STUDYFINDS - New modeling shows that global warming events can, under certain conditions, trigger long-term cooling strong enough to resemble ice age conditions, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
When the planet experiences large-scale carbon emissions and warming, natural cooling processes can sometimes overshoot and send global temperatures plummeting far below their starting point. In computer simulations, scientists observed “overcooling” that exceeded 6°C in some scenarios (greater than the temperature difference between today’s climate and the depths of the last ice age.)
Published in Science, the paper states that researchers “found that the silicate weathering thermostat can be ‘outcompeted’ by the more responsive organic carbon burial thermostat, which then dominates long-term climate regulation.” This discovery adds a new layer to scientific understanding of how Earth maintains livable temperatures across hundreds of thousands of years.