Image: A fire burns in the Amazon Rainforest near the Lago do Cunia Extractive Reserve, on the border of the states of Rondonia and Amazonas, northern Brazil, on August 31, 2022.Douglas Magno/AFP via Getty

James Dinneen of Mother Jones reports: “For decades, climate scientists have issued warnings about positive global warming feedbacks, vicious cycles in the Earth system in which rising temperatures from burning fossil fuels beget more warming. The best tools we have to understand these feedback mechanisms are climate models, which simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, and land will respond under different emissions scenarios. Many feedbacks, like the loss of sea ice as the planet warms, are well-accounted for. Others, such as changes in cloud cover, remain far more uncertain but are still included in models. Feedbacks in which ecosystems emit more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are so complex that they are often left out entirely.

For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models—that is, those that inform the assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…”

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