Nature Abhors a Positive Feedback

[John Reece]

Nature abhors a positive feedback

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Anthony Watts

Negative Feedback Prevents Harmful Temperatures from Carbon Dioxide

Guest essay by Bryce Johnson

The purpose of the article is to contribute to refuting the false alarm that has been generated worldwide about excess global warming caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide, primarily by mischaracterizing its inherently negative feedback.

Feedback is the effect that the result of a process has on itself. Positive feedback augments the result and negative feedback diminishes it. A negative feedback does not preclude an increase in the results of a process but it does limit the ultimate magnitude of the increase. Most feedbacks in nature are negative or soon become negative. Otherwise we would have been destroyed by nature some time ago. Positive feedbacks can cause runaway effects. Nature abhors a positive feedback.

A mathematical definition of feedback is derived from the following schematic.

Please do not post anything in this thread that is not directly related to the OP and/or the article cited herein.

[John Reece]

Nature Abhors a Positive Feedback

Roy Spencer has something to say about "feedback" here.

On the Debunking of Spencer’s Feedback Ideas: An Appeal to Physical Scientists Everywhere

September 1st, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

I am seeing increasing chatter about one or more papers that will (or already have) debunked my ideas on feedbacks in the climate system.

Yet, I cannot remember a climate issue of which I have ever been so certain.

I understand that most people interested in the climate debate will simply believe what their favorite science pundits at RealClimate tell them to believe, which is fine, and I can’t do anything about that.

But for those who want to investigate for themselves, I recommend reading only our latest and most comprehensive paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. It takes you from the very basics of feedback estimation — which I found I had to include because even the experts in the field apparently did not understand them — and for the first time explains why satellite observations of the climate system behave the way they do.

No one has ever done this before to anywhere near the level of detail we do.