Runaway greenhouse effect
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A runaway greenhouse effect has been predicted by some climate scientists, in which slight increases in trace gases in the Earth's atmosphere would lead to higher air temperatures. These higher temperatures would in turn cause "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide to have higher concentrations, which in turn would accelerate the warming trend. Alarming increases of 3 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit have been predicted.
Outside of the political sphere, few academics give any credence to this theory.
MIT professor 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]