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.