Knowing Earth's energy imbalance is critical in preventing global warming, study finds
According to a new research published today in the inaugural issue of Environmental Research: Climate, a new open access magazine, the imbalance of energy on Earth is the most crucial indicator of the scope and consequences of climate change. Kevin Trenberth, a renowned researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Lijing Cheng, a climate scientist and co-author, have created a new comprehensive inventory of all the different sources of surplus heat on Earth. In order to identify the imbalance, he looked at energy changes in the climate system's components of the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice from 2000 to 2019. He then compared these changes to radiation at the top of the Earth's atmosphere. According to Trenberth, whose paper was published today, "the net energy imbalance is calculated by looking at how much heat is absorbed from the Sun and how much is able to radiate back into space. It is not yet possible to measure the imbalance directly; t...