AAAS: Dire Warnings Have Not Been Dire Enough

warming map

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is currently holding its annual meeting and the news leaking out to the media of the discussions and data is not good.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At the crux of the increased pessimism is something called a 'carbon feedback loop'. The feedback loop occurs when the warming climate causes other natural processes to occur which speed up and actually release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are numerous feedback loops that occur, for example global warming and water deficits are causing tree mortality rates to rise. As trees die, they release carbon dioxide into the atmostphere, thus creating a carbon dioxide feedback loop.

However, the feedback loop that is gaining the most attention and concern involves the arctic permafrost. The arctic permafrost contains 1 trillion tons of carbon and with the rapid melting that is now underway, there is growing concern that as much of 10% of that could be released into the atmosphere this century!

"It's a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost"

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AAAS: Dire Warnings Have Not Been Dire Enough

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