Scientists of the Massachusetts Technological Institute showed that with a further increase in global temperatures due to anthropogenic carbon emissions, the land climate can become even more unstable than previously thought. This is reported in the article published in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers analyzed Paleoclimatic data over the past 66 million years, in the Cenozoic Era, which began shortly after the disappearance of dinosaurs. Scientists have found that during this period the land climate was experiencing fluctuations with a trend towards warming. In other words, there were much more cases of temperature increase than cooling. These periods lasted from thousands of up to tens of thousands of years and was characterized by stronger temperature drops.
This can be explained by the so-called “multiplicative effect” (Multiplier Effect), when moderate warming, occurring, for example, due to volcanoes excreasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, speeds up certain biological and chemical processes that increase these oscillations, leading to even greater warming.
Next to the warming disappeared about five million years ago, when ice shields began to be formed in the northern hemisphere. The results predict that the consequence of melting of ice currently can be a resumption of a multiplicative effect, resulting in a catastrophic increase in anthropogenic global warming.