According to a new study, dangerous climate feedback loops are increasing global warming and risk causing a permanent shift away from the Earth’s current climate.
These climate feedback loops are cyclical chain reactions that occur when one change triggers further changes, in a process that keeps repeating itself.
A group of international researchers pored over climate literature to identify 41 climate feedback loops. 27 of these were found to drive up global temperatures, while just seven are helping to slow the pace of the climate crisis.
Lead author of the study, William Ripple of Oregon State University said that forest die-off, smoldering peatlands and thawing permafrost are particularly worrisome.
“These feedbacks may be large and are difficult to accurately quantify,” said Ripple.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the most extensive list available of climate feedback loops, and not all of them are fully considered in climate models,” said Christopher Wolf.
Climate feedback loops can also affect each other indirectly, creating a complex web of interconnected changes that can accelerate the impacts of the climate crisis.
For example, greenhouse gases released by thawing permafrost increases global temperatures, which in turn helps create the hotter, drier conditions that makes wildfires spread faster and burn more intensely. Wildfires also heat up the atmosphere, further raising temperatures and so on.
These interconnections ““make it challenging to predict the precise impacts of climate change,” said Ripple.
There is also the risk that feedback loops could trigger climate tipping points. For example, feedback loops accelerating Arctic ice melt could trigger the Greenland ice sheet to collapse.