How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system?
how much energy are we currently adding to the earth system due to all those greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere?
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Xholon
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Title: How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system?
Description: how much energy are we currently adding to the earth system due to all those greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere?
Url: http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=2814
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My Notes
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Steve Easterbrook (Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada) writes the Serendipity blog, focusing on "What has Software Engineering got to do with Climate Change?". For one of his courses he calculated how much energy has been added to the earth system from anthropogenic sources. In this workbook, I'll try to reproduce his calculations.
Steve gets his basic numbers from::
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/figure-2-4.html
supplemented by::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)
The IPCC report and figure are a bit confusing. It's not stated anywhere explicitly what to do with the Natural Solar irradiance value, which they provide as a positive number. It seems I have to subtract this from the Anthropogenic values to derive the Total net anthropogenic.
The result I get is::
Total net anthropogenic radiative forcing: 1.6W/m^2
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Some of my own thoughts on this
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The sum of the man-made radiative forcings is about 1.6 W/m^2, while the Sun provides about 1361 W/m^2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant). At first glance it would seem that the 1.6 is an insignificant amount compared to 1361. But it reminds me of what Charles Dickens wrote in David Copperfield::
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
A possible paraphrase::
Annual energy inflow 1361 Watts per square meter, annual outflow 1361 Watts per square meter, result happiness. Annual energy inflow 1362.6 Watts per square meter, annual outflow 1361 Watts per square meter, result misery.
The extra 1.6 causes an imbalance. This suggests that in some way balancing the Earth's energy budget is similar to balancing a person's or nation's financial budget. I'll try to follow up this thought in a later workbook.
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<TotalRadiativeForcing>0.0 W/m^2</TotalRadiativeForcing>
<AnthropogenicForcings>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Long-lived greenhouse gases, CO2">1.66 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Long-lived greenhouse gases, CH4">0.48 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Long-lived greenhouse gases, N2O">0.16 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Long-lived greenhouse gases, Halocarbons">0.34 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Ozone, Stratospheric">-0.05 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Ozone, Tropospheric">0.35 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Stratospheric water vapour from CH4">0.07 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Surface albedo, Land use">-0.2 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Surface albedo, Black carbon on snow">0.1 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Total Aerosol, Direct effect">-0.5 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Total Aerosol, Cloud albedo effect">-0.7 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
<RadiativeForcing roleName="Linear contrails">0.01 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
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<RadiativeForcing roleName="Solar irradiance">-0.12 W/m^2</RadiativeForcing>
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totalRf = 0.0;
this.sumForcings(trf.next().first());
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trf.val(totalRf);
trf.println("Total net anthropogenic radiative forcing: " + totalRf.toPrecision(2) + " W/m^2");
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