"It's worse than we thought." Sound familiar?

[cprise]

8. I'm much less skeptical than he, and I know of several...

negative feedbacks

1. Low clouds (this can go either way though)

2. Albedo change from flora response (e.g. the Gaia hypothesis, so its not very likely)

3. Albedo change from desertification (might not kick in until we're "well done&quot

4. Snow cover (increased precipitation under the right conditions will produce lots more reflective snow). When I crunched work units for Climateprediction.net, one of the interesting possible outcomes was a "snowball Earth" due partly to this effect (I think atmospheric inversion was another cause). There seemed to me no rhyme or reason to where it popped up-- very chaotic. Snowball Earth was pretty much treated as a failure mode.

FWIW, the snow that hurricane Sandy dumped on W. Virginia might someday be considered to be a hint or taste of how snow can be a negative feedback.

But I believe the posited negative feedbacks may be so poorly understood because they scarcely exist if at all. They might have had a better chance of appearing over longer periods of time if we hadn't been slamming the atmosphere with GHGs so quickly.