Figure 2: Schematic representation of the machinery that manages
residual solar heat energy through water phase exchanges.
In this scheme, the Sun (1) heats the whole environment as everybody
feels it under sunshine (2 and 3). Greenhouse effect-dependent radiative
energy is represented in (2’). Atmospheric turbulences dispatch local
imbalanced heat within the multilayered atmosphere in contact with the
very cold intersidereal medium on one side, and with ground, ice and
surface water on the other side. The supply of geothermal heat is
generally considered as negligible like many other heat sources on Earth
including the combustion of fossil fuels ((Zhang & Caldeira, 2015) and
electricity-related ones). The temperatures of the ground surface and of
oceans tend to increase but rising is unavoidably limited by heat
absorption related to the melting of ices (4’ and 6’) over the whole
globe. It is also balanced by the process of evaporation (evaporator)
that cools ocean and surface liquid water (the refrigerant) and
transfers the corresponding heat to the atmosphere as warm vapor (4).
Water cycle has been proposed as climate factor but generally without
involving ices and not in terms of quantitative water interphase
equilibria. The air enriched in warm vapor being less dense than dry
air, it rises up to a zone cold enough to condense the vapor as
dispersed droplets and ice particles forming clouds while the heat
stored in the vapor is released to molecules present in the upper cold
atmosphere which radiate it away (7). Rains and snow (6) close the
cycle. Such cycle is not uniform. In reality, the Sun does not heat
continuously. Earth inclination and rotation lead to cyclic heating like
day and night, summer and winter, North and South hemispheres, and the
Sun long cycles. The process of ices melting and reformation is thus
cyclic with ups and downs as in a refrigerator. If all the ice
disappears inside the refrigerator, the inner temperature starts rising
up to the outside one unless the thermostat restarts the cycle to reform
ice. On Earth, the thermostat consists in water interphase equilibria.
When all ices will have melted, the control of heat, regardless of its
origin, will be handled by the dominance of right shift of evaporation ↔
vapor ↔ condensation interphases equilibria. At this stage, a thick
cover of clouds will be formed that will block the input of heat from
the Sun like durst particles and aerosols do. Less solar heat will lead
to regeneration of ice on Earth
(Miller
et al., 2012). The temperature control by evaporation-condensation
depends on the latent heat of evaporation but it depends also on many
dynamic factors that precluded estimations. Anyhow temperature rising or
not, the more heat is to be dispatched over the globe, the stronger and
the more frequent chaotic environmental will be, at least qualitatively
(Fig. 2).