Very bad news regarding climate change

[Richard Rosen]

Dear Scorai Colleagues,

As most of you probably know, climate change has been increasing faster than expected, especially in the last 10 years. We now have a much better understanding of why this is happening. A new analysis of the Earth's energy balance data from NASA CERES satellites clearly indicates that the net energy imbalance for the entire earth system has more than tripled over the period of only 20 years from 2004-2024. The energy imbalance is a direct and comprehensive measure of the pace of climate change, whereas average global air temperature increases alone, which are the most reported indicator, are a very partial measure, since only a few percent of the trapped heat goes to heat the air, with about 91% heating the oceans.

This new paper attached will give you a brief description of these new research findings. I am afraid that it is now clear that this huge increase in the earth's energy imbalance changes everything -- our entire perspective on the future of climate change and what, if anything, can be done to slow it down. That will be much more difficult now with this new understanding. Remember that the heating of the oceans and land also makes it much harder to even conceive of reversing climate change in any reasonable period of time. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere would be a very slow approach, even if we could do it.

See the attached paper "Earth's Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent
Decades" in AGU Advances - May 2025, and websites that discuss it.

Sorry for such bad news.

---- Rich Rosen

[Rees, William E.]

Thanks Richard -

Nice to have an early morning downer on what was otherwise shaping up to be a nice day. 

(I wonder if the 40 or so authors of this paper made equal contributions.)

s I'm sure you are aware, James Hansen et al. have been documenting the ballooning energy imbalance for several years and offer a mechanism to explain the growing imbalance -- reduced atmospheric aerosols and cloud cover due to reduced sulphur in marine shipping fuels.  

See summary here: https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2025/Acceleration.12Feb2025.pdf

Bill

aka

William E Rees, PhD, FRSC

Professor Emeritus

UBC Faculty of Applied Science

"The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically ineffective, when not catastrophic."

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From: sco...@googlegroups.com <sco...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Richard Rosen <richard...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2025 6:54:09 AM
To: SCORAI Group
Subject: [SCORAI] Very bad news regarding climate change

 

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[Richard Rosen]

Yes, Bill, I have been aware of Hansen's arguments in the past, and I trust him a lot. But a tripling of energy imbalance in 20 years does not seem to be explained completely by Hansen's arguments. While I am not a real climate scientist, as a physicist, based on what I have read, I think the various climate models are underestimating the trapping of heat due to water vapor, and the strong positive feedback between ocean warming and increases water vapor/evaporation rates, on average, into the atmosphere. We know that the oceans are warming even more steadily than the air, thus the climate models should show steady increases in humidity, which I don't think they all (or any?) do. Plus the humidity varies so dramatically from place to place and day to day, it must be very difficult to model accurately.

--- Rich

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/41adcf58c5d84520ad59bac6b6dee884%40mail.ubc.ca.

[RUBEN NELSON]

First, thank you for the paper. Good to see that some are paying attention.

What amazes me is the surprise folks express. There is nothing surprising here.‎ Living complex systems are behaving the way we expect them to behave. Our "problem" is that we have not yet deeply digested the fact that the Earth is a living complex system -- a place that is systemically misunderstood by a science which presupposes a mechanistic universe.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

From: Richard Rosen Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2025 9:10 AM To: wr...@mail.ubc.ca Reply To: richard...@gmail.com Cc: SCORAI Group Subject: Re: [SCORAI] Very bad news regarding climate change

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[Rees, William E.]

True enough, Ruben --

Three corollary problems:

1) complex systems pressed beyond certain unknow boundaries behave chaotically -- we cannot know where they are going, so even our capacity to adapt (assuming anyone is even paying attention) is constrained; and 

2) we're not really "paying attention"  -- mainstream economists, eco-modernists and the other tech optimists in charge believe the economy functions separately from and independently of nature. The latter is mere 'externality';  human ingenuity is the ultimate resource so, "What, me worry?"

3) Something I just wrote in another context:
"This situation has all the qualities of what Russian-American anthropologist, Alexei Yurchak (2005), called hypernormalization. Yurchak was writing about the collapse of the Soviet Union but the concept applies equally well here.  People are aware that ‘the system’ isn’t working – that our ruling elites are corrupt, that the income/wealth gap is widening, that climate disruption is upon us, that the ecosphere is in peril and even that capitalist values and unconstrained expansion are the cause of it all – yet global society acts as if oblivious to the real existential threat and ‘digs in’. The world takes no significant global corrective action for the long term common good." 

Have a great firestorm day.

Bill

aka

William E Rees, PhD, FRSC

Professor Emeritus

UBC Faculty of Applied Science

"The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically ineffective, when not catastrophic."

---

From: RUBEN NELSON <ruben...@shaw.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2025 9:00:51 AM
To: Richard Rosen; Rees, William E.
Cc: SCORAI Group; Ruben Nelson

Subject: Re: [SCORAI] Very bad news regarding climate change

 

[CAUTION: Non-UBC Email]

[Richard Rosen]

RUBEN, I disagree that this should not be a surprise. Even though we know that a lot of features of complex living systems cannot be predicted, The earth climate system is little impacted by living systems, it is basically just a physical system with greenhouse gases pouring into it. And the fact, whether or not we can explain it, that the heat imbalance grew to more than three times its 2004 value, which was bad enough, by 2024, should shock everyone. This fact will imply far worse climate change impacts in the near and far future than we would have expected before. It is very depressing to me! --- Rich Rosen

[Ilan Kelman]

Climate is and always has been a chaotically behaving system; for instance:

https://doi.org/10.1038/386592a0 and

https://doi.org/10.3402/tellusa.v56i5.14438

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-03291-6

and for more updated work, see IPCC AR6 WG1 such as sections 1.5.4.2 and 10.3.4.3.

This trait does not preclude climate projections or many other analyses. It does mean starting from the premise of chaotic climatic (and other environmental) behaviour as the norm and expectation, rather than being new or different due to crossing specific thresholds. Then, add human behaviour to the system of non-linear coupled partial differential equations!

Ilan

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/57db8e57e3b44017a39171b4e5b84a11%40mail.ubc.ca

.

[Ashwani Vasishth]

Richard says:

Remember that the heating of the oceans and land also makes it much harder to even conceive of reversing climate change in any reasonable period of time.

Yes, but "reversing climate change" and carrying on as we are are NOT the only options.

In fact calls to "stop" climate change, or to "turn things back" are the actual Type Three Errors (Koestler, 1967, The Ghost in the Machine)--asking the wrong question.  Failure is then pre-determined.

The only thing we can be sure of is, that the status quo will not prevail.  Things WILL change, and we CAN'T completely anticipate how.  Nor when.

Later, Richard asserts:

The earth climate system is little impacted by living systems, it is basically just a physical system with greenhouse gases pouring into it.

Is this to deny the biogeochemical roots of the organic (evolutionary) system that is our ecosphere?  Really?  So we should return to a mechanical view of the world?

Why do we care about "living systems" if not that they are different from "mechanical systems."

Set "expectations" aside, all who enter here.

Ruben says:

There is nothing surprising here.‎ Living complex systems are behaving the way we expect them to behave.

But the central point of a "living systems approach" is that we have no business "expecting" systems to behave this way or that.

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        Vasishth         vasi...@ramapo.edu          (323) 206-1858 (cell phone)
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[Richard Rosen]

But now, Ilan, the base year climate and earth system starting point for new projections will have to be substantially different from what the usual models were projecting for 2024.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/690781725.2492031.1749663280102%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Ilan Kelman]

One important characteristic of chaotic systems is sensitivity to initial conditions. Presuming that projections ought to begin with a single "base year" or specific "starting point" would be the antithesis of chaos theory from its beginnings https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020%3C0130:DNF%3E2.0.CO;2 The references provided might be worth reading to better understand climate's typical chaos and its meanings for future projections under various greenhouse gas emissions scenarios? An example of practical implications was published today https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL114611 covering potential European cooling under some AMOC change scenarios.

Best wishes to everyone,

Ilan

[Jean Boucher]

I'm also not so surprised because years ago I heard how ocean heat absorption was underestimated, from there I just figured humans missed the bus on the whole boat, but thx, Richard.

Also, my view, it seems that comments in this discussion approach from different systemic scales and we then seem to be talking past each other. For example, at a high scale, there is one earth system, a little blue marble, cycling around in a test tube overheating itself by burning massive amounts of materials that would have been better left underground (alas); at this level, it's not that complex. This is where, I believe, Richard means that mechanics runs the show.

However, as we move down in scale, it gets quite complex; I think it would be good to identify the scale of our arguments.

Good week,

Jean

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