Sentences with phrase «runaway ice feedbacks»

Rob, «The biggest swings in climate are due to runaway ice feedbacks to changes in thermohaline circulation — in periods of low NH summer insolation.»

Times like this in the past have triggered runaway ice feedbacks that culminate in kilometre deep ice sheets over much of Europe and North America.

Orbitals, bottom water formation in the northern Atlantic and runaway ice feedbacks is a more likely chain of causality at a 100,000 year cycle.

Runaway ice feedbacks drive the transitions between glacial and interglacial states seen repeatedly over the past 2.58 million years.

With a small decrease in radiation from the Sun — or an increase in ice cover — the system becomes unstable with runaway ice feedbacks.

Not exact matches

This positive feedback phenomenon, called the runaway albedo effect, would eventually lead to a single dominating ice cap, like the one observed on Pluto.

involves runaway ice albedo feedback — it stops (starts) when the «iceline» is at the equator; it starts (stops) when the «ice line» reaches some latitude when the sensitivity goes to infinity (or when all the ice has been eliminated).

What I meant (what I thought you meant) by Chuvian runaway was a runaway of an extent more limited (covering a smaller range of temperatures that can't be at equilibrium) than the big ice - albedo and H2O - vapor greenhouse runaway feedbacks of snowball and «steamball» conditions.

For example, if the Earth got cold enough, the encroachment of snow and ice toward low latitudes (where they have more sunlight to reflect per unit area), depending on the meridional temperature gradient, could become a runaway feedback — any little forcing that causes some cooling will cause an expansion of snow and ice toward lower latitudes sufficient to cause so much cooling that the process never reaches a new equilibrium — until the snow and ice reach the equator from both sides, at which point there is no more area for snow and ice to expand into.

Once the ice reaches the equator, the equilibrium climate is significantly colder than what would initiate melting at the equator, but if CO2 from geologic emissions build up (they would, but very slowly — geochemical processes provide a negative feedback by changing atmospheric CO2 in response to climate changes, but this is generally very slow, and thus can not prevent faster changes from faster external forcings) enough, it can initiate melting — what happens then is a runaway in the opposite direction (until the ice is completely gone — the extreme warmth and CO2 amount at that point, combined with left - over glacial debris available for chemical weathering, will draw CO2 out of the atmosphere, possibly allowing some ice to return).

This has been reinforced with increasing urgency by scientists around the world, with US climate scientist James Hansen this week publishing a paper highlighting that «conceivable levels of human - made climate forcing could yield the low - end runaway greenhouse effect» including «out - of - control amplifying feedbacks such as ice sheet disintegration and melting of methane hydrates».

The problem in the «slow» feedback analysis is that it seems a never - ending runaway: there are positive feedbacks (ice melting, carbon pump saturation); which imply less albedo, more CO2; which imply new positive feedbacks (more ice melting, more carbon pump saturation)... and so on.

So your scientific intuition rebels at the thought of runaway positive feedback (like that which causes the rapid transition from ice age to interglacial which is so well established), but it doesn't rebel at the thought that somehow, every scientist since 1922 has failed to notice an allegedly major flaw in our understanding of the greenhouse effect?

The longer global warming continues, the greater the risk of «waking the sleeping giants» — major feedbacks such as ice sheet collapse, methane «burps,» or ecosystem collapse — that could ignite abrupt or runaway warming beyond our control.

So you are likely to see elevated CO2 — a couple of Watts per metre squared from CO2 but the sea level change is massively and overwhelmingly runaway ice sheet dynamic feedbacks.

Runaway ice sheet feedbacks seem not to require much in the way of CO2 increase.

Your thesis appears to be that a net positive sea ice feedback should result in runaway loss of ice, a fundamental misunderstanding of the use of feedbacks in climate science.

At low points — ice sheet growth become a runaway feedback leading to glacials.

Clouds modulate Earth's energy budget over millennia and more — second only to runaway ice sheet feedbacks leading to glacials every 100,000 odd years.

The control variable might be Milankovitch cycles — but then there are feedbacks that include runaway increases in snow and ice.

Over longer times are mysterious episodes involving orbital eccentricities — much like yourself — thermohaline circulation and runaway ice and snow feedbacks.

In the case of glacials (note — not ice ages to distinguish the quaternary cycles from other periods) signals perhaps from orbital eccentricities triggering runaway snow and ice feedbacks.

I don't believe we're going to have any runaway feedback, at worse it almost neutral, but I think we'll find it (melting polar ice) net cools the Oceans.

The runaway greenhouse effect has several meanings ranging from, at the low end, global warming sufficient to induce out - of - control amplifying feedbacks, such as ice sheet disintegration and melting of methane hydrates, to, at the high end, a Venus - like hothouse with crustal carbon baked into the atmosphere and a surface temperature of several hundred degrees, a climate state from which there is no escape.

As the ice is increasingly punctured by cryoconite, more and more heat is captured, melting increasing amounts of ice in a feedback loop that might spell the end of pack ice — one of our most important defenses to runaway climate change.

At some point there are runaway feedbacks of ice and snow that plunge the world into a glacial in as little as a decade.

This combines with insolation in orbital cycles to set the conditions for runaway ice and snow feedbacks.