Dangerous feedback loops in the Earth’s climate are exacerbating global warming and threatening to cause irreversible change.

A new study warns of climate “feedback loops,” that is, cyclical chain reactions in which one change causes another in a constantly repeating process. Some of these loops increase the temperature increase, while others, to a much lesser extent, have the opposite trend.

Arctic ice is a typical example. Rising temperatures are causing the ice caps to melt, exposing dark ocean water. Dark surfaces absorb more heat than light surfaces (such as ice), the ocean heats up even more, so the ice melts even more.

An international team of scientists from institutions such as Oregon State University, the University of Exeter and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany analyzed the climate literature and identified 41 climate feedback loops.

As they found, 27 of them raise temperatures, while only seven cycles slow the pace of the climate crisis. The study was published Friday in the scientific journal One Earth.

The study leader, Oregon State University environmental professor William Ripple, said deforestation, burning fossil fuels and melting ice are particularly worrisome consequences of such climate loops.

“These reviews can be large and difficult to accurately measure,” Ripple told CNN. He added that the researchers were surprised by the large number of reinforcing climate feedback loops.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest list of climate feedback loops, and some of them have not been fully accounted for in climate models,” said Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon, the second lead author on the study. study.