In the Introduction to The Great Healing I wrote:
The planet’s ability to sustain its biosphere is deteriorating even more rapidly than projected because those entities that are warming are interacting in unexpected ways, further accelerating the world’s rising temperatures.
The earth’s warming forests, which are increasingly populated at higher and higher altitudes by dead and beetle stricken trees, are now ravaged by extreme forest fires (megafires) sweeping through them. They blaze with such intensity that they create their own weather patterns and are virtually unstoppable, each one burning hundreds of thousands of acres and releasing additional billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.[i] [ii] In 2018, wildfires ravaged not only the far northern hemisphere in Greenland, Alaska, and Canada — but the forests above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia.[iii]
Snow and ice surfaces reflect the sun’s heat away from the earth. As these melt away, those surface areas become heat-absorbing water and land, warming the oceans and the planet. As ice and permafrost melts away across Alaska, Greenland and Arctic regions, the newly exposed tundra contains large amounts of stored up carbon dioxide and methane that it then releases into the air, further accelerating global warming.[iv] [v] More than twice as much carbon is stored in this permafrost than is currently in our atmosphere.[vi] A study published in April 2019 revealed that melting permafrost is releasing significantly more methane than previously realized. Methane is nearly 300 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.[vii] [viii]
These are just several of hundreds of examples leading scientists to the conclusion that the More-severe Climate Model Predictions Could be the Most Accurate — that there is a 93% chance of a global temperature increase exceeding 4 degrees Celsius (4℃) by the end of this century.[ix]
_________
Unanticipated biofeedback loops are adding significantly to global warming and our climate crisis. This report by Joe McCarthy is well worth reading.
[i] Laura Parker, How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, National Geographic Aug. 9, 2015 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/
[ii] Heyck-Williams, S., L. Anderson, B.A. Stein. Megafires: The Growing Risk to America’s Forests, Communities, and Wildlife. Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. 2017 https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/NWF-Reports/NWF-Report_Megafires_FINAL_LOW-RES_101717.ashx
[iii] Jonathan Watts, Wildfires Rage in Arctic Circle as Sweden Calls for Help, The Guardian, Jul. 18, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires
[iv] Bob Berwyn, Thawing Alaska Permafrost Sends Autumn CO2 Emissions Surging, Inside Climate News, May 8, 2017 https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052017/arctic-permafrost-thawing-alaska-temperatures-co2-emissions
[v] Katrin Kohnert, Andrei Serafimovich, Stefan Metzger, et al. Strong Geologic Methane Emissions From Discontinuous Terrestrial Permafrost in the Mackenzie Delta, Canada, Scientific Reports 7, Article 5828, Jul. 19, 2017. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-05783-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05783-2
[vi] David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, New York Magazine, Jul. 9, 2017 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
[vii] Jessica Corbett, Thawing Permafrost Emitting Higher Levels of Potent Greenhouse Gas than Previously Thought, Common Dreams, Apr. 16, 2019 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/16/thawing-permafrost-emitting-higher-levels-potent-greenhouse-gas-previously-thought
[viii] Jordan Wilkerson, Ronald Dobosy, David S. Sayres, et al. Permafrost Nitrous Oxide Emissions Observed on a Landscape Scale Using the Airborne Eddy-covariance Method, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 4257-4268, 2019
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4257-2019 Apr. 3, 2019, https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/
[ix] Patrick Brown, Ken Caldeira, More-severe Climate Model Predictions Could be the Most Accurate, Carnegie Institution For Science, Dec. 6, 2017 https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/cifs-mcm120517.php