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Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 127

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these "feedback loops" that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections. This additional heating is however significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

[...] This latest paper makes clear that action by countries to cut fossil fuel pollution will still lessen the amount of additional emissions that come from landscapes. Under the most optimistic climate scenario where emissions are cut quickly, natural sources will add 0.2C of warming, the paper found. Under a worse case higher emissions scenario, 0.4C will likely be added. Current policies put in place by governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6C above pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker. This will likely cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea level rise, crop losses and other consequences. "This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming -- and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit," said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who led the research, published in Environmental Research Letters.

The disruption of the worldâ(TM)s carbon cycles is now being seen in "real time," said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and study co-author. "The results are a wake-up call, and itâ(TM)s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worldâ(TM)s climate goals less and less likely."

Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds More | Reply

Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds

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  • Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

    Yes I would, Kent.

  • Duh (Score:5, Informative)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:01AM (#66333502)

    Climate research has been conservative in its estimates, not, like the deniers are fond of claiming, overstated its case. Hence yes, we are going to find effects like this one. There are likely more things that make the situation even worse and that we have not yet found.

  • None of the studies matter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:59AM (#66333538)

    It's impossible to convince a person that a true fact is true if their fame, fortune or social status depend on it being false.
    Powerful people whose fortune depends on fossil fuels will never stop fighting to preserve their wealth.
    As they become increasingly threatened their response will become increasingly brutal.
    They will destroy everything before admitting fossil fuel is bad.

    • Geopolitics is a bigger factor; the US petrodollar must be maintained to fund deficit spending, the rising treasury yields indicate that the easy money days are coming to an end. On the flip side China, the worlds largest greenhouse gas emitter, has enormous incentive to become petro independent. The US seizing of Venezuela oil and failed attempt on Iran oil a case in point. China's green transition has insulated them from the oil shock and provided even more motivation to continue the transition, which als

      • Foreign entities hold less than 25% of the debt. Your world view obscures the real winners and losers w/respect to treasury yields and sovereign debt servicing.

  • His 1994 novel "Mother of storms" warned us about the feedback loop for all the methane trapped in the permafrost.

  • I don't care if people don't believe in AGW (or pick your label). Not important anymore. Floods and fires will destroy property, insurance will go up or vanish, food supplies will be impacted, populations will be displaced... the list goes on. And irrespective of our beliefs, each of us will have to deal with whatever those changes brings. It doesn't even matter if it's human-caused or not. That's semantics. Mitigation is demanded.

    The camps are divided and it's no longer about rationality or cause and effec

    • You should care because they are in the way of fixing the problem

      • I care about things I can do something about. I'm disappointed that I can't change their mind, but I trust the universe to force their hand eventually. But being dissatisfied is not the same as caring.

    • The camps are divided and it's no longer about rationality or cause and effect. It's tribalism, emotion, and the willingness to completely shut off all input.

      So a person who believes that the energy retention characteristics of an atmosphere are based on that atmosphere's composition that would be me. it is easily provable, and has been known for hundreds of years. It has even been put to commercial use for around 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      You are calling me an emotional tribalist and that I am shutting off input?

      I only ask that deniers explain how an easily provable fact of physics fails on a global level. I cannot see emotions or tribal

      • You missed my whole point. Right and wrong do not matter. Nobody is listening. And, yeah.. . Somebody shouting angrily into empty space, no matter what they're trying to convey, is probably emotionally suspect. And I f it turns out there's a god, it doesn't make the guy with the megaphone shouting about the end times near the mall less tribal.

        • You missed my whole point. Right and wrong do not matter. Nobody is listening. And, yeah.. . Somebody shouting angrily into empty space, no matter what they're trying to convey, is probably emotionally suspect. And I f it turns out there's a god, it doesn't make the guy with the megaphone shouting about the end times near the mall less tribal.

          Who is shouting? Seems you are doubling down on tribal. I loathe tribes. What tribe am I in?

          FWIW, the tribalism of many people might just end humanity much better than any AGW could.

          And not to put too fine a point on it, I really don't care if anyone is listening. I sometimes troll a bit for my personal entertainment, and very seldom get angry. But if humanity goes splat, they will just be another of the 99.9 percent of all life that goes extinct.

    • You nailed it, except for: "Mitigation is demanded." What's demanded is reduction of the human population from 8-billion to 1.5 billion. For example, the "self-supporting yeomanry " population of North America is 125-million and of India 250-million. In the great scheme, matters not what reduces the population, as long as intermediate-term environmental constraints are not violated by the cull. Naturally, everyone wants a place on the < arc >. But, that is not possible. Rejecting peo
  • It's not a a problem: The planet will kill the cause of global warming until global warming stops: It's a problem that solves itself.

    /p. In other words, don't complain when it's your turn to die.

    • Re:The planet has a solution (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Friday September 11, 2026 @11:04AM (#66334082)

      It's not a a problem: The planet will kill the cause of global warming until global warming stops: It's a problem that solves itself.

      /p. In other words, don't complain when it's your turn to die.

      Perhaps a less emotional response is in order.

      The concentration of the so called greenhouse gases in an atmosphere affecting that atmosphere's energy retention characteristics is science so settled, it would cause a lot of physics to be proven wrong if found out that all that science is wrong.

      And over time, the amounts of greenhouse gases has alternated, and the average temperatures have as well.

      Some times, the life during those times has influenced the amounts and therefore the energy retention. The carboniferous and Pennsylvanian ages plant life started out gobbling CO2, and then sequestering it. By the end of the Pennsylvanian age, the world had cooled to the point that it didn't support as much plant life.

      I have a minor quibble with the idea some people have fixating on1750 as the "proper" amount of CO2. It is the start of wide scale de-sequestering of CO2 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It is a starting point, not a "right amount".

      I have a huge quibble with the idea that some have of acidifying the atmosphere with sulfuric or hydrochloric acidic aerosols to emplace anti-greenhouse "gases" to force the temperatures lower. Given that the process would take thousands of years of the resultant acid rain, making species extinct, and heavily acidify the oceans, no - just no. And if we stopped? Right back to rapid warming.

      Purposeful acidification of the atmosphere is every bit as stupid as AGW denial. We have a situation we accidentally created. We need to understand that, ramp down our de-sequestration, and not make it worse. It's gonna be a ride for certain.

  • The world has no climate goals. Or policies. (Score:3)

    by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Friday September 11, 2026 @05:49AM (#66333696)

    "The results are a wake-up call, and its imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worlds climate goals less and less likely."

    The world has no climate goals nor any policies either. You have the COPs, which most of the high emitting and fastest growing emitters attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any agreement on stopping growing or reducing. In which they have been very successful over the years.

    Then you have some Western countries adopting what they try and position as national action plans. However these plans never address the total of even national emissions - the only thing they propose is to build wind and solar generation of electricity, which is a minority of emissions. The proposals also, while they are sold as net zero, in fact do not go near eliminating even all local emissions from power generation.

    And even if they did, the countries doing this only account for a tiny percentage of total global emissions.

    I read these pieces containing comments like the one quoted at the head of this comment and shake my head. These people are living in a dream world - the world in which sending tens of thousands of people to the COPs every couple of years to decide nothing is supposed to be making some difference to the worlds climate and weather.

    In the real world the furthest advanced on thee national plan of moving to an electric society powered by wind and solar is the UK, and its failing. They are incurring huge costs to bring the generated wind power from the north coast of Scotland to where demand is, in the south and Midlands. They have no plans for dealing with intermittency of the resulting supply other than gas plants. The cost estimates for the transmission are rising ominously. People are not buying heat pumps anyway. Their latest effort to deal with the so called migration is to allow for the electricity companies to do rolling blackouts. Its beoming an election issue and net zero will not survive the next couple of elections.

    As I keep saying, people need to wake up. If its really true that human emissions are going to bring about a climate crisis, get ready, because its coming. There is no realistic prospect of the world reducing its emissions. China etc are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting the emissions go where they may. The UK is demonstrating that the plan of moving to wind and solar, and to EVs and heat pumps, will not happen and is anyway not affordable, and even were it to be afforded and done, it would only drop global emissions by a fraction of 1% - an amount China makes up by a couple months of growth.

    The usual suspects will mark this post as trolling, but its not, its just the view any rational person will come to when looking at the facts of this matter. I am not persuaded there is any existential climate crisis from emissions. But suppose there is, there is certainly no rational global plan to lower them, and this is the point people need to start from. If you cannot get the Chinese to commit to lowering their emissions by 80%, which you cannot, then start preparing for whatever you think continuously rising emissions will lead to. Because its coming, and expensive programs which are no more than feelgoodery will not help.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Chinese have always been less polluting than Americans. Probably always will be.
      So why isn't America doing anything useful?
      As always people like you blame the people who are doing more to solve it and are already cleaner than you. You use it as an excuse for you to do noting.

      • You understand that literally everyone who reads your comment (whether they agree or not) recognizes you're a ccp-sponsored bot, yeah?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Budenny ( 888916 )

        China is burning and mining more coal than the rest of the world put together.

        Its emitting about 12 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. That is a bit under one third of the global total.

        It is financing and building coal fired generation plants all over the world.

        The US is emitting 5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

        That is less than half what the Chinese are emitting.

        Wake up!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          America increased it's coal use in 2025 3x as much as the whole world added together...
          It's because China and India went down and America was the biggest increaser. [iea.org]

          And American is responsible for more CO2 than a Chinese person and 2 Indians added together

          America is responsible for the greatest amount of excess CO2. More than China, more than all the EU countries added together.

          You wake up you ignorant fool.

      • Really? It seems the world disagrees with you. https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com] https://www.iqair.com/world-mo... [iqair.com] https://climate.selectra.com/e... [selectra.com]

  • between climate variables. How do you estimate the amount that the estimate of sea level rise will vary with the estimate of the rise in temperature?

    It's a typical area where estimate like this can be wrong, and mischaracterize the true uncertainty with a random variable. It's one of the reasons the true risk associate with mortgage backed securities were underestimated prior to 2008.

    It's no surprising the climate effects are also underestimated.

    • between climate variables. How do you estimate the amount that the estimate of sea level rise will vary with the estimate of the rise in temperature?

      It's a typical area where estimate like this can be wrong, and mischaracterize the true uncertainty with a random variable. It's one of the reasons the true risk associate with mortgage backed securities were underestimated prior to 2008.

      It's no surprising the climate effects are also underestimated.

      Interesting comparison.

      I find that the underestimation is influenced heavily by greed and wishful thinking. in both cases. I recall listening to an economic "expert" being interviewed on NPR, around late 2006. He claimed that in the future, people were just going to continually refi their houses to buy things. I gave a "What the actual FSCK?" while driving. Here's an expert handing out an equation that rapidly ends up with a result of infinity. Not to mention not everyone owned real estate.

      Yet people

  • Fire up more AI datacenters!

  • Global warming is going gangbusters, we want to reverse it. So far we are attempting one thing only to reverse it, and that is emissions reduction.

    It is plain to see that it is not working, is not going to work. That is reality.

    Maybe, just maybe, it is time to do a second and maybe a third thing to cool the climate? Or at very least do some research into alternatives to reducing emissions.

    • Global warming is going gangbusters, we want to reverse it. So far we are attempting one thing only to reverse it, and that is emissions reduction.

      I haven't seen any serious attempts at reducing emissions, quite the contrary. Sure, renewable electricity generation is a growing industry, but it's only a small part of the total energy budget that's growing fast. With a nation whose official motto is "drill baby drill" and an AI slop industry powered by gas turbines, it's hard to believe the story of renewables saving the world.

      Instead of asking how we can power our cars with more climate-friendly sources, we should be questioning the need to drive ar

      • It's been how many years working on emissions? Has the warming reversed? Or even slowed? Seriously, is enough emissions reduction really going to happen?

        You are wringing your hands, writing about traffic jams, meanwhile more and more cities of the world are gridlock. Admit it, emissions reduction is too hard, too expensive, too slow. You don't have to give up on it altogether, just do something in addition or have a backup plan.

  • Would you prefer a feedback loop that increases global cooling by 30%, in a world-climate-system hell-bent on entering another ice age ? I know --- you like your sun-tan booths. Goldilocks is a cartoon character ... remember ? Billions of the unable , disabled or UN-adoptive will die during global hotness or global coolness lasting a millennia. Same people actually. Only question is ... whether that smug , whining elite of green-beaning "leading edge of the opening wave" collectivist

  • It doesn't stop in 2100 (Score:3)

    by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:25PM (#66334258)

    All these predictions are for what will happen by 2100, but that's just an arbitrary date. Once we push the system too far, the feedbacks take over and it becomes unstoppable. At that point, even if we completely stop burning fossil fuels, CO2 keeps increasing, permafrost keeps thawing, ice keeps melting, forests keep dying, and the planet keeps heating. The eventual result is that the earth transitions back to a hothouse state (its normal state for most of the last few hundred million years), about 6C hotter than what humans evolved under. It'll take centuries, but it will be unstoppable.

    We don't know exactly how long we have before it becomes unstoppable, but not long. Possibly only a few decades.

  • Nutone's 3rd law of maybes: every could has an equal and opposite could.

  • Just more libtards wanting handouts for their non-profit woke science climate change hoax fake news.

    I'm being sarcastic but the fact I have to say so tells you what a sorry state of affairs USA 2026 is.

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