How to Heat a Planet? Impact of Anthropogenic Landscapes on Earth’s Albedo and Temperature

Abstract

Today anthropogenic climate change is underway and predicted future global temperatures vary significantly. However, the drivers of current climate change and their links to Earth’s natural glacial cycle have yet to be fully resolved. Currently, many on a local level understand, and are exposed to, the heat energy generated by what’s referred to as the urban heat island effect (UHI), whereby natural flora with higher albedos is replaced by manmade urban areas with lower albedos. This heat effect is not constrained to these regions and all anthropogenic surfaces with lower albedos need to be studied and quantified as the accumulated additional heat energy (infrared energy) is trapped within Earth’s atmosphere and could affect the Earth on a planetary level. Deployed satellites have detected critical changes to Earth’s albedo to lower levels, however the cause and impact of these changes have yet to be fully understood and incorporated into Global Circulation models (GCMs). Here it’s shown that industrialization of anthropogenic landscape practices of the past century has displaced millions of square kilometres of naturally high albedo grasslands with lower albedo agricultural landscapes. Utilising a fundamental Energy Balance Model, (EBM) it’s demonstrated these specific changes have generated vast amounts of additional heat energy which is trapped by the atmosphere, transferred and stored within the oceans of the Earth as shown in <b> Figure 1 </b> . The total additional heat energy accumulated over the preceding 110 years correlates to that required to warm the Earth to the levels seen to date, altering Earth’s overall energy budget. This energy will continue to accumulate and warm the Earth to a predicted 1.60 ± 0.20 Celsius by 2050 over 1910 levels. These findings are independent of anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas (GHG) additions and are further validated by predicting Earth’s temperature and albedo at the last glacial maxima, suggesting that an albedo cycle aligned to Gaia theory is the primary driver of Earth’s natural climate cycle.