Runaway greenhouse effect
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The runaway greenhouse effect is a sustained, intense warming associated with positive feedbacks within the climate system. Although the runaway greenhouse effect is not predicted for Earth, it is of interest for other planets, such as Venus.
An example of the effect, as it would occur on Earth, is that as carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, atmospheric water vapor concentrations increase, amplifying the natural greenhouse effect, which impacts the climate system such that additional greenhouse gases are introduced to the atmosphere until the surface temperatures become untenable.
Richard Lindzen wrote:
- It is still of interest to ask what we would expect a doubling of carbon dioxide to do. A large number of calculations show that if this is all that happened, we might expect a warming of from .5 to 1.2 degrees centigrade. The general consensus is that such warming would present few, if any, problems. ... current models depend heavily on undemonstrated positive feedback factors to predict high levels of warming. [1]
