4. The evolution after the appearance of Anthropogenic Heat
The controlling process described in the previous section worked for billions of years to manage Sun, volcanoes and biomass-burning heats by cyclic ice melt and reformation and by radiation to space. The exploitation of fossil oil-derived energy started bringing in extra heat in the middle of the 19th century and alerted people recently. Both natural gas and more recently electricity provided more heat to be balanced. The new situation is schematically represented in Figure 3.
The comparison between Figures 2 and 3 does not reveal important differences relative to the heat managing thermal machinery. Solar energy still heats the Earth dominantly (2) but with other terrestrial sources of heat including rAHR (2”) and anthropogenic heat released from the sources of energy use by humans for their comfort and exploitation to provide work. In contrast to radiative forcing, the anthropogenic heat issued from the consumed energy is released in the low atmosphere where it is slowly dispatched (4’ and 4”) for average over the whole planet. The corresponding surplus of heat must be absorbed by oceans and by heat transfer to ices melt (8) and water evaporation (4) to close the ring like in section 2.