New NASA data show Earth heating at unprecedented rate – “Like 800,000 nuclear power plants of 1 GW capacity heating Earth 24/7, 365 days a year”
By Leon Simons
5 May 2022
(Twitter) – NASA data shows our Earth is heating at unprecedented speed: 1.64 W/m2.
CERES radiative flux data for 2021 has come available. The annual Earth’s Energy Imbalance was +1.52 W/m2, the energy equivalent to 1 million Hiroshima sized atomic bombs every day.
Another 12-month EEI record (from Mar 2021-Feb 2022). That’s a lot of additional energy in the Earth’s system, available to heat oceans, land and atmosphere, melt ice and increase sea levels.
What makes this new record even more significant, is that NASA’s CERES team responsible for this satellite-based data, expected the rate of heat uptake to decrease instead of increase.
The Earth’s Energy Imbalance is the rate at which the world heats up.
The graph above clearly shows the increase in heating is a result from Absorbed Solar Radiation (ASR) increasing faster than Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR). The increased greenhouse gas concentrations limit the amount of heat that radiates to space, while the increase in ASR is in part caused by the rapid decrease in emission of sulfur. These particles from the burning of fossil fuels, notably coal and heavy fuel oil by ships, reflect light and increase cloud cover and reflectivity. [Aerosol] emissions are rapidly decreasing for health reasons:
1.64 W/m2 doesn’t seem that much, until you realize how many square meters Earth actually has: 510,100,000,000,000 (510 trillion).
That’s like 800,000 nuclear power plants of 1 GW capacity heating Earth 24/7, 365 days a year.
It’s over 40 times humanity’s annual energy use. [more]
NASA data shows our Earth is heating at unprecedented speed: 1.64 W/m²
