Too often, certain news sources advocate only one angle. Whether it is on the networks or in the blogosphere, we are too often exposed to rampant one sided banter, where the duality of truth is not often presented.
Yesterday, I gave a rather compelling argument for what can be known as ‘natural negative feedback’. Now, this is a confusing phrase, but let me break it down for you. Natural negative feedback refers to the ability of the earth to correct the errors or imbalances made by its inhabitants. In our case, it referred to the algae blooms over the artic and how, by their very nature, they were a corrective force which diminished the impacts of global warming, at least to a degree.
Negative feedback can be thought of a push for a push. Just like if you go and shove a human, often times you are going to get a shove in return. Or, perhaps a less violent example would be, if you are going to push on a spring, often times you will have a push coming back ‘correcting’ the spring its original, or equilibrium position.
However, positive feedback is an entirely different story. Positive feedback can be thought of a domino effect. After you tip one domino, it creates a chain reaction which tips other dominos, making your situation progressively worse and worse. To make matters even more drastic, imagine that the dominos get slightly bigger as they fall, so even though in the beginning you only pushes a thumb sizes domino, by the end, they could be the size of a house.
So… what does this have to do with us?
Well, yesterday I showed how the earth has natural negative feedback loops. These are fun, and reassuring. However, the earth also has many positive feedback loops which complicate matters a bit. For instance, many people have heard of the methane trapped under the artic ice. As the ice melts, the methane is released, floating up into the atmosphere and accelerating the impacts of global warming. Bad news all around.
Recent research has also indicated that many of our forests around the world serve as temporary CO2 sinks. However, these sinks seems to be temperature dependent. This is bad news for all of you out there who think that the forests only have the capacity to help us. As the temperature rises, there is the potential for fertile soils to release some of their CO2 content into the atmosphere. To read more on this issue, check out the article in the UC Irvine daily news: http://today.uci.edu/news/2012/06/nr_soil_120611.php
Anyway, I don’t write this to scare you. All I mean to express is that the earth is very VERY complicated. And I praise those who are attempting to model it out so that we can fully comprehend the gravity of our actions.
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