Vert (2025) Ice Melt as a Means to Assess Earth's Heat Budget Imbalance and Climate Changes from the Last Glaciation to the Inevitable Next One

⚠️ Warning: This summary was generated from the abstract only, as the full text was not available.

Identification

• Journal: International Journal of Environment and Climate Change
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-10-16
• Authors: Michel Vert
• DOI: 10.9734/ijecc/2025/v15i105072

Research Groups

The paper refers to "we have recently proposed an alternative mechanism," indicating the authors' own research group building upon their previous work. No other specific research groups, labs, or departments are explicitly mentioned.

Short Summary

This paper proposes an alternative mechanism for climate change, positing that heat, managed by water and its phase changes, is the primary driver rather than carbon dioxide's radiative forcing, and demonstrates that Earth's heat balance has historically been, and continues to be, imbalanced based on ice melt data.

Objective

• To propose an alternative mechanism for climate change where heat, managed by water and its interphases equilibria, replaces radiative forcing due to carbon dioxide as the primary driver.
• To demonstrate that Earth's heat balance has never been truly balanced in terms of heat, estimating past and recent thermal imbalances from ice melting data.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global (Earth)
• Temporal Scale: Last deglaciation (approximately 20,000 years ago to present), Holocene interglacial plateau, and the recent period 1994-2017.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: A conceptual model is proposed where heat is managed by water and its interphases equilibria. No specific numerical climate models (e.g., ISBA, mHM) are mentioned.
• Data sources:
  • Energy required to melt ice during the last deglaciation.
  • Energy required to melt ice during the Holocene interglacial plateau.
  • Estimates of ice loss over the period 1994-2017. (Implied use of paleoclimate and contemporary glaciological data for these estimations).

Main Results

• Earth's heat balance has never been balanced in terms of heat, challenging the climatological consensus based on radiative flux balance.
• The thermal imbalance in the distant past was estimated from the energy necessary to melt ice during the last deglaciation, the Holocene interglacial plateau, and the 1994-2017 period.
• Ice melting progressed almost linearly during the first 80% of the deglaciation process, followed by a slow decline to a near-steady-state during the Holocene.
• Estimates for the 1994-2017 period suggest that the heat imbalance is increasing again.
• This increasing imbalance is predicted to lead to more evaporation and a proliferation of clouds, which would mask solar heating and potentially initiate the next ice age.

Contributions

• Proposes a novel, alternative fundamental mechanism for climate change, shifting the focus from carbon dioxide radiative forcing to heat management by water and its phase changes.
• Challenges the widely accepted notion of Earth's heat balance, arguing for a persistent thermal imbalance throughout geological history.
• Provides a new interpretation of past and recent climate trends based on heat imbalance and ice melt data.
• Suggests a future climate scenario where increasing heat imbalance leads to cloud proliferation and the potential onset of the next ice age.
• Advocates for a reorientation of climate mitigation efforts towards combating anthropogenic heat sources based on life cycle assessments.

Funding

The paper does not explicitly list any specific projects, programs, or reference codes that funded this research.

Citation

@article{Vert2025Ice,
  author = {Vert, Michel},
  title = {Ice Melt as a Means to Assess Earth's Heat Budget Imbalance and Climate Changes from the Last Glaciation to the Inevitable Next One},
  journal = {International Journal of Environment and Climate Change},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.9734/ijecc/2025/v15i105072},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.9734/ijecc/2025/v15i105072}
}