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 energy started bringing in extra heat in the middle of the 19th century and alerted people recently. In parallel, both natural gas and, more recently, electricity provided progressively more waste heat in the low atmosphere. 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 now with anthropogenic heat releases eAHR (2”). Both rAHR and eAHR anthropogenic heat issued from the consumed energy are dispatched in the atmosphere (4’ and 4”) for averaging over the whole planet. The corresponding surplus of heat is absorbed by oceans, ices melt (8) and water evaporation (4) to close the ring like in section 2.