ICYMI June 2025
Rich Rosen
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.
A new paper gives a brief description of these new research findings.
“Earth’s Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent
Decades” in AGU Advances – May 2025, and websites that discuss it
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.
William Rees
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
Rich Rosen
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 in 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.
Ruben Nelson
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.
William Rees
There are three corollary problems:
1) complex systems pressed beyond certain unknown 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. They consider that the latter is mere ‘externality’ and that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.
3) As I have said before : “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.”
Rich Rosen
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. The fact 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. 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.
Ilan Kelman
Climate is and always has been a chaotically behaving system; see
https://doi.org/10.1038/386592a0 and
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!
Ashwani Vasishth
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. We cannot completely anticipate what or when change will occur. The central point of a “living systems approach” is that we have no business “expecting” systems to behave this way or that.
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.
Jean Boucher
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.