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.