What is #9: Climate feedback loops
or Earth's magic beauty tricks
This concept was quite difficult for me to grasp and explain, so I’ll dry up my tears and share with you why. As a warning, I’m not only a hyper sensitive person, but I also studied physics, so failing at grasping this concept hurt deep.
I blame this, of course, on my mom. No, no, kidding, I blame it on my childhood except my mom, she’s great. No, no, it’s my adult responsibility.
The thing is, I think we’re all familiar with making small mistakes and ending up with a worse situation: “positive feedback loops”. These don’t have to be a big deal. Take for example a pimple. You see it on the way out of home and squeeze it in despair, only to end up with a bigger or multiple pimples the day after thanks to stress and bacteria being spread. Ewww.
The hard thing for me to understand was, that sometimes you have an input, and that input causes something that removes the input as a whole (yes, I’m struggling with imagining an example of an input!). I’ll try an example… Imagine the magical case in which by squeezing the pimple, all pimples in your face disappear. Who on Earth can understand that?! Not me, apparently.
Turns out, the Earth system does that all the time and this magical case is called: “negative feedback loop”. Ain’t Mother Nature amazing?!
Now the science example: Humans cause global warming and temperature increases (the input), then oceans warm up and evaporate at a higher rate, producing more clouds, which in turn reflect a higher amount of sunlight back to space, removing some energy from entering Earth and cooling it down.
People! I love Earth!
For less happy science examples you could read about the Earth’s energy budget, surface reflectivity (or albedo) and the mixed effects of GHG, but it’s the end of a tough year, so let’s leave it here.
and I will make a small pause until January 7th, to reflect and enjoy the end of this year, and to create a bit of suspense. In the meantime, we wish you a very happy new year! May it be full of love, hope, decarbonization, peace and fun.