Figure 2: Schematic representation of the machinery that manages
residual solar heat energy through water phase exchanges.
In this scheme, the Sun (1) heats the whole environment as everybody
feels it under sunshine (2 and 3). Natural greenhouse effect is included
in (2’). Humid air ascension and atmosphere turbulences dispatch and
tend to average local imbalanced heat and raise it to the multilayered
atmosphere in contact with the very cold intersidereal medium on one
side, and with ground, ice and surface water on the other side. It is
worth noting that in contrast to humid air, the dense
CO2 tends to go down. The supply of geothermal heat is
generally considered negligible as many other heat sources on Earth are,
including the combustion of fossil fuels ((Zhang & Caldeira, 2015) and
electricity-related ones. The temperatures of land surface and of oceans
tend to increase but rising is unavoidably limited by heat absorption by
the melting of ices (4’ and 6’) over the whole globe and also by the
process of evaporation (evaporator) that cools ocean and surface liquid
water (the refrigerant) and transfers the corresponding heat to the
atmosphere as warm vapor (4). The air enriched in warm vapor being less
dense than dry air, it rises up to a zone cold enough to condense the
vapor as dispersed droplets and ice particles forming clouds from which
the released heat is eliminated by radiation (7) and rains and snow (6)
that close the cycle. In reality, the Sun does not heat continuously.
Earth inclination and rotation lead to cyclic heating like day and
night, summer and winter, North and South hemispheres, and the Sun long
cycles. The process of ices melting and reformation is thus cyclic with
ups and downs as in a refrigerator. If all the ice disappears inside the
refrigerator, the inner temperature starts rising up to the outside one
unless the thermostat restarts the cycle to reform ice. On Earth, the
thermostat consists in water interphase equilibria. In hot summers, ices
melt. In cold winter, ices are restored but the process is more and more
imbalanced. If ice imbalance continues to grow, all ices will disappear
sooner or later and warming will then be controlled by the sole right
shift of evaporation ↔ vapor ↔ condensation interphases equilibria. This
will occur progressively over the years with more and more clouds to
form a thick cover that will tend to limit the solar input like durst
particles and aerosols do. Less solar heat will lead to ices
regeneration like in past glacial eras
(Miller
et al., 2012). The temperature control by evaporation-condensation
depends on the latent heat of evaporation but it depends also on many
dynamic factors that are major obstacle to quantification. Anyhow,
temperature rise or not, the more heat to be dispatched over the globe,
the stronger and the more frequent chaotic environmental have to be, at
least qualitatively (Fig. 2), a trend already observed today (Reed et
al., 2021) although temperature rise is no more than a few hundredths of
a Celsius degree annually. Water cycle has been already proposed as
climate factor but generally without involving ices and not in terms of
quantitative water interphase equilibria.