(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of researchers has identified 27 self-sustaining climate processes that will intensify in the near future as a result of rising temperatures and further accelerate global warming.
“We have uncovered a wide range of climate drivers that are being amplified by rising temperatures and are accelerating global warming.
Existing climate models can greatly underestimate global warming because they do not take into account the existence of a large part of these interrelated factors,” said OSU researcher Christopher Wolf, whose words are quoted by the press service of the university.
Almost all climatologists today have no doubt that global warming exists and that it will radically change the face of the planet if the temperature increase cannot be contained at around 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This is evidenced not only by hundreds of computer models of the planet’s climate, but also by thousands of measurements obtained using various climate satellites, land meteorological stations and ocean buoys.
Rapid climate warming, as scientists suggest, could potentially trigger a large number of climatic processes that further accelerate global warming.
For example, the thawing of permafrost can lead to the release of huge amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as a result of the decomposition of thawed organic matter.
This will accelerate the rise in temperatures on Earth, which will increase the rate of permafrost thawing and further enhance its contribution to global warming.
Accelerated global warming
Wulff and his colleagues conducted the first large-scale test of how the rate of global warming is affected by four dozen different climate processes that could potentially be exacerbated by rising temperatures.
In addition to the melting of permafrost, this list includes forest and peat fires, various extreme weather events, droughts, mass death of plants as a result of pest attacks, as well as many other natural factors.
Scientists have studied in detail all these natural processes and calculated how much additional heat each square meter of the Earth’s surface will receive or lose as a result of their increase under the influence of global warming.
The calculations carried out by the researchers indicated that 27 studied climatic phenomena at once will enhance global warming, another seven will have a neutral effect on it, and the remaining seven will not accelerate, but slow down the rise in temperatures.
The latter, in particular, included a reduction in the area of sea ice that prevents heat from leaving the oceans, as well as an increase in precipitation in the Sahara desert and the appearance of forests on its territory.
In turn, global warming will accelerate not only due to the melting of permafrost, but also due to fires in peatlands, an increase in the activity of methanogenic microbes in swamps, a decrease in the area of clouds, and many other factors.
Many of these factors, Wulff and his colleagues note, are currently not accounted for by the climate models that are used to predict global warming.
As a result, such calculations greatly underestimate the rate at which the average temperature on Earth will change in the coming decades, the scientists concluded.
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