Another Dose of Climate Change News

A new study from the University of Exeter, highlighted in a Science Daily article, finds concrete evidence that a warming climate releases greenhouse gases, leading to more warming, leading to more release of greenhouse gases, and so on in a positive feedback loop.

This is no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention. Go to YouTube and search for "methane fire ice". You'll get a number of short videos that illustrate the problem.  Here's just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI. There is a lot of methane sequestered in permafrost and beneath the ice that covers frozen lakes. As climate warms, the only possible expectation is that this methane will be released into the atmosphere. As methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the result is more warming.

Some global warming deniers have tried to argue that, because paleoclimate indicators seem to show that increased carbon in the atmosphere happened before ancient warming episodes, that's proof that atmospheric carbon isn't what causes warming -- instead, they say, warming causes increased atmospheric carbon.

They're half right. Warming does cause carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be released. But greenhouse gases also cause warming. The science is clear on that, completely apart from any question of whether the mechanism would apply to the atmosphere. Physics is physics. The two phenomena, warming and carbon release, go together in what could be a dizzying spiral of runaway greenhouse effect, were it not for other, less well understood mechanisms that eventually retard the effect.

The earth will recover from our current, human induced warming episode. But it may take millennia.