Aha thank you this was my eureka moment. I remember from high school chemistry the idea that temperature stays constant when energy input goes to phase change.
So in the southern hemisphere with that much water, some of the energy goes into the phase change between water/steam. Much less so in the northern hemisphere.
Thank god we have these big thermal sinks (ice/water) to hold a lot of this energy to keep temp a little more stable.
Follow up question: I'm assuming the exact same thing applies with ice->water. So some of the energy hitting the earth is going into melting the ice instead of increasing temperature. It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted, that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water phase-change?
Do they predict the temperature rise to increase once all of the sea ice and glaciers have melted?
Or maybe once it's water it just means that there is that much more liquid water available to evaporate into humidity?
Also, anyone know how the Canadian wildfires impacting the equation? Is that a potential explanation for the several sigma deviation this year?
> It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted,
> that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures
> will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water
> phase-change?
Yes, and it's even worse than that. The ice also reflects and awful lot of energy back into space due to being highly reflective. When that the ice is gone, that exposes darker surface which is a lot less reflective. That will also result in lot more heating.
The more things warm up, the more things will warm up in a vicious cycle with many positive feedback loops. Sadly a lot of it seems irreversible at this point.
More desert dust being carried at higher altitudes - Himalayas, Alps - is also increasing the darkness aka heating of the glacier surfaces, thus speeding their melting...
So in the southern hemisphere with that much water, some of the energy goes into the phase change between water/steam. Much less so in the northern hemisphere.
Thank god we have these big thermal sinks (ice/water) to hold a lot of this energy to keep temp a little more stable.
Follow up question: I'm assuming the exact same thing applies with ice->water. So some of the energy hitting the earth is going into melting the ice instead of increasing temperature. It would seem to follow that, once all the sea ice and glaciers have melted, that this phase-change effect is removed, and therefore the temperatures will increase faster as none of the excess energy is going into ice->water phase-change?
Do they predict the temperature rise to increase once all of the sea ice and glaciers have melted?
Or maybe once it's water it just means that there is that much more liquid water available to evaporate into humidity?
Also, anyone know how the Canadian wildfires impacting the equation? Is that a potential explanation for the several sigma deviation this year?