Climate Degradation Will Have Consequences For “Hundreds And Thousands Of Years”

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Every year, the World Meteorological Organization publishes its State Of The Global Climate report. In this year’s addition, it introduces a new measure for the state of the climate it calls Earth’s Energy Imbalance — a snapshot of how the Earth is overheating.

After this year’s report was released, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits while every key climate indicator is flashing red, Earth’s energy imbalance — the gap between heat absorbed and heat released — is the highest on record. Our planet is trapping heat faster than it can shed it.”

The consequences, he added, “are written into the daily lives of families struggling as droughts and storms drive up food prices, in workers pushed to the brink by extreme heat, in farmers watching crops wither, and in communities and homes swept away by floods. Our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.”

Accelerating the transition to renewable energy would “deliver climate security, energy security and national security,” he said. “Today’s report should come with a warning label — climate chaos is accelerating and delay is deadly. The way ahead must be grounded in science, common sense, and the courage to act.”

Energy In, Energy Out

The latest WMO State Of The Global Climate report shows that in a stable climate, incoming energy and outgoing energy are about the same. But activities such as burning fossil fuels, growing food, and making steel, cement and plastic have upset that balance by pushing levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere to the highest level in at least 800,000 years. That’s trapping more of the sun’s energy in the Earth’s climate system than ever previously recorded, writes Bob Berwin of Inside Climate News.

“Improved scientific understanding of Earth’s energy imbalance shows the disruption is real and the reality facing our planet and climate right now,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said. “We will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”

The new metric shows a more complete picture of how the climate system is responding to human emissions by integrating all the heat accumulating in the oceans and atmosphere, on land and melting ice, said oceanographer Karina von Schuckmann, a senior science adviser with Mercator Ocean International and a member of the WMO ocean observations panel.

Ko Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the WMO, who is based in the US, said Earth’s energy imbalance also helps show how different parts of the climate system are connected and identifies the central role of the oceans in absorbing most of the trapped heat.

The energy balance indicator highlighted by the WMO focuses on the fundamentals of climate change, said independent climate analyst Leon Simons, who has collaborated with other scientists to create several recent technical papers on the topic. “Energy coming in, energy going out,” he said. “Greenhouse gases change how much energy escapes, and the system responds. That’s really what’s driving everything.”

Check The Temperature Gauge

Way back in the last century, cars had temperature gauges that kept the driver informed about how hot the engine was running. It turns out that many infernal combustion engines operate best at a temperature that is just below the boiling point of water. Woe betide any driver who watched the temperature gauge climb into the red zone and just kept driving merrily along, hoping against hope to reach the chosen destination before the radiator boiled over and the engine melted down.

Today, humans are doing something equally foolish — high fiving themselves to celebrate how smart they are to ignore the Earth’s temperature gauge. This is not going to end well, no matter how many times the MAGAlomaniacs go on social media to complain about the Green New Scam. “It is expected that the ocean will continue to warm well into the future — a change which is irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales,” the WMO report says.

The Historical Record

The Earth’s Energy Imbalance is a better starting point than trying to establish temperature change relative to 1850 in international forums, Simons said. Those convocations quickly descend into quibbling over what a tenth of a degree means. The measurement is also more significant now because there are 20 to 25 years of data from satellite sensors designed to study Earth’s energy balance. (Of course, the current US administration wants to turn off many of those satellites because truth is anathema to the ideologues in charge today.)

Science basics also help explain one of the report’s most memorable conclusions, which is that the air temperature people experience is less than 2 percent of all the energy trapped in the Earth’s systems by greenhouse gases. Up to 93 percent of that trapped heat is stored in the oceans and heats the oceans, while the rest melts glaciers and ice caps or heats the land itself.

The WMO report is compiled with input from national weather agencies, international research programs, and UN partners, drawing on data from satellites, ocean monitoring systems, and weather stations worldwide. It reflects contributions from scientists and institutions across nearly 190 countries.

The information reflects the best available global science, despite concerns during the past year about cuts to U.S. climate programs, said Barrett, the WMO deputy who previously was a leader of federal climate programs in the US during several administrations.

Science Goes On

Critical data flows and climate observations have not been disrupted by the insane policies of this administration, she said, and noted that Congress has restored “a lot of the funding” previously reported as having been cut. There also has been no decline in demand for accurate climate information, she added.

We have plenty of evidence that the Earth has experienced dramatic changes over millennia. When dinosaurs roamed, the Earth was in a hot phase, marked by lush vegetation. It was, for all practical purposes, a large terrarium like the ones we use to make in elementary school with light bulbs simulating the sun. Some of us may recall how our little ecosystems shriveled and died if they got too hot.

We also know the Earth has experienced ice ages, in which much of the land was covered with glaciers that were a mile or more thick. The central plains of North America were once a vast inland sea. The decomposing bodies of the creatures who lived in it have been transformed over millennia into the oil and methane we rely on to power our civilization today.

There is a theory that the Grand Canyon was not carved by water flowing in the Colorado River over tens of thousands of years but by a cataclysmic rush of rushing, tumbling, turbulent water over the course of a few short centuries after the area near the headwaters of the Colorado became a primary outlet for the hundreds of billions of gallons of water stored in that inland sea.

The current president of the US and his jock sniffing henchmen despise science and denigrate scientists. Their studied stupidity will leave its mark on human society and the Earth — a stain that could last for a thousand years. Megalomania is a poor trait in a leader. As one reader told me recently, those who enjoy punching down on others are beginning to realize they are now the punching bags.

The Earth takes no position on such discussions. It will simply continue to warm until most, if not all, living things are eradicated. Once the flow of fossil fuel crud into the atmosphere ends, a cooling trend will set in, and in a million years or so the Earth may be ready for its new masters.

Hopefully that species will reject the avarice and inclination to denigrate some members of society to inflate the egos of others. But if any human DNA is incorporated into the next stewards of the Earth, that may be too much to hope for.