Climate change feedbacks
Feedback related to climate change / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Climate change feedback?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Climate change feedbacks are processes in the climate system which amplify or diminish the effect of forces that initially cause the warming. Positive feedbacks enhance global warming while negative feedbacks weaken it.[3]: 2233 Feedbacks are important in the understanding of climate change because they play an important part in determining the sensitivity of the climate to warming forces. Climate forcings and feedbacks together determine how much and how fast the climate changes.[4]
Feedbacks are generally divided into purely physical and partially biological (i.e. biogeophysical and biogeochemical.) The former include cloud feedback, ice-albedo feedback, Planck response feedback as well as the lapse rate and water vapor feedbacks. The latter mostly consist of feedbacks associated with the carbon sinks and the carbon cycle. Sometimes, feedbacks associated with the ice sheets are treated separately from either, because it takes multiple centuries before they become apparent, whereas the others have a substantial role within decades.[5]: 967 Feedback strengths and relationships are primarily estimated through global climate models, with their estimates calibrated against observational data whenever possible. "Fine-scale" modelling devoted to specific processes also exists, and has been used more widely starting from 2010s.[5]: 967
The overall sum of climate feedbacks is negative, meaning that they make the warming slower than it would be otherwise.[2]: 95 It also means that runaway greenhouse effect effectively cannot occur due to anthropogenic climate change.[6][7] This is largely because of the Planck rate negative feedback, which is several times larger than any other singular feedback. Additionally, the carbon cycle already absorbs a little over half of annual CO2 emissions, and its ability to do so scales almost in proportion to emissions. However, as the warming increases, it amplifies positive feedbacks - like the ice-albedo feedback and soil carbon feedback, or the various feedbacks which increase atmospheric methane concentrations - more than the negative ones, so the warming is slowed less than it would have been at a cooler initial state.[2]: 96