Science Snippets: Earth's Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent Decades

Draft script:

I have discussed Earth’s energy imbalance frequently in this space. The collective actions of billions of people on Earth are causing a tremendous difference between the energy released into the atmosphere and the energy captured and sequestered by organisms on Earth. As Industrial Civilization produces more greenhouse gases that trap more energy, this difference continues to grow. As I have pointed out many times in this space, based on five peer-reviewed papers, civilization is a heat engine, regardless how civilization is driven.

Earth naturally sequesters carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas. Most of this sequestration is conducted via photosynthesis on land and coral reefs at sea. However, the ongoing and accelerating energy imbalance is causing a stunningly rapid heating of Earth. Even the designed-to-fail Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that Earth is amid the most rapid heating in planetary heating. The IPCC also concluded climate change is irreversible.

Recent findings come in the form of a peer-reviewed, open-access paper published in AGU Advances. AGU stands for American Geophysical Union, an international, nonprofit scientific association whose mission is “to promote discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity.” AGU Advances is one of the peer-reviewed journals produced by the American Geophysical Union.

The peer-reviewed, open-access paper in AGU Advances was published on 10 May 2025. Produced by 57 scholars, the paper is titled Earth’s Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent Decades.

After a short Abstract, the peer-reviewed paper presents three Key Points and a Plain Language Summary. I will begin with these:

The three Key Points are

(1) “Earth’s Energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades.”

(2) “The large trend has taken us by surprise, and as a community we should strive to understand the underlying causes.”

(3) “Our capability to observe the Earth’s energy imbalance and budget terms is threatened as satellites are decommissioned.”

The Plain Language Summary provides exactly that: “Global warming is caused by the imbalance between the incoming radiation from the Sun and the reflected and outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth. The imbalance leads to energy accumulation in the atmosphere, oceans and land, and melting of the cryosphere, resulting in increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather around the globe according … [to] the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ... Observations from space of the energy imbalance shows that it is rising much faster than expected, and in 2023 it reached values two times higher than the best estimate from IPCC. We argue that we must strive to better understand this fundamental change in Earth's climate state, and ensure our capacity to monitor it in the future.”

The Abstract provides a science-based overview of the peer-reviewed paper: “Global warming results from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions which upset the delicate balance between the incoming sunlight, and the reflected and emitted radiation from Earth. The imbalance leads to energy accumulation in the atmosphere, oceans and land, and melting of the cryosphere, resulting in increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather around the globe. Despite the fundamental role of the energy imbalance in regulating the climate system, as known to humanity for more than two centuries, our capacity to observe it is rapidly deteriorating as satellites are being decommissioned.”

This comes as no surprise to me, and probably to you. The current presidential administration in the country of my birth is an embarrassment to the few rational citizens. Referring to climate change as a hoax, president Donald Trump disregards the process of science and the reliable knowledge it produces. I doubt Trump understands either the point or the process of science.

The first figure in the peer-reviewed paper presents a graphical overview of the energy imbalance during the period between 2001 and 2024. This figure clearly shows profound increase in energy imbalance during this short period of time. The blue line shows the linear trend over the 2001–2024 period. Although there is plenty of variation during this short period of time, the increase in energy imbalance is clear. Gray shading shows years affected by three major El Niño Southern Oscillation events.

A description of the Figure is provided in the second paragraph of the peer-reviewed paper, which relies upon additional peer-reviewed evidence: “Worryingly, the observed energy imbalance is rising much faster than expected, reaching 1.8 Watts/m² in 2023—or twice that predicted by climate models—after having more than doubled within just two decades ... This strong upward trend in the imbalance is difficult to reconcile with climate models: even if the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and associated climate response are accounted for, state-of-the-art global climate models can only barely reproduce the rate of change up to 2020 within the observational uncertainty ... The continued rise in the energy imbalance since 2020 leaves us with little doubt that the real world signal has left the envelope of model internal variability. The root cause of the discrepancy between models and observations is currently not well known, but it seems to be dominated by a decrease in Earth’s solar reflectivity …, and model experiments suggest it could be due to poorly modeled sea surface temperature patterns, the representation and emissions of polluting aerosol particles, or something else ...

There we have it, folks. “The root cause of the discrepancy between models and observations is currently not well known, but it seems to be dominated by” this, that, “or something else.” Color me shocked. Models and observations aren’t keeping up with reality. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of the IPCC’s conclusion that Earth is amid the fastest rate of environmental change in planetary history. There is no mention that this rapid rate of change results from anthropogenic climate change. There is no mention of the strong supporting evidence used by the IPCC to reach this conclusion on 8 October 2018 in its Global Warming of 1.5^o.