"Holman Jenkins, Jr.'s "How Climate Policy Went Wrong" (Business World, Jan. 27) could leave the impression that scientists have come up with some novel positive feedbacks to explain the role of carbon dioxide in global warming. Not so. In fact, we know the earth would be cold and uninhabitable were it not for the well-established water-vapor feedback.
We are saved from a snowball-earth condition by CO2 emitted naturally by volcanic activity. This produces enough greenhouse warming to increase temperature enough to put more water vapor into the air. That then traps even more heat, constituting positive feedback. The negative feedback that has restrained greenhouse warming is the weathering of rock by atmospheric CO2 and water, a process that accelerates with warmer temperature.
Left to themselves, these competing CO2 water-vapor feedbacks act on earth's temperature on millennial time scales and are responsible for the earth's glacial and interglacial cycles. So, though carbon dioxide doesn't directly trap the bulk of heat, it is critical to controlling the gas that does. Through CO2 emissions, humanity is rapidly turning up the thermostat of earth's heating-cooling system, which is otherwise miraculously balanced to keep us alive.
Jamie Morison
Oceanographer, Polar Science Center
Kirkland, Wash." [1]
1. The Balance That Preserves Life On Planet Earth. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Feb 2024: A.12.
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