In July, I wrote a post that laid the groundwork for the discussion of climate change basics: Gases, Forcing & Surface Temperature. This post follows onto that initial post by discussing energy within Earth’s climate system. As in that post, I will focus on the results in the IPCC’s AR4. There is a wealth of additional results in the scientific literature since the 2007 Report and I will share some of those in future posts. In other words, the IPCC information will be used as a baseline. This post is a little long, but I think it’s worth reading in its entirety.
Energy Content
First, here are two views of the energy content in the climate system. The first is from the IPCC’s WGI Technical Summary:
Source: IPCC AR4 Figure TS.15. Energy content changes in different components of the Earth for two periods (1961-2003 (blue) and 1993-2003 (burgundy)).
