Positive Feedback Loops in Global Warming

The thing about positive feedback loops is that they're not natural - they're usually evidence that human interference is having a major impact in the system.  First let's clarify the difference between negative feedback and positive feedback:

• Negative feedback: also known as a homeostatic mechanism, it's when the increase in one factor leads to the decrease of another.  Usually, this means more output causes less input, and less output leads to more input.  Thus, negative feedback loops keep things in balance; this is how your body maintains its inner temperature, how proteins can inhibit their own enzymatic production, and how nature in general works.
• Positive feedback: an increase in one factor causes an increase in another.  This does not maintain a balance.  Unchecked, it could cause production of the output to increase off the charts.

This ties into global warming because many calculations about the impacts and harms of global warming have not taken into account newly discovered positive feedback loops.  Most notably, the IPCC didn't take them into account.  These loops act as increasingly significant accelerators of global warming.

So what are they?  Let me introduce you to a couple:

• Glaciers:  as glaciers melt due to rising temperatures, the bare ground is often exposed.  Thus, the amount of reflective surface on the Earth is decreased, and more energy is absorbed from sunlight (as opposed to being reflected back into space).  Result: more warming.
• Oceans: We often think of CO2 as being an atmospheric gas, but in reality the oceans hold 60% more of it than the atmosphere.  Remember solubility curves from chemistry?  Remember how the solubility of most gases (carbon dioxide included) decrease as temperature increases?  This means as CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere, temperatures rise, the oceans release more CO2 - and maybe other greenhouse gases too - and the positive feedback loop continues.  Result: more warming.

Moral: Don't mess with nature's negative feedback loops.