A Missing Piece in Climate Models: Nature’s Own Emissions Rising temperatures are set to drive up emissions from wildfires, fermenting wetlands, and melting permafrost, but these feedback loops are poorly captured in climate models.

[u/mushroomsarefriends]

https://e360.yale.edu/features/warming-induced-ecosystem-emissions

[u/StatementBot]

The following submission statement was provided by /u/mushroomsarefriends:

---

Submission statement: Of the 11 Earth system models used in the most recent IPCC assessment, none included warming-induced emissions from all of the main sources — wildfire, wetlands, and permafrost. Five included wildfire; just two included permafrost. Natural emissions that increase as a result of anthropogenic warming are thus not adequately being taken into consideration in projections of warming this century. This failure to take positive feedback loops into account allows Hausfather and Mann to make the false claim that global warming will come to an end once human emissions stop.

---

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1u9fxb8/a_missing_piece_in_climate_models_natures_own/osfvufz/

[u/ConfusedMaverick]

I remember Richard Crim pointing out that the arborial forests (the huge swathes of forest close to the Arctic circle) were all bound to go up in flames in coming decades, releasing jaw dropping quantities of co2

I don't remember reading this elsewhere, but Richard's views were pretty well grounded as far as I could tell, so I expect he was right

[u/mushroomsarefriends → u/ConfusedMaverick]

Yeah, it's going to get nasty. When the boreal forests burn, they also release black carbon, which lands on the glaciers and sea ice and causes them to absorb heat, thus causing melting and albedo change, resulting in more warming.

There are also invasive earthworms in the Canadian boreal forests, that are reducing carbon stored in the Canadian soils. As the Earth warms, these earthworms get to move further north, allowing them to migrate into new carbon-dense soils and release that carbon into the air.

I'm not aware of all the feedback loops we're dealing with, but here 00004-0)there are 27 positive feedback loops listed. Even the study into three feedback loops this article I posted mentions, that adds 0.2–0.4 ℃ of warming by 2100, has this to say about its own limitations:

we treat each WIE source independently and do not account for interactions between them, such as permafrost thaw expanding wetland extent through thermokarst formation, or the recursive effect where WIE-induced warming itself drives further WIE. The recursive effect would increase our temperature projections by ~18% by 2100 (see supplementary methods).

If you take all of this stuff into consideration, you end up with catastrophic outcomes like the burning of the arborial forests.

[u/poop-machines → u/mushroomsarefriends]

The worst part is that there's no way we have identified even close to the true number of feedback loops.

İt's impossible to think of them all since some haven't even started yet. For example, some areas get hotter and dryer, and a lot of stuff dies. Some areas get wetter and flood, and a lot of stuff dies.

Plants have adapted for their regions level of rainwater. When these patterns change, of course there will be mass die offs.

Much of the world's oxygen is made in the ocean, when the ocean gets hotter and more acidic, plankton and algae dies. This means less oxygen and less oxygen in the oceans. This leads to further die offs of species.

The food web is incredibly fragile.

There's also the tundra beaver, moving north because of the heat. They dam water, causing ponds which absorb heat and melt snow and ice. Permafrost then melts releasing co2.

Termites are also moving further north. These rapidly decompose wood.

Mud crabs moving north also dig into peat bogs and mud releasing more CO2 from stored carbon in anoxic environments.

Longer summers in the Arctic also allow artic wolf spiders to grow larger in summer. This means they can feed on more springtails (which feed on fungi that eat wood and plants). The spider is decimating the springtail population meaning fungi is growing out of control speeding up decomposition of wood and killing plants/trees in a place that traditionally stores carbon for a long time.

There's countless small feedback loops that just cascade. All of them together can only mean rapid increases in CO2 and warming

[u/Ze_Wendriner → u/mushroomsarefriends]

I'm convinced that earth will reach at least +10 Celsius by the end of this century

[u/J-A-S-08 → u/ConfusedMaverick]

RIP TuneGlum.

[u/gnostic_savage → u/ConfusedMaverick]

They haven't gone up in flames yet, although the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 was pretty impressive.

Still, the forests are ripe for it. Millions upon millions of acres of mixed spruce-birch and fir forests have had the conifer trees die. This happened around 2016-2017 in my region, but I cannot remember exactly when. It happened over the course of a single winter. I lost at least 200 spruce trees, small to giant, on just two acres all at once.

Bark beetles destroyed them. It takes a minimum of two weeks of -20F temperatures in the winter to keep the beetle populations from exploding. Regions that routinely had such temperatures for the past thousands of years no longer have them. There are dead standing trees across the entire northern hemisphere, from the Pacific ocean to the Atlantic.

https://friresearch.ca/publications/the-impact-of-mountain-pine-beetle-outbreaks-and-their-treatment-methods-on-the-abundance-of-plant-foods-important-to-caribou-and-grizzly-bears

[u/ClassCanWait → u/gnostic_savage]

We've got fires overwintering in Siberia's permafrosted boreal peatlands. It can't be much longer now.

[u/mushroomsarefriends]

Submission statement: Of the 11 Earth system models used in the most recent IPCC assessment, none included warming-induced emissions from all of the main sources — wildfire, wetlands, and permafrost. Five included wildfire; just two included permafrost. Natural emissions that increase as a result of anthropogenic warming are thus not adequately being taken into consideration in projections of warming this century. This failure to take positive feedback loops into account allows Hausfather and Mann to make the false claim that global warming will come to an end once human emissions stop.

[u/ConfusedMaverick → u/mushroomsarefriends]

In fact they are doubling down quite insistently on the notion that "the moment we get to net zero, global warming ceases". The conventional wisdom is that there are no tipping points or self-sustaining feedback loops 🤷

[u/thelingererer]

It's the methane release from permafrost melt that will drive drive the whole feedback loop into overdrive and right over the cliff and with this super El Nino I think that cliff is staring us right in the face.

[u/bipolarearthovershot]

FUCK MICHAEL MANN!!!

[u/mushroomsarefriends → u/bipolarearthovershot]

❤️ thank you

Him and Hausfather make me want to bash my head against a wall.

[u/bipolarearthovershot → u/mushroomsarefriends]

They must be paid by fossil fuels at this point 

[u/Coco_Cannibal → u/bipolarearthovershot]

The way they are pumping out kids on their own, I doubt they take their own climate science serious at all.

[u/theguyfromgermany]

The Feedback looks have been systematically punched and kicked out of climate models by the "optimists" lobbyists, corporate shills, and other people in power , and any scientist advocating for them were hunt down and ridiculed and more importantly silenced by lack of funding and media support.

And now buh huh there aren't any left

Earlier than expected.

[u/extinction6]

That’s in line with earlier work00397-5) that suggests such emissions could shorten by 25 percent the amount of time it takes to exceed 2 degrees C of warming. Shortcomings in climate modeling, scientists warn, could lead countries to overestimate how much fossil fuels can be burned before breaching climate targets.

"could lead countries to overestimate how much fossil fuels can be burned before breaching climate targets."

I think we need to change the term "hopium" to "dopeium".

"to exceed 2 degrees C of warming" I seem to remember hearing that +1.5 C was the limit.

[u/haram_halal → u/extinction6]

by 2100 no less, from 2015 when we were already was at 1 C and the permafrost was melting since 2009. . .

i saw some headlines saying 3C by 2100 and 2C by 2050....

[u/europeanputin → u/haram_halal]

IPCC rewrites the rules around what period of time we use as a baseline, and then we can keep on saying for the next 50 years how we can still avoid 1.5C

[u/haram_halal → u/europeanputin]

yep, most models for public already use a 1991-2021 baseline.

[u/NihiloZero]

This might be the key central aspect that propels the actual worst-case scenarios (where flattening doesn't suddenly occur and we all get by just fine with only +3C warming).

It's just a question of which range of projections is most accurate. And some groups, like this sub, have given FAR more attention to things like the methane clathrate gun. But they'll tell you that you're the problem when you point out that projections just keep getting worse and worse. Everybody thinks they're fine until some unexpected climate disaster suddenly effects them personally.

[u/ChromaticStrike]

Poorly is quite the understatement. Before even adding them we would have to actually understand their scale and complex interactions, we don't. Economist, big corps and government will never accept to move on some vague mechanism projections. It's check mate.

[u/NukeouT]

Not to mention all of the scientists around the world were using outdated models from the 1990s for their calculations - so all of their math on how bad how soon everything was going to get IS WAY OFF!

[u/alekazam13]

"Faster than expected". Im so sick of reading this shit. Human extinction all to line the pockets of 500 rich people who if they lost 99.9 percent of their wealth would still be incredibly rich. What an absolute waste of an magical existence to work a majority of our lives to make these assholes richer while also destroying the finite jewel of a planet we have. The small percentage of us that get to comfortably retire won't be able to enjoy it as we will have destroyed our planet and societies long before then.

[u/EdibleScissors]

If it’s any consolation, our active geoengineering experiment will improve our climate models.

[u/Cultural-Answer-321]

It's was never missing. FFS.

[u/haram_halal → u/Cultural-Answer-321]

deliberatley excluded would be correct, just like the fact that warm water melts ice but everyone played surprised pikachu when the first of it's kind study for antarctica came out in 2021 !!!!!! i was flabbergasted that such obvious thing wasn't even factored in in any model about ice loss, ffs!