How 'feedback' can suppress the earth's ability to remove greenhouse gases

[Karmadillo]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=570727

The possibility of a "feedback" impetus to global warming, greatly accelerating the process of climate change and obliging us to rip up our present forecasts as too optimistic, lies at the heart of concern about the recent rise in the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Feedback is what happens when a part of the output of a process or a system returns to affect the input. Negative feedback, which occurs when what comes out lessens the strength of what subsequently goes in, tends to suppress the original process (this is what happens with the valve regulating a steam engine).

Positive feedback, on the other hand, which occurs when the output goes back to add force to the input, can magnify the whole process until it takes on a "runaway" character.

The fear of climate scientists is that just such a positive feedback might occur with global warming, in which the warming itself precipitates changes in the earth's natural systems, which themselves cause additional warming, which then causes further changes, and so on, in an unstoppable acceleration.

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[Paradise]

1. Important post! Thank you!

In other words, Global Warming is "Snowballing"!