The single number that best characterizes the status of Earth’s climate,
Earth’s energy imbalance, will be updated today in a paper by Karina
von Schuckmann and 37 co-authors. As long as Earth continues to absorb
more solar energy than the planet radiates to space as heat, global
temperature will continue to rise. The new paper finds that Earth’s
energy imbalance increased during the past decade, with implications for
the burden being left for young people. Stabilizing climate requires
that humanity reduce the energy imbalance to approximately zero. That
task has become more difficult during the past several years.
Two numbers, atmospheric CO2 amount and global surface temperature, have
received special prominence, and they deserve attention. However, this
third number, Earth’s energy imbalance, is perhaps the most important.
CO2 is just one of the forcings that drive climate change, even if the
dominant one. Earth’s energy imbalance incorporates the effect of CO2
and all other forcings, including some, such as human-made aerosols,
that are poorly measured at best.
Earth’s energy imbalance will be our guide during the next several
decades as we work to restore a healthy climate for future generations.
It deserves greater attention.
Karina von Schuckmann has become perhaps the world’s leading expert in
monitoring Earth’s energy imbalance, in some sense analogous to Dave
Keeling monitoring atmospheric CO2. Measuring Earth’s energy imbalance
is a lot harder though, it requires a whole team of experts. We might
call Karina, with her team of colleagues, the “sentinel for the home
planet.”
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