-glacier-state/

Arctic Sea Ice Extent (July)
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/

Sea Level Rise
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/

Appendix 2, Comparison of Descriptions of Greenhouse Gas Heating
Arrhenius, 1896
“The selective absorption of the atmosphere is…of a wholly different kind [than diffusion of ultraviolet radiation]. It is not exerted by the chief mass of the air, but in a high degree by aqueous vapour and carbonic acid [CO2], which are present in the air in small quantities.  Further, this absorption is not continuous over the whole spectrum, but nearly insensible in the light part of it, and chiefly limited to the long-waved part, where it manifests itself in very well-defined absorption-bands, which fall off rapidly on both sides.  The influence of this absorption is comparatively small on the heat from the sun, but must be of great importance in the transmission of rays [thermal infrared, or long-wave radiation] from the earth.” 
Arrhenius then describes the debate over whether water vapor or CO2 has the greater influence as a greenhouse gas. 

Asimov, 1959
"The light rays of the Sun hit the air, pass through a hundred miles of it, hit the surface of the Earth, and are absorbed. The Earth heats up.  The heated Earth radiates energy at night back into space, in the form of the far less energetic infra-red.  This also passes through the atmosphere.  The warmer Earth grows, the more heat is radiated away at night.  At some particular equilibrium temperature, the net loss of radiation by Earth at night equals that gained by day so that, once the temperature (whatever it is) is reached, the Earth as a whole neither warms nor cools with time.
Carbon dioxide, however, introduces a complication.  It lets light rays through as easily as do oxygen and nitrogen, but it absorbs infra-red rather strongly.  This means that Earth’s nighttime radiation finds the atmosphere partially opaque, and some doesn’t get through.  The result is that the equilibrium temperature must rise a few degrees to reach the point where enough infra-red is forced out into space to balance the Solar input.  The Earth is warmer (on the whole) than it would be if there were no carbon dioxide at all in the atmosphere.  The warming effect of carbon dioxide is called the “greenhouse effect”.
…A recent set of calculations indicate that if the present carbon dioxide level should double, the overall temperature of the Earth would rise by 3.6 C."
Asimov was reporting on the work of G.N. Plass, published in 1958. 

Ramaswamy, 2019
“Interactions of the incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation with Earth’s surface and atmosphere affect the planetary heat balance and therefore impact the climate system.”

Also see:
Ramaswamy, Radiative Forcing of Climate Change, 2001

Ramaswamy, Radiative Forcing of Climate: The Historical Evolution of the Radiative Forcing Concept, the Forcing Agents and their Quantification, and Applications, 2019

R. J. Bantges & H. E. Brindley, On the Detection of Robust Multidecadal Changes in Earth’s Outgoing Longwave Radiation Spectrum, 2016

A. Dessler, Modern Climate Change, Third Edition, 2022

IPCC Reports, Technical Summaries, various dates.

Appendix 3, Discussion of Climate Feedback Discrepencies
Wikipedia asserts that there is a net positive feedback to warming.  However, a check of the referenced IPCC Technical Summary for AR5 (2014) is less clear and does not explicitly mention Planck radiation, the strongest negative feedback.  Andrew Dessler’s Modern Climate Change also concludes that total feedbacks are positive.  Dessler also does not mention Plack radiation as a feedback parameter.  [Dessler quantifies the total feedback relative to radiative forcing, rather than temperature change, which makes direct comparison of the feedback numbers a little more difficult.]  On the other hand, Global Climate Models, by D.L. Hartman, clearly identifies each feedback component, including Planck radiation.  Hartman states “the best estimate of the total feedback is about −1.2 ± 0.6 W m−2 K−1, but it is uncertain by about ±50%.”   The IPCC AR6 preliminary Technical Summary also concludes that total physical feedbacks are negative, with a best value of about -1.2 ± 0.7 W m−2 K−1.  I think that the value of -1.2 W m−2 K−1 is likely to be the best estimate.

References:
Svante Arrhenius, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, 1896.
https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

Isaac Asimov, "No More Ice Ages?", 1959
In Fact and Fancy, 1972

Ocean heat content, NOAA
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/global-ocean-heat-content/ 

ARGO Ocean Temperature Program Homepage
https://argo.ucsd.edu/ 

NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index
https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/aggi.html 

Lambeck et al, Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene, 2014
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1411762111

Doug Robbins, atmospheric CO2 and related charts, 2022.
http://dougrobbins.blogspot.com/2022/04/charts-of-atmospheric-co2-carbon.html 

NASA GISS Annual Mean Temperature over Land and over Oceans
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

G. Macdonald, JASONs presidential science advisory report, excerpt, 1979.
https://climatestate.com/2019/07/10/the-jason-report-the-long-term-impact-of-carbon-dioxide-on-climate-1979/
Whole report:
https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jason/co2.pdf 

Dennis Hartmann, Global Climate Models, 2016 (feedback chart)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/climate-feedback
IPCC AR6 Technical Summary (feedback chart, pg. 96)
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_TS.pdf

Andrew Dessler, Introduction to Modern Climate Change, Third Edition, 2022

The Global Heat Budget

Something odd is going on in the oceans. 

The oceans are apparently becoming more efficient at absorbing greenhouse gas heat from the atmosphere. Or, we are becoming better at quantifying the amount of man-made heat entering into earth systems.

According to published figures, the percentage of greenhouse gas heat entering the ocean has risen from less than 50% in the 1970s to over 92% today.  While the data from earlier years might be suspect, recent, high-quality data confirms the earlier pattern. The apparent change suggests we need to understand the cause of the higher rate of heat transfer to the oceans.  It may be that the rising rate of heat transfer is due to higher air temperatures, or there may be another explanation for the change.  If the rising rate of heat transfer is real, it begs the question of what was happening to the excess heat in earlier years.

In this post, I include other sources of man-made heat to calculate a world heat budget, comparing the quantity of man-made heat with the quantity of heat observed entering the oceans, atmosphere and melting ice.

Part I.  Anthropogenic Heat

Greenhouse Gases

In this post, we’ll look at the earth’s heat budget relating to greenhouse gases and other man-made sources of heat.   Greenhouse gases retain heat in the atmosphere, because they are transparent to much of the sun’s radiation spectrum, but opaque to most of the infrared thermal radiation.  Visible radiation from the sun penetrates the atmosphere and strikes the earth, but is trapped after being converted to infrared thermal radiation, instead of radiating back into space.  Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases trap increasing amounts of the sun’s heat. 

We can calculate how much heat is retained, depending on the concentration of the gas.  We can look at the history of how greenhouse gas concentrations have changed, and calculate how much heat was retained a few years ago as compared to today.  And we can forecast how much heat will be retained in the future, and estimate what will happen because of the extra heat.

The amount of heat trapped by greenhouse gases was measured in laboratory measurements beginning in the late 1800s.  The Swedish chemist Arrhenius calculated the planetary warming that would result from doubling the amount of CO2 in the air, and published his results in 1896.   The high-altitude chemistry of the atmosphere was measured in high-altitude flights around the globe, improving the estimates of how much heat was trapped at varying concentrations of greenhouse gases.  Upcoming satellite missions will define the incoming and outgoing heat budget with even greater detail, unless cancelled by the current administration. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publishes a measure of the heat retained due to greenhouse gases, termed radiative forcing, reported in units of watts per meter squared (W/m2), equivalent to joules per second per meter squared (J/sm2).  NOAA's figures are global averages, with corrections for angle of incidence and cloudiness included.  From radiative forcing, we can calculate the global heat retained by each gas by multiplying by the cross-sectional area of the earth, and the time interval of interest.  Here is the annual global heat retained by various greenhouse gases, as reported by NOAA.  The heat retained by non-CO2 greenhouse gases was extrapolated for years that no data was available (1955 – 1978), assuming a constant ratio to CO2 for the earliest data available. 

Figure 1.  Annual Heat from Greenhouse Gases

The annual heat retained by greenhouse gases has increased by 75% since 1979, driven primarily by increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. 

The amount of heat retained by greenhouse gases is huge.  The annual heat retained by greenhouse gases in 2016 is 1.23 x 10²² joules, which is equivalent to about 533,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, every day, or one bomb a day on a grid of about 20 miles spacing, all over the world.  Fortunately, only a small fraction of that heat remains in the atmosphere, as we will see when we discuss heat sinks.

Primary Heat from Fossil Fuels, Nuclear Energy and Deforestation

For completeness and to give a sense of scale to the greenhouse effect, we can add other man-made additions to the earth’s heat budget.  Primary heat from fossil fuels and nuclear energy is published by the Energy Information Administration.  The volumes of biomass consumed by deforestation are uncertain, but I used published figures to estimate the primary heat derived from deforestation, through combustion or decay, using thermal values for combustion of wood, after corrections for moisture.

                Heat from Agriculture

Heat from agriculture is another source of anthropogenic heat, through the decay, combustion or consumption of agricultural biomass.  For the volume of agricultural biomass, I used data from the United Nations Environment Programme for the year 2009, and scaled that number in other years in proportion to world population.  Agricultural biomass displaces natural biomass, so I assumed an arbitrary 50% gain in productivity in agricultural biomass, as a result of irrigation and fertilizer.  I again used the thermal values for the combustion of wood, after corrections for moisture.

The sum of these inputs provides the history of human-caused heat to the earth’s heat budget, from 1955 – 2016.

Figure 2. Man-made Heat from All Sources, 1955 - 2015.

Part II.  Heat Sinks

To understand climate change, it is necessary to understand what happens to the heat retained by greenhouse gases.  Where is the heat going, and what is it doing to the planet?   The goal is to quantify the heat budget for the earth, and look at how it has changed over the past several decades. 

There are three main heat sinks we can measure: the ocean, the atmosphere, and volumes of melted ice.  I have used different methods to estimate the heat consumed by these processes, depending upon the data available.  It is quickly apparent that the ocean is the most significant heat sink.

Ocean Temperature

The temperature distribution of the ocean is seasonal, heterogeneous, and changing.  Maps of ocean temperatures at various depths can be seen on NOAA’s website.  Temperature data prior to 2000 was dependent on ship tracks, and variable methods of data collection.  These datasets had clusters of dense measurements in shipping lanes, and large gaps with no data.  The calculation of heat content is somewhat uncertain.  Beginning in 2000, NOAA launched ARGO, a system of free-floating buoys measuring ocean temperatures.  Today there are 3849 active buoys, which periodically dive to depths of 2000 meters, measuring temperatures within one-thousandth of a degree C, and returning to the surface every ten days to broadcast measurements to satellite receivers.  Here is a map of the current buoy locations. 

Figure 3.  Map of Current Location of ARGO Temperature Buoys, June 27, 2017.

The temperature rise noted over the past 50 years is relatively small, at 0.1 degrees C, but is two orders of magnitude more than the sensitivity of the ARGO instruments.  This temperature change represents an enormous amount of heat because of the huge volume of water and large heat capacity of the ocean.  As we might expect, the temperature of the shallow ocean is rising much faster than the temperature of the deep ocean.
Figure 4.  Ocean Temperature 0 -- 100 meters, NOAA

Figure 5.  Ocean Temperature 0 – 700 meters, NOAA

Figure 6.  Ocean Temperature 0 – 2000 meters, NOAA

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a chart of ocean heat content from 1957 through 2016.   NOAA did not publish the specific data used to generate the plot, so I have made an eye-ball fit to the data using a smooth function in Excel.   The NOAA chart, and my overlay of a smoothed function, is shown below.  The smoothed function allows me to calculate the annual change in ocean heat content.  As we will see when we compare heat sources to heat sinks, the heat absorbed by the ocean is very close to the amount of heat retained in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

Figure 7.  Cumulative Ocean Heat Content, NOAA, 1956 - 2016.

Figure 8.  Annual Change in Ocean Heat Content.

Figure 8 shows the annualized change in ocean heat content from my smoothed version of NOAA’s heat content chart, 0 – 2000 meters.  The change in heat content is constantly positive, but the rate of change dipped in the 1960s, before a continuous acceleration in heat content from the 1970s to the present.

Atmosphere

Similarly, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published a table of average global surface air temperatures. 

Figure 9.  Surface air temperature, 1880 – 2016, NOAA.

Figure 10.  Surface air temperature, 1955 – 2016, with polynomial regression to the data, NASA.

Assuming that the surface temperature change is representative of the atmosphere as a whole (or at least, the majority of the heat content), I calculated the annual change in atmospheric heat content.  The heat content of the atmosphere is significantly smaller than the heat content of the oceans despite a larger change in temperature, due to the very high heat capacity of water compared to air. 

Figure 11.  Annual change in Atmospheric Heat Content.

Melting Ice

NASA has used satellites and overflights to measure the changing volumes of ice on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.  The determinations have been based on a combination of satellite gravity measurements, surface elevation measurements, and ice-penetrating radar measurements (from overflights).   Most of the high-quality surveys have occurred since the early 2000s, in particular NASA’s GRACE  (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) gravity-measurement satellite, which was launched in 2002.

Figure 12.  Mass loss in Antarctica measured by NASA's GRACE satellite.

Figure 13.  Mass loss in Greenland measured by NASA's GRACE satellite.

Separately, the volumes of continental glaciers and ice sheets (other than Greenland and Antarctica) have been separately studied through an inventory of photos and elevation maps, and published as a time-series of melted ice volumes.  Volumes of melted ice from all three sources were reported in a single chart by Shuang Yi, et al, 2015.  As I did with NOAA data for oceans and temperatures, I fitted a smooth polynomial function to the published charts, and then extracted the annual change in melted ice for all three sources.  I should note that mass-loss data from NASA’s GRACE satellite shows about 10% smaller volume of ice loss than Shuang et al.  Shuang et al presumably incorporated other sources of information, including ice-penetrating radar, altimetry and flow measurements from other studies.

Figure 14.  Ice Loss from Antarctica, Greenland, and other Glaciers, Shuang Yi et al, 2015, with overlay of smoothed polynomial functions.

Image Credit:  Shuang Yi et al, 2015.

Finally, I calculated a volume of ice melted in the Arctic sea-ice, based on simple assumptions of new ice thickness (1 m) and multi-year ice (2 m), and the changing areas reported for new and multi-year ice.   The volume of melting Arctic sea-ice is relatively trivial compared to the volumes melting from glaciers and ice-sheets, but is still indicative of the overall melting trend in the Arctic.

Figure 15.  Diminishing Arctic Sea Ice, 1953 - 2010, image credit, National Snow and Ice Center.

I assumed that the volume of ice would need to be heated by 10 degrees Celsius before melting, based on temperature profiles from drilling on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  I then applied the heat of crystallization to the volumes of ice melted to obtain the total heat absorbed by melting ice. 

Figure 16.  Heat consumed by Global Melting Ice, 2004 – 2015.

The sum of oceanic, atmospheric, and melting ice heat sinks is shown below.  The ocean is by far the dominant heat sink. 

Figure 17.  Global Heat Absorbed by Heat Sinks.

Despite all of the news about rising atmospheric temperatures and volumes of melted ice, the ocean is absorbing the lion’s share of heat around the earth.  By comparison to the oceans, heat consumed by atmospheric heating and melting ice is negligible.  In 2016, the ocean absorbed about 96% of rising heat, compared to a little over 1% for the atmosphere, and 3% for melting ice. 

Part III.  The Heat Budget:  Retained Heat and Heat Consumed

Greenhouse Gas Heat and Ocean Heat Content

The simplest (but incomplete) expression of the planetary heat budget is the comparison between annual heat retained by greenhouse gases and the rising heat content of the oceans. 

Figure 18.  Annual Greenhouse Gas Heat and Annual Change in Ocean Heat Content

The first observation to make from this chart is that heat retained in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases and heat warming the oceans are very close to the same quantities. Greenhouse gases are retaining about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of excess heat in the atmosphere annually, and about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of unexplained heat is showing up annually in the oceans.  There is no known natural source of new heat warming the oceans.  It cannot be a coincidence.

The second, startling observation from this chart is that the rate of heat transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans is changing.  The amount of heat annually absorbed by the oceans apparently fell in the 1960s, although the data supporting this observation is weak.  However, continuing forward into the era of good data, the volume of heat absorbed by the oceans since 2000 has rapidly increased, and the fraction of  man-made heat absorbed by the oceans has also rapidly increased.  As temperatures rise, the oceans appear to be becoming more efficient at absorbing heat from the atmosphere.  

This raises a number of questions.  First, is the measurement of ocean heat content correct?  The quality and sensitivity of the ARGO system would suggest that the numbers are good since 2004. Second, are the calculations for man-made heat correct?  These numbers contain many assumptions, and are more likely to be uncertain than the ocean heat content.  Or third, was there another heat sink functioning in prior years, which is no longer working?  This seems unlikely.  Rather, the effort to align the sources and sinks in the earth's heat budget should focus on better quantifying of the sources of man-made heat.  

Full Heat Budget: Anthropogenic Heat and Heat Consumed in Heat Sinks

We can compare all sources of man-made heat from Part I to all heat sinks identified in Part II, to construct a heat budget for human-induced climate change.   Let’s look again at all sources of man-made heat, 1955 – 2015.

Figure 19.  Anthropogenic Heat, 1955 – 2015.

The red line indicates the sum of all man-made heat added to the earth’s atmosphere.

And let’s look again at the heat taken up by the oceans, atmosphere and ice.  As we noted before, the amount of heat entering the ocean overwhelmingly dominates heat entering the atmosphere or melting ice.

Figure 20.  Heat sinks, 1955 – 2015.

Let’s combine the two charts to see the full heat budget. 

Figure 21.  Man-made Heat and Heat Sinks, 1955 - 2016.

As we see, the gap between known sources of man-made heat and the observed amount of heat entering earth systems has narrowed, primarily due to an increasing amount of heat observed entering the oceans.  The amount of man-made heat that we can observe entering the oceans has risen from about 40% in the 1970s to nearly 90% today.  Much of that difference is probably due to the inadequacy of data prior to the deployment of the ARGO system of ocean buoys in the early 2000s.  However, there is a very real possibility that it also reflects a physical change in the process of transferring heat from the atmosphere to the ocean.

Let’s exclude questionable data, and only look at data from 2004.  First, man-made heat:  

Figure 22.  Anthropogenic Heat, 2004 – 2016.

And second, the heat budget including heat sinks in the oceans, atmosphere, and melting ice.

Figure 23.  Global Heat Budget, 2004 - 2016.

We are still left with the striking observation that between 2004 and 2016 the fraction of man-made heat absorbed by the ocean changed from 67 percent to 87 percent.  Given the high quality of recent observations, it seems that this is a real change in the rate of heat absorption by the ocean. 

Conclusions

People are the cause of rising temperatures and melting ice on earth.  Rising temperatures are observed in the atmosphere and oceans, and accelerating melting of ice in glaciers, arctic sea ice, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  The heat responsible for these changes can be quantified and compared to the heat known to be retained in the atmosphere by human activities: CO2 and other greenhouse gases, primary heat from energy production, primary heat from deforestation, and heat produced from agricultural biomass.  There is a close correspondence between the quantity of man-made heat and observed heat appearing in natural systems; 89% of the heat generated by humans can be accounted for in known heat sinks.  Further, there is no known natural process which can be observed and measured presently warming the earth.

In more striking terms, people added 13,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of heat to the atmosphere in 2016.   We observed 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules appearing in oceans, atmosphere, and melting ice with no known alternative cause.  This is not a coincidence.

The largest source of man-made heat is carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, which accounts for 57% of heat input into the Earth’s heat budget.  Greenhouse gases other than CO2 account for an additional 32%, bringing the total fraction due to greenhouse gases to 89% of man-made heat.  When I began this project, I focused on only greenhouse gases, but I found that heat appearing in heat sinks exceeded 100% of the heat retained by greenhouse gases.  I then added other sources of man-made heat that occurred to me: primary heat from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, primary heat from deforestation, and primary heat from the decay of agricultural biomass.  These other sources account for a smaller, but significant 11% fraction of man-made heat.

Large quantities of heat are retained in the atmosphere prior to absorption by other heat sinks.  Heat from human sources is put into the atmosphere before being transferred other to heat sinks.  Total man-made heat delivered to the atmosphere is equivalent to about 585,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs (533,000 from greenhouse gases alone) exploding in the atmosphere daily, or on a world-wide grid with a spacing of about 17 miles.  It seems likely that there will be increasingly severe consequences to weather systems, as such quantities of heat are moved from the atmosphere to their ultimate repository in heat sinks. 

Oceans are absorbing the bulk of heat produced by humans.  Oceans are absorbing 96% of the heat that can be observed going into heat sinks on earth; with atmospheric warming and melting ice accounting for only about 1% and 3% of the heat we can observe going into heat sinks.  If the oceans were not absorbing heat from the atmosphere, average temperatures would increase by 5 degrees C in about two years, equivalent to the temperature change between the current climate and the ice ages.   Without oceans on earth to absorb heat, man-made heat would quickly destroy civilization.  As climate scientist John Abraham said, “Global warming is really ocean warming.”

The fraction of man-made heat absorbed by the oceans is increasing rapidly, according to recent, high quality data.  The fraction of man-made heat absorbed by the ocean rose from 67% to 87% between 2004 and 2016.  The cause of the changing rate of heat absorption is not known.  Some likely possibilities include higher air temperatures and increased wave and wind activity at the ocean’s surface.

Explanations matter.  As I wrote in an earlier post, science is about delivering explanations in terms of physical processes.  Unfortunately, I could not find any physics describing the rate of heat transfer between the atmosphere and the ocean.  It is certain that higher surface air temperatures will mean a higher rate of heat transfer to the ocean, but it would be good to quantify that effect.  Other aspects of climate change, such has higher wind speeds and larger waves, may also play an important role.  Identifying the processes involved and quantifying the rate of heat transfer is unfinished work.

Future predictions of the consequences of anthropogenic heat depend on understanding the changing rate at which the ocean is absorbing heat from the atmosphere. 

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Appendix I.

Other Potential Sources of Heat

When I began this study, the only source of anthropogenic heat I considered was from greenhouse gases.  I calculated the heat retained by greenhouse gases based on NOAA’s on-line publication of annual radiative forcing figures for each kind of greenhouse gas.  When I calculated the heat absorbed by heat sinks for 2015, I found that new heat showing up in earth systems exceeded the heat from greenhouse gases by a little bit.  So I went looking for other sources of man-made heat, and added primary heat from energy production, primary heat from deforestation, and net heat resulting from agriculture.  This brought the heat observed in earth systems to less than the sources of anthropogenic heat.

But the rapidly changing heat content of the ocean concerns me, and makes me think that I have not yet captured all of the sources of anthropogenic heat, or properly quantified heat from greenhouse gases.  In particular, it seems to me that published figures on radiative forcing are only considering the proportion of the sun’s radiant heat which is retained in the atmosphere due to the greenhouse effect.  However, greenhouse gases will affect all out-going thermal radiation from earth.  Thus, geothermal heat will also be retained in the earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases.  Geothermal heat is a steady-state process, adding about 1.4 x 10^21 joules to the earth’s heat budget (about 10% of total anthropogenic heat).  I ignored geothermal energy in this study because it is constant.  But if the amount of geothermal energy retained in the atmosphere is changing due to greenhouse gases, I may need to add additional heat to the analysis.  Similarly, natural biomass is a large part of the earth’s heat budget.  Like geothermal heat, I assumed that it is constant (except where displaced by agriculture).   Presumably, heat from all natural biomass is accounted for in the sun’s radiant heat, and therefore accounted for in the radiative forcing figures published by NOAA.  But it might be worth a question for clarification.  

Appendix II.

Assumptions for Global Heat Budget study: 

I made a number of simplifying assumptions in order to calculate the global heat budget.  Those assumptions are fairly sweeping in some cases, but all are based on reasoning, as explained below, and the results of the study are robust with respect to the simplifying assumptions made.

NOAA published data for radiative forcing for fifteen greenhouse gases other than CO2, for the years 1979 – 2016.   I extrapolated the radiative forcing for these gases for the years 1979 – 1974, scaling the radiative forcing for non-CO2 gases proportionally with CO2 for the years 1955 – 1978, for Figures 17, 18 and 20.

I assumed that volumes of deforestation biomass decayed or were burned, generating heat according to the heat content of wood fuel with an initial moisture content of 50%.  I used published figures for annual deforestation biomass through 2008, and assumed deforestation was constant at 2008 levels for all later years.

I assumed that net agricultural biomass was proportional to global population, and scaled reported biomass from 2009 for each year accordingly.  I also arbitrarily assumed that agricultural biomass productivity was 50% greater than the natural productivity it displaced, allowing me to calculate the net heat attributable to agricultural production, in excess of natural biomass production.   I assumed that the heat produced during decay is equal to the heat of combustion for wood, after corrections for moisture content.  Moisture was assumed to be 50%.  The heat of combustion for dry wood was used to calculate heat produced from dry agricultural biomass during decay.

I used a smooth 2^nd order polynomial function for global ocean heat content (0 – 2000m).  I created the function as a visual overlay on NOAA’s plot of heat content, as I was unable to obtain digital data from NOAA for this parameter.

I used smooth 2^nd order polynomial functions for ice melt from Greenland, Antarctica and other Glaciers and Ice Sheets, created by visual overlays on a figure from Shuang, 2015.  The functions for Antarctica and Greenland compare very well (about 10% higher) to digits available from NASA for the gravity-indicated mass losses from Greenland and Antarctica.  Numerous papers document ice loss from other glaciers and ice sheets, but without documented volumetric data.

I estimated the thickness of “multi-year [‘old’] ice” as 2 meters, and “new ice” as 1 meter, in calculating loss of Arctic sea ice.   Old ice diminished from 1,860,000 km2 in 1984 to only 110,00 km2 in 2016, a decline of 96%.   (Imster, E., in EarthSky, Nov. 8, 2016). Declining areas of multi-year ice and new ice were calculated separately, and attributed as a constant annual average, resulting in an estimate of 145 gigatonnes of Arctic sea ice melted annually. 

I assumed that all ice needed to be warmed 10 degrees C before melting.  This figure was an eyeball estimate based on temperature profiles of ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland.

I used a figure for the heat capacity for the atmosphere from college physics lecture notes available on-line.  I assumed that the temperature of the atmosphere changed proportionately with surface temperature when calculating atmospheric heat content.  I would note that recent satellite studies have shown that the troposphere is cooling, perhaps as the result of greater water content.  In any event, the bulk of the atmosphere’s mass, density and heat content are near the surface. 

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References:

Heat Sources

Greenhouse Gases

James.H.Butler and Stephen.A.Montzka, 2017,  THE NOAA ANNUAL GREENHOUSE GAS INDEX (AGGI),

NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html

Source for radiative forcing data used in greenhouse gas heat calculations.

Fossil Fuels

Conti, J., et al, 2013.  International Energy Outlook, U. S. Energy Information Administration, Office of Energy Analysis, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.    DOE/EIA-0484(2013)

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/pdf/0484(2013).pdf

U.S. Energy Information Agency, Data Tables, U.S. Energy Information Agency, Office of Energy Analysis, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington D.C. data tables, 2014

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/tablebrowser/

Source for data on primary heat from fossil fuel and nuclear energy.

Deforestation

Houghton, R.A. 2008. Carbon Flux to the Atmosphere from Land-Use Changes: 1850-2005. In TRENDS: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/landuse/houghton/houghton.html

Source for biomass used in calculation of primary heat generated by deforestation.  Volumes of deforestation were assumed constant after 2008.

Adam Martin, 2011, A Reassessment of Carbon Content of Tropical Trees.  Average carbon content of dry wood is 47.2%.  This analysis includes volatiles, determined by the process of freeze-drying, instead of heat-drying the wood.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023533

Agriculture

UNEP, 2009, Converting Waste Biomass Into a Resource

https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/7614/WasteAgriculturalBiomassEST_Compendium.pdf

Heat Sinks

Atmosphere

NASA, 2017, Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change

Tabular data and chart

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

Dennis Hartman, 2017, University of Washington, Heat capacity of ocean, atmosphere and land.

https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/321/321_Lecture_12.pdf

Heat capacity of atmosphere used to calculate changing heat content.

Oceans

NOAA, National Centers for Environmental Information

https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

Source of charts used with overlays to generate smoothed functions for ocean heat content and temperature.  Note: the charts showing average ocean temperature changes for 0 – 700 meters and 0 – 2000 meters were accessed on this site in June, 2017, but are no longer available.

http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html#temp

The ARGO system and the Jason altimeter system allow separation of sea level rise into steric (heat & salinity; i.e. density) and mass components.   The steric component is dominant over the mass component in regional sea level variability and on a global basis it accounts for about 1/3 of total sea level increase in the past half century (Domingues et al 2008).

http://www.bickfordscience.com/03-05_State_Changes/PDF/Specific_Heat.pdf

specific heat of seawater = 3.9 joules/g

John Abraham, 2017, New study confirms the oceans are warming rapidly, The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jun/26/new-study-confirms-the-oceans-are-warming-rapidly

Dr. John Abraham is a professor of thermal sciences. He researches in climate monitoring and renewable energy generation for the developing world. His energy development work has extended to Africa, South America and Asia.  “Global warming is really ocean warming.”

Ice Melt

Greenland, Iceland, and Antarctica

Shuang Yi, Wenke Sun, Kosuke Heki, and An Qia, 2015, An increase in the rate of global mean sea level rise since 2010, Geophysical Research Letters

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL063902/full

NASA Global Climate Change, Vital Signs of the Planet

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/

Source of charts and data tables for ice mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica.

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n7/full/ngeo1829.html

Contribution of ice sheet and mountain glacier melt to recent sea level rise

J. L. Chen, C. R. Wilson, & B. D. Tapley

Arctic Sea Ice

http://earthsky.org/earth/decline-of-arctics-thickest-sea-ice

Imster, E., in EarthSky, Nov. 8, 2016, Decline of Arctic’s thickest sea ice.  Multi-year ice grows up to 4 meters thick, while single-year ice is 2 meters thick at most.  The area covered by Arctic sea ice at least four years old has decreased from 1,860,000 square kilometres in September 1984 to 110,000 square kilometres in September 2016.