THE Earth is storing up trouble by absorbing more energy from the sun than it is emitting back into space. And most of this excess energy input – which is equivalent to 7 trillion 60-watt light bulbs or the output of half a million 1000-megawatt power stations – is warming the oceans.
That’s the conclusion of Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and his team, which developed a computer model of the energy imbalance in the Earth’s atmosphere. This imbalance is mainly down to greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere which trap infrared radiation and prevent it from dissipating into…
