The Earth Energy Imbalance is back over 13 Hiroshimas per Second as of February, 2026.

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Diaza_Kinutz@reddit

I'm sorry but Hiroshimas per second is a wild unit of measurement. I'm sure Japan loves it.

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Volcanic eruptions and aerosols do contribute, but they’re usually not the main driver of the short-term wiggles you’re seeing. The biggest source of year-to-year variability in EEI is ENSO — the El Niño/La Niña cycle. Here’s the rough breakdown of what’s making that line jump around:

ENSO (dominant short-term driver): During La Niña, the eastern tropical Pacific is cool, which actually traps more heat in the system (less outgoing longwave radiation to space, plus changes in cloud distribution). El Niño does the opposite — warm Pacific surface dumps more energy to space. The 2008–2010 dip and several other troughs line up with ENSO transitions.

Volcanic eruptions: Major stratospheric sulfate injections (Pinatubo-scale) absolutely tank EEI for 1–2 years. But there hasn’t been a Pinatubo-class eruption in this window. Hunga Tonga (2022) was unusual — it injected mostly water vapor, which is a warming agent, not the typical cooling.

Anthropogenic aerosols: Slower-moving but increasingly important. The IMO 2020 shipping fuel sulfur cap is widely suspected to be part of the recent jump — fewer reflective aerosols over shipping lanes means more absorbed sunlight. This is a “termination shock” effect that’s still being quantified.

Clouds: Huge wildcard. Small shifts in low cloud cover (especially marine stratocumulus) move EEI significantly, and a lot of cloud variability is internal/chaotic. Solar cycle: ~11-year sunspot cycle, but the amplitude is small (~0.1% TSI) — visible in the data but not dominant.

The recent surge toward 16+ HpS isn’t fully explained yet — it’s probably a combination of GHG accumulation, aerosol decline, ENSO state, and possibly emerging cloud feedbacks, and there’s active scientific debate about the relative weights.

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Velocipedique@reddit

If images are worth a thousand words, this linked graph is worth a gazillion "Hiroshimas" towards understanding what is happening. We must, unfortunately sooner rather than later, start the painful journey toward the realities of Earth's natural balance by closing that ever increasing gap caused by the unprecedented speed we are heating the planet. justdean.substack.com/p/unprecedented-in-66-million-years

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_nephilim_@reddit

So we're already on track to 5°C and beyond. I hope the billionaires enjoy their life in bunkers.

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GloriousDawn@reddit

Super interesting article. There's one ghastly question remaining: what is the timeline for closing the gap to the thermal lag ? Are we talking decades or hundreds of years ?

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Velocipedique@reddit

Only Mother nature knows!

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TrickyProfit1369@reddit

Nice graph. It paints a very grim picture, even if we stopped emiting right now.

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kitkats124@reddit

And that’s just the CO2 being over 430ppm, the CO2E of total GHG is closer to 600 even now, something like 560-570 ppm already with including methane, etc and other excess GHGs

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johannesfranco13@reddit

What happened in 2002 to make it negative

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haram_halal@reddit

9/11, a shit tin of flights cancelled globally.

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fedfuzz1970@reddit

Cancellation of civilian air traffic for 72 hours resulted in a 2.3C (or so) increase of surface temps across the U.S. This due to absence of contrails which are reflective of sun's energy on the surface. I've always thought that was supportive of Hansen's theory of the effects of particulates on reflectivity and cloud formation.

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shwhjw@reddit

Was expecting to see covid make a dent in the graph but I guess the feedback's too locked in.

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Bandits101@reddit

Have a guess what the cornucopian’s say when confronted with that reality……First they want to blame, be it billionaires, capitalism, boomers or oil companies.

When they get over that, they say we must get off fossil fuels, plant trees, sequester CO2, build more renewables , go vegetarian and so on. They completely ignore or can’t grasp the enormity of our predicament.

I’m quite sure the 300 billion tonnes of annual melting ice sheets, shelves, glaciers and permafrost is unstoppable, considering the albedo loss and methane releases.

I guess people are committed to believing the lies, not questioning the ten year old Paris Accord (made in ignorance) agreement to limit warming to “less than 2 degrees 1750”.

I think we should have started planting a billion trees annually at about the year 1900….but you know humans and Jevons Paradox, we would simply have burned harder.

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fedfuzz1970@reddit

Tipping points reached and some exceeded. Time for hoping is over; time for adapting, prepping and surviving is upon us.

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Decloudo@reddit

cornucopians

Oh, so there is a term for that logical fallacy.

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ga-co@reddit

My plus one said she was going to not rinse her dishes as much before putting them in the dishwasher. No matter how dirty those dishes are before they go in the dishwasher, her actions aren't getting us out of this mess... and even if 100% of the planet did what she's doing, we're still toast. At this point we should all just prepare, think about our reproductive choices, and try to enjoy life where we can.

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NihiloZero@reddit

There's always hope! Ain't you ever seen Snowpiercer?!

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wanton_wonton_@reddit (OP)

Source

Explainer: What are zettajoules – and what do they tell us about Earth’s energy imbalance?

Last year, the energy imbalance in the world’s oceans, which absorb more than 90% of solar radiation, hit a record 23 zettajoules, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

Scientists have used various comparisons to put that in context. John Kennedy, the lead author of the WMO report, said the 2025 imbalance in the oceans was about 39 times the annual human energy use for the whole globe.

The scientist John Abraham has previously calculated the accumulation of energy in terms of the explosive power of the Little Boy atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. In 2020, he observed that the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs of energy every second. By 2022, this had gone up to seven Hiroshimas every second. Last year, the WMO figures suggest, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has used an Olympian comparison. Three years ago, it noted that the then 15 zettajoule accumulation of energy in the oceans was enough to boil away the water of 2.3bn Olympic-sized swimming pools (50 metres in length, 25 metres in width and 2 metres in depth). By that calculation, the updated 2025 figure would be enough to vaporise about 3.4bn Olympic pools.

However you dress this up, the number is terrifying and moving in a horrifying direction.

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Drew_Eckse@reddit

I don't understand the explanation, can someone summarize?

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Sputnik-overdrive@reddit

Time to pour out some whiskey and smoke a big doobie, shits gunna get WILD this summer in northern hemisphere, hell it’s just turning May and wild fires are already rampaging across the US and Europe is getting very dry! Good luck all and peace ✌️

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shwhjw@reddit

Oh crap it's May tomorrow, I need to prep.

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Buffmclargehuge69420@reddit

I dont know what this means and why is there orange shit all over the graph

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HassanAchievedIt@reddit

Just wave your MAGA flag and enjoy Champagne by the coast of Cali until reality hits and then its War at Home

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wanton_wonton_@reddit (OP)

Maybe read the submission statement.

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bipolarearthovershot@reddit

This is the part about climate the moderates don’t understand. This shit is in complete runaway

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/wanton_wonton_:

Source

Explainer: What are zettajoules – and what do they tell us about Earth’s energy imbalance?

Last year, the energy imbalance in the world’s oceans, which absorb more than 90% of solar radiation, hit a record 23 zettajoules, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

Scientists have used various comparisons to put that in context. John Kennedy, the lead author of the WMO report, said the 2025 imbalance in the oceans was about 39 times the annual human energy use for the whole globe.

The scientist John Abraham has previously calculated the accumulation of energy in terms of the explosive power of the Little Boy atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. In 2020, he observed that the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs of energy every second. By 2022, this had gone up to seven Hiroshimas every second. Last year, the WMO figures suggest, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has used an Olympian comparison. Three years ago, it noted that the then 15 zettajoule accumulation of energy in the oceans was enough to boil away the water of 2.3bn Olympic-sized swimming pools (50 metres in length, 25 metres in width and 2 metres in depth). By that calculation, the updated 2025 figure would be enough to vaporise about 3.4bn Olympic pools.

However you dress this up, the number is terrifying and moving in a horrifying direction.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1szd6cl/the_earth_energy_imbalance_is_back_over_13/oj0v3lw/