The Balance That Keeps Climate Stable Is Out of Whack, U.N. Report Finds

The Earth is out of balance.

That’s the message from a United Nations report released late Sunday that looked at how much energy from the sun is absorbed by the Earth or reflected back into space.

Researchers found the gap between the two is the biggest since measurements began in 1960, meaning more of the sun’s heat energy is now staying on Earth. And that energy imbalance is heating up the oceans, atmosphere, and frozen regions of the world, according to the World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate report.2

Ashkay Deoras, a research scientist at Britain’s National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, likened the planet to a heated room with the windows closed.

“If you open the window, naturally, you will allow the hot air to escape,” said Dr. Deoras, who was not associated with the report. “But now what is happening is that, because of all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”

In previous reports, the U.N.-based meteorological organization documented changes in each element of the Earth’s system, such as surface temperatures, ocean heat, melting glaciers and sea level rise. This year, the authors, who include climate scientists and meteorologists, examined shifts on a wider scale.

“The energy imbalance gives you the full picture,” Karina Von Schuckmann, an author of the report and senior adviser at Mercator Ocean International, a French scientific oceanographic organization, said at a news briefing.

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