What processes moderate our climate and prevent runaway warming?

what is preventing runaway global warming? in a word. reality. global warming is scare fiction. as a group americans are the most gullible people in the world. we believe anything spoon fed to us. what a bunch of suckers we are.

For the last million years, the carbon in the atmosphere has fluctuated between 100 and 300 ppmv (parts per million volume). It was during that period that all forms of life started to evolve on Earth. Then suddenly, as the industrial revolution start, we go from 280ppmv to 390ppmv today.

This is a simplistic way to explain it without all the scientific jargon.

When the sun hit the earth, the planet absorbs 50% of the heat and reverberate the other 50% into the atmosphere.

If we did not had an atmosphere, the remaining 50% would go straight in outer space and the temperature on Earth would be minus 19.

So the Co2 is an essential part of life and nature to keep the planet alive. And nature being perfect, it has determined that between 250 and 300ppmv provides the perfect equilibrium.

So what happens is, that when Earth reverberate 50% of the heat, part of it gets absorbed by the Co2 in order to keep the planet warm, and the rest is allowed to escape in outer space. But if the mass of the Co2 increase, it absorbs a bigger volume of heat before releasing the rest in outer space. As a result, the more heat is absorbed, the hotter the planet becomes. It is the greenhouse effect.

You have to view the Co2 as a glass roof which does not allow the heat to escape.

As for those citing water evaporation.

There are only two main things absorbing heat, C02 and water vapor.

So as the heat from C02 increase and produce water vapors, the heat increase even more.

Now look at this from a mathematical point of view.

You are in the 18th century.

You have massive forests world wide absorbing huge amount of Co2

And you only have 1.8 billion people probably contributing 3 tons of Co2 per head of capita.

Use your calculator and tell me that humanity does not contribute to Co2.

We did cut most of the forests world wide for farming in order to feed all those billion of people.

And each person contribute between 6 and 27 tons of C02 a year, depending what country you live in.

The average person use 8000KW of electricity per year. That's 8 tons of C02.

I suspect the first is diminishing returns. The more of a greenhouse gas that's in the atmosphere, the less effect it has. And eventually (well beyond what we're likely to end up, but there is such a point afaik) you'll reach a point of pure saturation. Other feedbacks have much clearer endpoints. For example, the ice-albedo feedback would eventually lead to an Arctic and Antarctic with no ice at all, meaning it can have no further effect on warming. (in the other direction, eventually the planet would simply be covered in ice, and thus no further feedback)

And, as several others have pointed out, the warmer a planet is, the more heat it will simply radiate away. This is the simplest of what I suspect are a number of negative feedbacks. Some of these, we may simply not have reached yet, as they will only kick in under much warmer conditions. Some (like clouds) are quite complicated, and can cause both warming and cooling.

I myself don't understand exactly what is meant by a runaway scenario. In my mind, even if the feedbacks associated with a change in forcing are great enough to overcome the diminishing returns of that initial forcing (for example, if albedo or water vapor feedbacks overcame the logarithmic growth of CO2's forcing power), there would still be a limit to the warming that could occur from that because of, at the very least, a physical limit on resource pools (e.g. as Chem Flunky said, all the ice melts). So, does a runaway warming effect mean that the warming follows a non-asymptotic (or, non-logarithmic) curve until a resource limit is reached? I think I need to read into this more myself. I've heard of Venus having a runaway greenhouse effect but I don't actually know what that means.

In any case, I think other suggestions are good ones for why we won't have a runaway effect - diminishing returns, and likely not strong enough positive feedbacks. I would assume you'd also possible have negative feedbacks that initiate and start to become dominant after some time. I'll see if I can find any more references for discussion on this topic for you.

The world has many built in carbon sinks that help moderate climate change. Limestone beds are one example, and the largest carbon sink is the ocean. As fossil fuels are burned, carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, thus producing the greenhouse effect. As oceans begin to get warmer (and they are getting warmer. The equilibrium is greatly disturbed, as evidenced by the mass die-outs of coral), the gases (including CO2) within them are released (gases absorb better at lower temperature, which is why soda becomes flat in the heat), expediting the process. The natural carbon sinks have been enough to keep the planet relatively stable over geological history, although it is true that the planet's temperature does fluctuate over time.

"Runaway" in the context of your reference, is the triggering of added greenhouse sources that are not under human control and have potential effects as large as or larger than human inputs. Two such potential sources are permafrost melt and methane release from clathrates. Trigger points and potential rates of release are under intense study right now. There's no known feedback limiting either one except the relatively rapid decay of methane to CO2. The potential temperature rise from those effects is limited by the size of the reservoir and the fact that energy lost from the system increases as the 4th power of temperature.

The first thing is radiation-our planet radiates its energy into space. The surface of our planet is cooled by evaporation as a secondary system moderating our planet's climate. Several minor processes also moderate the climate like mountains and lakes ect.

<<What processes moderate our climate and prevent runaway warming?>>

It is not the case that runaway global warming is prevented. There are some negative feedbacks, but it is not known that they can overcome the positive feedbacks.

A while ago on the board one of the Deniers asked if we were all going to die from global warming. Taking the bait, as they always do, the Moderates (i.e. the Non-Deniers who obsessively try to avoid being labelled "extremists"), bent over backwards to say that global warming is not going to detroy life on Earth. They of course had no reasons, but they did accomplish their Mission of Moderation.

Greenhouse gases are the best thing to moderate climate. They theoretically should reduce the difference between the high and low temperature. They theoretically should have an increase in warming mostly on the coldest winter and night temperatures. Since those facts are inconvenient and not particularly scary, alarmists have dreamed up scenarios that ignore the moderating effect of GHGs and try to scare people that climate will behave in the opposite way and become more variable. It is easy to play games like that with models and theories. If they were simply honest, I think GHGs would be considered as primarily beneficial. Alarmists depend on CO2 causing runaway water vapor increases. The problem is that the water vapor increases would tend to result in more clouds (which may lead to cooling) and more rain which should moderate temperatures. I don't think there is any good evidence that CO2 is causing water vapor concentrations to runaway.

Nothing has been said here about aerosols. Aerosols are produced by volcanoes, cars and coal burning power plants among dozens of other sources, including high flying aircraft. Data indicates that an increase in aerosols has the dramatic effect of cooling the earths atmosphere. So we already know a very simple way to lower that earths temperature. But the greens will not consider it because it will cause a slight uptick in deaths due to the aerosols effect on lungs. So rather than lose a few more people a few years earlier, the greens want us to destroy the earth thru runaway warming. They are not serious about this. They just want the power to control your life.

Heat escapes to space via infra red light. All planets are in or near balance: the rate that energy is received from the sun equals or close to equals the rate that it is reflected back out. A planetary atmosphere, like anything, loses heat faster the warmer it is.

With no changes to the surface or atmosphere, the earth would reach an equilibrium and heat received would equal the heat reflected and the heat retained would remain constant. As greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, the atmosphere slowly warms until a new equilibrium is reached. But as long as greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere, that point of equilibrium continues to increase.