NASA says that Earth has an energy budget and that the planet is constantly trying to balance energy in and out of its systems. However, the space agency says observations have just shown that throwing people off the balance of that energy budget is causing the planet to warm. Radiant energy enters the Earth’s system from sunlight shining on the planet, and some of that energy appears off the earth’s surface or atmosphere and back into space.
The rest of that energy is captured, heating the planet, and released as thermal radiation energy. Eventually, that radiant energy goes to space, and some of it gets recycled by clouds and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That absorbing energy can be sent back to Earth, where it warms the surface even more. NASA says adding more radiation-absorbing components such as greenhouse gases or removing those exposed to it as aerosols will throw off the planet’s energy balance.
The energy balance thrown away results in more energy being absorbed by the Earth than escaping into space, a process known as radiation propulsion. NASA says radiation penetration is the biggest white human activities affecting the climate. NASA climate modeling has predicted that human activities are causing the release of greenhouse gases and aerosols that will affect the planet’s energy budget. NASA confirmed these predictions with direct observations for the first time indicating that radiation forcings are increasing as a result of human actions.
NASA researcher Ryan Kramer says this is the first calculation of the Earth’s total radical eruption using global observations and describing the effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases. Kramer says it is direct evidence that human actions are causing changes in the planet ‘s energy budget. Some of the data collected by NASA for the study came from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy Systems (CERES) project which studies the flow of radiation at the Earth’s atmospheric surface. Ultimately, NASA researchers found that human activities caused the Earth’s radical scavenging to increase by about 0.5 watts per square meter between 2003 and 2018.