The Rate of Environmental Change

Draft script:

If you have been following my work for more than 15 minutes, you undoubtedly know that Earth is amid abrupt, irreversible climate change. As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Earth is experiencing the most rapid change in planetary history. This change is irreversible. This abrupt, irreversible change was published in two reports produced more than six years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization designed-to-fail when it was created during the Ronald Reagan administration. Michael Oppenheimer, a Professor at Princeton University, concluded that the IPCC was designed to fail.

As I have also mentioned in this space, the situation is getting worse. Ongoing, accelerating anthropogenic climate change is likely to cause the extinction of all life on Earth, as reported in the peer-reviewed literature. As a result, today’s information is worse than the information I have presented before.

An article published at The Conversation is titled Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models forecast – and the rate has doubled in 20 years. The article was written by a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in Australia, an Associate Research Scientist in Climate Science in France, and a Professor of Climate Science in Sweden. Here’s the lede, followed by two additional sentences to complete the first paragraph: “How do you measure climate change? One way is by recording temperatures in different places over a long period of time. While this works well, natural variation can make it harder to see longer-term trends.”

The following paragraph provides another answer to the question about measuring climate change: “But another approach can give us a very clear sense of what’s going on: track how much heat enters Earth’s atmosphere and how much heat leaves. This is Earth’s energy budget, and it’s now well and truly out of balance.”

You knew that, of course. I have reported the energy imbalance on this planet many times during the last couple of years.

In typically scholarly manner, the article at The Conversation cites other research and adds to it in the following three paragraphs: “Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested.

In the mid-2000s, the energy imbalance was about 0.6 watts per square metre (W/m2) on average. In recent years, the average was about 1.3 W/m2. This means the rate at which energy is accumulating near the planet’s surface has doubled.

These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years. Worse still, this worrying imbalance is emerging even as funding uncertainty in the United States threatens our ability to track the flows of heat.”

What’s this about “funding uncertainty in the United States threaten[ing] our ability to track the flows of heat”? When the President in the country of my birth denies anthropogenic climate change and refers to it as a hoax, there are consequences. As reported by these scholars in The Conversation, the consequences include funding uncertainty leading to the “inability to track the flows of heat.” We are now witnessing the results of defunding NOAA and the National Weather Service in Kerr County, Texas and southern New Mexico. Deaths in these locales could have been prevented.

Beneath a subsection titled Energy in, energy out, seven paragraphs explain Earth’s energy imbalance: “Earth’s energy budget functions a bit like your bank account, where money comes in and money goes out. If you reduce your spending, you’ll build up cash in your account. Here, energy is the currency.

Life on Earth depends on a balance between heat coming in from the Sun and heat leaving. This balance is tipping to one side.

Solar energy hits Earth and warms it. The atmosphere’s heat-trapping greenhouse gases keep some of this energy.

But the burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These trap more and more heat, preventing it from leaving.

Some of this extra heat is warming the land or melting sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. But this is a tiny fraction. Fully 90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity.

Earth naturally sheds heat in several ways. One way is by reflecting incoming heat off of clouds, snow and ice and back out to space. Infrared radiation is also emitted back to space.

From the beginning of human civilisation up until just a century ago, the average surface temperature was about 14°C. The accumulating energy imbalance has now pushed average temperatures 1.3-1.5°C higher.”

Well, no. The accumulating energy imbalance has now pushed average temperatures more than 2°C hotter, as agreed by governments of the world in October 2023. Either climate scientists cannot keep up with the ongoing exponential increase in Earth’s energy imbalance or they choose not to keep up.

Beneath a section titled “Tracking faster than the models”, we find six short paragraphs of explanation: “Scientists keep track of the energy budget in two ways.

First, we can directly measure the heat coming from the Sun and going back out to space, using the sensitive radiometers on monitoring satellites. This dataset and its predecessors date back to the late 1980s.

Second, we can accurately track the build-up of heat in the oceans and atmosphere by taking temperature readings. Thousands of robotic floats have monitored temperatures in the world’s oceans since the 1990s.

Both methods show the energy imbalance has grown rapidly.

The doubling of the energy imbalance has come as a shock, because the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn’t predict such a large and rapid change.

Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we’re seeing in the real world.”

As I have pointed out previously in this space, the models are not keeping up with reality. Of more importance is the inability or unwillingness of climate scientists to keep up with climate science. When even the designed-to-fail IPCC concludes Earth is amid the most abrupt climate event in planetary history, and that change is irreversible, then it’s time for climate scientists to catch up to reality. Denial is not a viable strategy for anyone, including academic scientists.

The bottom line comes in the final two, one-sentence paragraphs at The Conversation: “Satellites, in particular, are our advance warning system, telling us about heat storage changes roughly a decade before other methods.

But funding cuts and drastic priority shifts in the United States may threaten essential satellite climate monitoring.”

Again, with the U.S. presidential administration stuck in denial, we are unlikely to witness good news on the climate front. Considering that every U.S. President in my life has been the worst U.S. President in my life, I doubt good news lies in the near future.