WTF is happening with Earth’s Energy Imbalance?

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WTF is happening with Earth’s Energy Imbalance?

Ryan Katz-Rosene<br>Jul 08, 2026

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On the face of it, the situation with Earth’s Energy Imbalance seems straight forward: If the amount of energy entering the Earth system is higher than the amount leaving it, then Earth is going to warm up. Simple.<br>And sure enough, that’s what we’ve seen. As the figure below from Climate Change Tracker shows, the gap between ‘Incoming’ Energy from the Sun and ‘Outgoing Energy Radiated’ has been generally increasing (on average) since around 2000 – when our ability to measure this stuff with satellites improved greatly. The result is more energy ‘locked in’ to Earth’s system, which translates into more heat overall. Easy peasy – the mysteries of contemporary global warming solved!

Monthly EEI chart from Climate Change Tracker: https://climatechangetracker.org/global-warming/monthly-earths-energy-imbalance<br>However, things start to get a bit more complex when we look at how this energy balance has shifted over time in recent decades, which types of energy are implicated, and why they are changing.<br>If we look at another version of Earth’s Energy Imbalance – this time a chart from Berkeley Earth showing two slightly different energy metrics – we can see that both Outgoing Longwave Radiation AND Absorbed Solar Radiation are increasing since 2000 (though again the difference between these curves is getting wider, thus resulting in a generally increasing imbalance).

EEI Chart from Berkeley Earth’s Global Temperature Update 2025: https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025/<br>This raises some curious questions for non-experts like myself: If greenhouse gases (GHGs) warm Earth by effectively ‘blocking’ Longwave Radiation from leaving Earth’s system, why is Outgoing Longwave Radiation generally increasing – shouldn’t it be declining as we are adding to the atmospheric concentration of CO2? And moreover, why would Absorbed Solar Radiation be increasing over the last couple of decades if the amount of total solar energy coming from the sun is holding roughly steady at ~340 W/m2 (as shown in the first chart above)? More importantly, what does this all imply for our future? To help answer these questions and supplement my own research I turned to several experts in this area – including Dr. John Fasullo, Dr. Aaron Donohoe, and Dr. Shiv Priyam Raghuraman - all of who are very well published in this area.<br>My hope in digging into this is to help critically assess two main claims I’ve seen frequently on social media recently about Earth’s Energy Imbalance: First, the idea that EEI is spiralling out of control and increasing much faster than models predicted; and second, that the increase in Absorbed Solar Radiation implies some sort of fundamental flaw in the physics of GHG-led warming.<br>The punchline, for those who have read enough and want to get on with their day: Earth’s Energy Imbalance does appear to be quite above what the mean of models expected. At the same time, it is still (for now) within the broader range of modelled possibilities. While it is cause for alarm (in the same way 1.4C of warming already experienced is cause for alarm), it does not imply that the imbalance is on a runaway warming trajectory. Second, the physics underlying anthropogenic global warming is solid, and warming dominated by Absorbed Solar Radiation is actually expected by climate scientists, though there is still considerable uncertainty about the main contributing forces involved.<br>The Basics

The basic story of anthropogenic global warming is that humans have emitted greenhouse gases – with CO2, CH4, and N2O as the predominant gases (in that order). While the gases let downwelling Shortwave energy from the sun “through” the atmosphere down to the surface, they ‘block’ upwelling Longwave radiation at various wavelengths. More specifically, the GHGs absorb and reradiate the energy in all directions, with the net effect being that additional energy remains in the Earth’s system, which translates into warmer sea and land surface temperatures.<br>The obvious first question based on Earth’s Energy Imbalance above is: Why then is Outgoing Longwave Radiation *increasing*? In essence, OLR is increasing because as Earth heats up, it emits more radiation (or so says the Stefan-Boltzmann Law). Remember, the outgoing radiation is only being absorbed at some wavelengths. But it’s still passing through others, and so the net effect is that across the whole spectrum, OLR is increasing. This was nicely synthesized by Dr. Raghuraman when we spoke: “OLR is increasing because the amount of heat escaping from the atmospheric window keeps increasing. A hotter planet sheds more heat to space.”<br>Intriguingly, if you focus specifically on the wavenumbers where Greenhouse gases absorb energy, OLR is actually decreasing (as shown in this figure below, where outgoing radiation falls...